Last updated: October 23, 2026
Viral Hit Finder (formerly Reel Scout) is a Chrome extension made by Crew (crewedits.com). It helps you study public Instagram reels: it ranks a creator's reels by how far each one beat their usual views and writes out the first 3 seconds of the top ones.
The short version: your research stays in your browser and on your own Viral Hit Library page. We never receive it. No accounts with us, no ads, no analytics, no tracking, and we never sell anything about you.
What Viral Hit Finder reads
Only when you open a public Instagram creator's page and press Scan (or switch on the daily update), Viral Hit Finder reads what Instagram already shows you there: each reel's views, likes, comments, date, length, audio name and caption, its cover image, and the creator's public name and follower count. To write out a reel's spoken hook, it downloads the reel's video and turns its first 3 seconds of audio into text, inside Chrome on your computer.
It does not read your messages, your password, your own account's private data or any other website. It never logs in, posts, likes, follows or comments for you.
Where it's kept
- In Chrome on your computer (the extension's own storage): your scans, the hooks, small cover thumbnails, which Viral Hit Library page you linked, and your daily-update setting.
- On your own Viral Hit Library page: a private page in your own Claude account (claude.ai), or, if you run Crew with ChatGPT Codex, a page Crew serves on your own computer (http://localhost). Viral Hit Finder passes your research to that one page, inside your browser, and the page saves it there. Anthropic's privacy policy covers your Claude account; the Codex page keeps everything on your computer. Only you can see the page unless you share it.
Who it's shared with
Nobody. We (Crew) don't run a server for Viral Hit Finder and receive none of this data. Viral Hit Finder only connects to:
- instagram.com and Instagram's own image and video servers, to read what Instagram shows you;
- huggingface.co, once, to download the speech model. No audio or other data is sent to it.
What we don't do
We don't sell or rent data, use it for advertising, use it to decide credit or loans, or use it for anything other than Viral Hit Finder's one purpose.
Your choices
- Switch off or remove Viral Hit Finder at any time in chrome://extensions. Removing it deletes everything it kept in Chrome.
- Unlink your Viral Hit Library page in Viral Hit Finder's options (chrome://extensions > Viral Hit Finder > Details > Extension options).
- Remove a creator on your Viral Hit Library page, or delete the whole page's data: in your Claude account, delete the page; with ChatGPT Codex, tell your Front desk "delete my Viral Hit Library data" (or uninstall Crew, which removes it from your computer).
- Turn the daily update off on your Viral Hit Library page or in Viral Hit Finder's options.
Fair use
Viral Hit Finder reads only what Instagram already shows you, at a normal pace, for study. Please use it to learn what works, never to repost anyone's videos. Viral Hit Finder is not made by, endorsed by or affiliated with Instagram or Meta.
Children
Viral Hit Finder is a tool for adult creators and isn't meant for children under 13.
Changes
If this policy changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top.