Last updated: August 10, 2026
YouTube Playlist Search is a Chrome extension that adds an in-page search bar to YouTube's playlist selection interfaces. It fetches your playlists directly from YouTube and lets you save videos to them.
This extension does not collect, store, transmit, or sell personal data to the extension developer or any third party. No analytics, tracking, or remote logging is performed. The extension developer does not operate a backend server and never receives any of your data.
Your username, email, and profile photo are ignored. The extension reads only the playlist content and YouTube session value described below. It sends neither item to the developer or any third party.
The extension only communicates with youtube.com — the same server you are
already browsing. It does this by calling YouTube's internal "InnerTube" API
(https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/*) as a same-origin request from the YouTube
tab you already have open. No requests are made to any other server, and no data is sent to
the extension developer.
The extension does not use OAuth, does not use
chrome.identity, and does not obtain, store, or transmit any
access tokens or refresh tokens.
Because InnerTube requests originate from a youtube.com page, your browser automatically
attaches your existing YouTube session cookie — the same way it does when you click
around YouTube normally. To satisfy InnerTube's authentication scheme, the extension reads the
SAPISID cookie from document.cookie on the current YouTube tab and
uses it to compute a short-lived SAPISIDHASH authentication header. The cookie
value and the derived hash are only ever sent back to youtube.com itself as part
of these same-origin API calls. They are never stored, logged, or transmitted anywhere else.
The extension reads the following "website content" from the YouTube pages you visit:
MiniSearch indexes this data in the current tab. Playlist titles, IDs, search text, URLs, and modal HTML are not written to persistent storage or page diagnostics. Account-scoped playlist caches refresh after six hours when next used. The browser clears them when the tab closes.
All search, ranking, and filtering is performed locally in your browser.
The extension uses two Chrome API permissions:
scripting registers the content script after you grant YouTube access.storage stores onboarding flags and content-script registration errors.These records contain no playlist, search, page, or authentication data. Runtime diagnostics stay in the local DevTools console. The extension does not persist or expose them in page DOM.
Site access is limited to https://www.youtube.com/*. You grant this optional host
permission on the welcome page. A service worker manages this permission and opens the welcome
page after installation. The extension has no popup.
The extension bundles a local copy of MiniSearch for BM25-based ranking. MiniSearch runs entirely in your browser; no remote executable code is loaded at runtime, and no third-party SDKs are used.
If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new "Last updated" date.
Email: playlist@codyh.xyz