Privacy

Steady browser extension and desktop application. Last updated 27 August 2026.

Steady has no servers. It collects nothing, sends nothing to us, and there is no analytics of any kind. Everything below describes data that stays on your own computer.

What the extension reads

When you start a download that Steady takes over, the extension reads and passes to the Steady application on the same computer:

• the download's address, and the address it was reached from;
• the filename the browser suggested, its size and its content type;
• the cookies your browser holds for that download's address.

The cookies matter and deserve a plain explanation. Many downloads are behind a signed-in session. Without the cookies for that address, the download would fetch a login page instead of the file. They are read at the moment of the handover, for that one address, using the browser's own cookies.getAll({ url }); they are handed to the Steady application for that request; and they are not stored, logged or sent anywhere else. Steady's logs deliberately record only cookie names and the domains they belong to — never their values.

What the extension observes but does not keep

The extension watches request methods so it can leave certain downloads alone. A download that began as a form submission cannot be re-requested from its address, so Steady must not take those over — cancelling one would destroy a download that could not be recovered. Addresses seen this way are held in memory for sixty seconds and discarded. They are never written to disk and never transmitted.

What is stored

• In the extension: two settings you choose in its popup — whether downloads are handed to Steady, and the smallest file size worth handing over. Nothing else, and nothing synced between devices.
• In the application: your preferences, the list of your downloads and their progress, and a log used for diagnosing failures. All under your own user folder, all removable by uninstalling.

Where data goes

To the Steady application on your machine, over the browser's native messaging channel, and to the servers you are downloading from. Nowhere else. There is no account, no telemetry, and no request to any service operated by us — because there is no service operated by us.

What the application fetches on its own

With your agreement, Steady downloads three third-party components used for video sites — yt-dlp, ffmpeg and a JavaScript runtime, each open source and maintained by others — from their publishers' release pages, and checks each against its published checksum before running it. It also checks a file on our storage to see whether a newer version of Steady exists. Neither request carries any information about you.

Contact

If anything described here does not match what Steady actually does, that is a bug and worth reporting.