Jarvis

A personal assistant that runs on one Mac, for one person.

Jarvis is a private, non-commercial project I build and use myself. It helps me organise my own creative work — music I have written, recorded and published. It is not a product, not a service, and has no users other than me. There is no sign-up, because there is nothing to sign up to.

Why it asks for Google access

I publish music to my own YouTube channel. Jarvis holds a catalogue of my recordings as they exist on my own machine, and to be useful it needs to know which of those recordings I have actually released, and where. So it asks my permission to read the metadata of my own YouTube channel — titles, dates, durations, playlist membership — and matches that against what it already knows locally.

That is the entire reason the integration exists. It is authorised by me, against my own Google account, for my own channel.

What it asks for, exactly

With that permission, Jarvis reads:

• my channel's id, title, creation date and video count;
• for my own videos: id, title, description, publication date, duration, privacy status, category and tags;
• my playlists, and the ordered list of video ids each one contains.

What it cannot do

A read-only scope cannot write, and this one is the only permission Jarvis ever requests. It cannot upload, edit, rename, rate, comment on, or delete anything on YouTube — not because it chooses not to, but because the access it holds does not permit it.

It also downloads no video files, no audio, no thumbnails, no captions or transcripts, no comments and no analytics. It reads metadata and nothing else.

What it does with what it reads

Today, it records it. The metadata is written to a local log on my Mac and can be listed back. The step that links a published video to the specific recording it came from is written but not yet enabled, so at present nothing is inferred, matched or acted upon — the data is kept for that purpose and is not yet used for it.

Nothing is sent to anyone. There is no server, no database off my machine, and no third party involved at any point.

Privacy

The privacy policy sets out precisely what data is accessed, where it is stored, how long it is kept, how credentials are handled, and how access can be revoked. It describes what the software actually does rather than what would be reassuring to read.