Last updated: 27 July 2026
The short version. Lantern has no servers. There is no Lantern account, no analytics, no tracking and no advertising. Everything Lantern knows about you is stored on your own computer, in your browser's extension storage. The only service your data is sent to is YouTube, using the login you are already signed in with.
Your open tabs. Lantern reads the title, address and icon of the tabs you have open, because displaying and organizing them is what the extension does. It also remembers tabs you recently closed and the arrangement of your windows so you can reopen them. This information stays on your computer.
Your YouTube account details. For each YouTube account you add to Lantern, it stores that account's display name, profile picture and YouTube account identifier, so it can label your account slots and send each feed request to the right account. This stays on your computer.
Your YouTube login cookies. To load your subscriptions, home feed, library and search results, Lantern makes the same signed requests to YouTube that youtube.com makes for itself. YouTube requires those requests to carry a signature derived from your youtube.com login cookies. Lantern reads those cookies, converts them into the one-time signature YouTube expects, and sends only that signature, only to youtube.com. The cookie values themselves are never stored, never written to disk, never logged and never transmitted anywhere.
YouTube page content. On youtube.com, Lantern reads page content — video titles, channel names, durations, thumbnails and links — to build your dashboard, and keeps a local copy so it does not have to fetch the same information repeatedly.
What you watch. Lantern records which videos you have watched and how far into a video you reached, so it can hide watched videos and resume playback where you left off. It also detects when a tab is playing audio or video, for the now-playing display. This stays on your computer.
Your bookmarks. Lantern reads your browser bookmarks to display them in its bookmarks panel. It never creates, edits, moves or deletes a bookmark, and bookmark data is never sent anywhere.
Your settings and images. Your themes, layout preferences, folders, pinned items and any background images or animated GIFs you upload are stored on your computer. Uploaded images never leave your device.
YouTube and Google. Requests to load your feeds, search results, library and channels — and to add or remove videos from your playlists — go to YouTube, under the account you are already signed into. Video thumbnails load from Google's image servers. Suggestions in Lantern's search box are requested from Google's public search-suggestion service as you type. These are the same requests your browser makes when you use YouTube normally.
Syncing between devices. Where Lantern syncs, it does so through your own YouTube playlists inside your own YouTube account. No Lantern server holds a copy, because there is no Lantern server.
The optional AI feature. Lantern includes an optional feature that can group your feed into themes using an external AI service. It is switched off and does nothing unless you enter your own API key. If you choose to turn it on, the titles and channel names of the videos in your current feed are sent to the endpoint you configured — Google's Gemini API by default — for that one request. Removing the key stops this completely. No other Lantern feature contacts this service.
Sharing a theme. If you share a theme you made, its settings are encoded into a link that you copy and send yourself. Nothing is uploaded. The Lantern share page cannot read anything from your browser; the extension only accepts a theme code that you explicitly choose to import, and always asks you to confirm first.
Lantern's use of information received from Google APIs, and its handling of any browsing activity, adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Browsing activity is read solely to provide the tab dashboard and YouTube features described on Lantern's Chrome Web Store listing and visible in its interface. It is not transferred, sold, or used for any other purpose.
Everything Lantern stores lives in your browser's local extension storage. You can export it or erase it at any time from Settings → Backup & Restore inside the dashboard, and uninstalling the extension removes all of it from your computer.
If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page will be updated. Material changes will also be noted in the extension's release notes.