Clips Kitty does not collect anything about you

The short version

• No telemetry. The app reports nothing back. There is no usage tracking, no crash reporting, and no analytics of any kind inside Clips Kitty.
• No account with us. There is nothing to sign up for, and no Clips Kitty server to sign in to. The optional sign-ins are to your own accounts: YouTube, which goes straight to Google, a publishing service if you choose to use one, and your ChatGPT plan, which goes straight to OpenAI.
• Your video never leaves your PC unless you publish it. Transcription, scoring, face tracking, subtitles and rendering all run locally, on your own hardware, by default. Both ways of publishing are off by default and described below.
• The AI runs locally too, by default. The language model runs on your machine through Ollama. Your transcript is not sent to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or anyone else, unless you choose one of them yourself, with your own API key, for a PC that cannot run the AI (described below).
• Five things reach the internet, and all are things you asked for: downloading a video, downloading an AI model, publishing a clip to your own YouTube channel, publishing a clip through a social publishing service, and using a cloud AI provider with your own key or your own ChatGPT plan. The last three only happen if you switch them on.

What is stored, and where

Everything Clips Kitty creates stays in one folder on your own computer:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Clips Studio

• Videos you downloaded or imported, and the clips rendered from them
• A local SQLite database of what has been processed, the scores it gave, and your creator profiles
• Your settings
• The AI models you downloaded

None of this is synced, backed up or transmitted. Uninstalling the app deliberately leaves the folder in place, because it holds your footage; delete it yourself if you want it gone.

When Clips Kitty uses the network

Because you asked it to

• Downloading a video. Pasting a YouTube, Twitch or Kick link fetches that video from that platform. Your request goes to them, subject to their own privacy policies, exactly as if you had opened the page in a browser.
• Downloading an AI model. Choosing a model fetches it from the Ollama library. That is a file download; nothing about you is sent with it.
• Checking for updates. The desktop app asks a static file on Hugging Face whether a newer version exists. This is a plain file fetch with no identifier attached, and it can be turned off in Settings. Copies installed from the Microsoft Store do not do this at all, because the Store handles updates.

Only if you turn on YouTube publishing

Clips Kitty can upload a finished clip straight to your own YouTube channel. This is off by default and has to be switched on in Settings, where it also asks you to create your own free Google API key. The app does not ship with a shared one.

• Nothing is uploaded until you press a button. There is no automatic posting, no background sync, and no scheduled upload that happens without you asking for it.
• The clip goes from your computer to YouTube directly. It is not proxied, copied or queued through any Clips Kitty server, because there isn't one. We never receive your video, your channel details, or anything about your account.
• Your Google sign-in stays on your machine. The token is stored encrypted with Windows DPAPI, tied to your Windows user account, so copying the folder to another PC or user does not carry it over. On Linux it is an owner-only file instead.
• You can disconnect at any time. Settings → Publish to YouTube → Disconnect deletes the stored sign-in and tells Google to revoke it.
• Google sees what you would expect. Once a video is on YouTube it is subject to Google's privacy policy and terms, exactly as if you had uploaded it through the YouTube website.

Only if you turn on publishing through a service

Clips Kitty can also post a finished clip to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Bluesky in one go. This is off by default and has to be switched on in Settings, where it asks for an API key from your own account with WoopSocial or Upload-Post.

• This part is not local, and that is the trade. Unlike everything else in the app, the clip does not go straight to the platform. The video file, the title, the description and the platforms you picked are sent to the service you chose, and it delivers them for you.
• It is still not us. The service is your account, not a Clips Kitty one. Nothing is proxied through a Clips Kitty server, because there isn't one, and we never receive your video or anything about your social accounts.
• Clips Kitty never sees a social password. You connect TikTok, Instagram and the rest on the service's own site, and it holds those connections. The app only ever holds the API key you pasted in.
• Your API key stays on your machine, stored the same way as the YouTube token, and it is write-only in the app: once saved, it is never displayed back.
• Nothing is sent until you press Publish, or until a watched channel you set to publish automatically has new clips, and the feature makes no network calls at all while it is switched off.
• Their policy applies to what you send. Once a clip is with the service it is subject to that company's privacy policy and terms, and then to each platform's once it is posted. Read theirs before you switch this on, because a third party is involved.

The WoopSocial link above is an affiliate link. Clips Kitty may earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no extra cost to you. It is the only way the project earns anything, and it does not change what is written here.

Only if you choose cloud AI on your own account

For a PC that cannot run the AI itself, Settings → AI can hand the work to a cloud provider instead: OpenRouter, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, xAI, Meta, DeepSeek or Qwen (Alibaba Cloud). This is off by default, and it only ever uses an API key from your own account with that provider.

• What is sent, and only what the job needs. For the AI, the transcript text of the video and the app's instructions for picking clips, writing titles, translating or answering the assistant. For online transcription, the video's audio, in short parts. The video picture is never sent.
• It goes straight to the provider you chose. From your PC to them, with your key. There is no Clips Kitty server in between, no Clips Kitty key, and no Clips Kitty account; the provider bills you directly for what you use.
• Your key stays on your machine, stored the same way as the YouTube token, and it is write-only in the app: once saved, only its last four characters are ever shown.
• OpenRouter is told it is Clips Kitty. Requests to OpenRouter carry the app's name, website and category so they count toward Clips Kitty in OpenRouter's app listings. That identifies the app, not you.
• Their policy applies to what you send. Each provider handles what it receives under its own privacy policy and terms, which can differ by plan: some may use data sent on free tiers to improve their products. Read theirs before you switch this on.
• Switching back is one click. Choosing "This PC" in Settings → AI returns everything to local, and removing the key deletes it.

Only if you sign in with your ChatGPT plan

Instead of an API key, Settings → AI can use a paid ChatGPT plan you already have, through Codex, OpenAI's own software for other apps. This is off by default, experimental, and for now only in Clips Kitty run from source. Anthropic and Google don't allow their plans to be used by other apps, so Claude and Gemini are API key only.

• You sign in on OpenAI's own page, in your browser. Codex keeps the sign-in, encrypted, with its key in Windows Credential Manager. Clips Kitty never sees your password or sign-in, and never uses a Codex login you already have: it keeps its own, in its own folder.
• What is sent: the same transcript text and instructions as any cloud AI, to OpenAI, through Codex. Codex here can't run commands, search the web, load plugins, or send OpenAI its usage analytics.
• What Clips Kitty reads from OpenAI: which plan and email you're signed in with, the models the plan offers, and how much of the plan's limit is used, so a job stops at the limit instead of spending ChatGPT credits.
• OpenAI is told it is Clips Kitty. Codex identifies the app to OpenAI by name, not as Codex.
• OpenAI's policy applies to what you send, under your ChatGPT plan's terms.
• Signing out removes the sign-in from this PC and asks OpenAI to cancel it.

Only if you submit a report

The in-app Feedback Hub can file a bug report for you, so you do not need a GitHub account. Nothing is sent until you press Submit, and the exact contents are shown to you first.

A report contains what someone needs to reproduce the problem:

• What you typed in the report
• App version, operating system version, CPU, RAM, and graphics card model
• Which AI model and settings were in use
• Recent log output, with email addresses, secret-shaped strings and your Windows username automatically stripped out
• The platform and channel name of the video involved, if any: public information, and usually the whole point of the report
• Any screenshots you chose to attach

Reports become public GitHub issues. They travel through a relay that files them on the project's issue tracker, so do not put anything in one you would not post publicly. If you would rather send nothing, do not use the Feedback Hub; the app works exactly the same without it.

Only if you turn on remote rendering

Settings → Advanced settings can let another computer of yours render your clips. This is off by default, and it only ever talks to a computer you paired yourself with a one-time code, on your own network (or your own Tailscale network).

• What is sent to the render PC: the stretch of video each clip comes from, the transcript lines inside it (for captions), the render settings, and your watermark image if you use one. It sends the finished clip back.
• What is never sent: your AI keys, publishing accounts, YouTube sign-in, library or anything else. The render PC only renders.
• It is encrypted and paired. The connection is HTTPS, the render PC accepts only the certificate it saw when you paired it, and every render PC has its own credential that you can revoke by removing it. There is no Clips Kitty server in between.

Only if you set it up yourself

Clips Kitty has an optional command-line feature that can upload finished clips to your own YouTube channel. It is switched off, it is not part of the desktop app, and it does nothing unless you create your own Google Cloud credentials and place them in the config folder. If you do, the resulting authorisation token is stored on your machine and used only to upload to your channel. It is never sent to us. There is no "us" to send it to, since Clips Kitty has no server.

This website

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which records ordinary web server logs including IP addresses, as described in GitHub's privacy statement.

The site includes a Google Analytics loader that is not configured and does nothing: with no measurement ID set, no script is fetched and no cookie is written. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it does.

Donation links go to PayPal. Any payment happens on PayPal's own site under their privacy policy; Clips Kitty never sees your payment details, and no donation is required to use anything.

Children

Clips Kitty is a video editing tool for content creators. It is not directed at children, and it collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

How to verify any of this

You do not have to take this page's word for it. Clips Kitty is open source under the GNU AGPL-3.0 licence, and every network call in it can be read: github.com/ColinGPT9/clips-studio. If you find something this policy does not describe, that is a bug: please open an issue.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the edit is visible in the repository's history like everything else.

Questions about privacy: open an issue on GitHub.