Short, because there is little to say.

What Venfy does not have

No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no name, email address or password to keep.

No advertising, no advertising trackers and no tracking script. The pages load no third-party script except YouTube's player, and that one only on the screen page, the one you open on your computer.

No cookies of its own.

What is counted

Venfy counts how it is used, so that the person who builds it can tell whether anybody does. The counting is done by our own server. The server keeps the numbers with PostHog, an analytics service, on PostHog's servers in the United States, and it is the server that sends them there: your browser never contacts PostHog, and no page loads anything of theirs.

What is counted: a page of this site being opened, with the name of the site that linked to it (google.com, never the full address) and the campaign tag of the link, if it had one. Start being pressed on the screen page. A room being opened, a screen connecting to it, and a phone pairing with it. A screen being given its code for the YouTube app, and a phone connecting through that app. A video being sent, a video starting to play, and a video that would not play, with the reason. A screen signing its phones out. And three things about what is installed: that the Venfy Cast extension is in the browser a page was opened in, that its download link was clicked, and that the remote was added to a home screen.

Each of those comes with three facts read from the way your browser describes itself: which browser it is, which operating system, and whether it is a computer, a phone, a tablet or a TV. The description itself, with its version numbers, is not passed on.

No cookie is set, and nothing is stored on your device to recognise it. To count visitors, the server scrambles your IP address and your browser's description together with a random value, and passes on only the result. The random value exists only in the server's memory, is replaced every day and is never saved. Tomorrow the same browser gets an unrelated id, and with yesterday's value gone nobody, us included, can turn an id back into an address or match one day's id with the next.

What happens in a room is counted under a label for that room: a one-way scramble of the room's id, made with a key only the server has. The label stays the same for as long as your computer keeps its room, which is what lets a room that is used again another day be counted as returning. It cannot be turned back into the room, its code, or anything that opens it.

None of it ever contains which video is playing, its title or its channel. Nor a room's code, its id or a token. Nor your IP address, your browser's full description of itself, the full address of a page, or the full address of the site you came from. Your location is not looked up.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track are honoured. If your browser sends either one, nothing the pages report is counted: no page views, no clicks, nothing about what is installed. What the server counts by itself for that browser, a room it opened or a video it played, is still counted, each time under a new random id and without the room's label, so nothing ties one of those counts to another, to a room, or to you.

What the server holds

A room, while it is in use: its codes, the queue of video ids and titles, what is playing, which subtitles were chosen, and how many phones are connected. It lives in memory and is discarded once everyone has left for a while. It is never written to a database.

Standard request logs: the time, the address a request came from, and the route. They exist to keep the service running and to stop abuse. They do not contain what you watch.

What your devices keep

The page on your computer stores its room, its copy of the queue, which subtitles were chosen and which screen it is in YouTube's Cast list in the browser's local storage, so reloading the page lands in the same room and a phone linked once stays linked.

The remote stores a token for the room it is paired with, so you do not have to scan the code every time. Disconnecting, or clearing the site's data, removes it.

If you pick a language by hand, on the screen or on the remote, that browser remembers which one.

Language

The screen and the remote are shown in the language your browser asks for, which it says with every request it makes to any site. If it asks for none that Venfy is written in, the country the request comes from is used as a guess. Neither is stored, and neither is counted.

YouTube

Videos are played by YouTube's official embedded player, loaded directly from YouTube by your computer. What that player collects is between that browser and Google, and is covered by Google's privacy policy.

To show a video's title, the Venfy server asks YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint about the video id. That request comes from the server, not from your phone.

Thumbnails on the remote are images loaded straight from YouTube's image servers, the same ones any page that shows a video preview uses.

Casting from the YouTube app

When you press start, the Venfy server registers that page with YouTube as a screen, the way a smart TV registers itself, and YouTube issues the TV code you see. Our server makes those requests, so YouTube sees them come from it and not from your computer.

When you link the YouTube app with that code, the link is between your phone and YouTube, and YouTube knows which of its users linked to which screen. Venfy is told only that a phone connected, under an id YouTube makes up for it. It is never told who you are or which account you use.

What you cast reaches the Venfy server from YouTube as video ids, and becomes the room's queue. It is held the way everything else in a room is: in memory, while the room is in use.

Sign everyone out, on the screen, makes it a new screen in YouTube's list, which unlinks every phone that was linked to the old one.

Venfy Cast, the browser extension

Venfy Cast collects nothing and sends nothing to us. With the extension, what you cast does not pass through any server of ours: your phone talks to YouTube, and YouTube talks to your computer.

It changes how one tab, the one it opens, identifies itself to YouTube, and sets the name that screen is listed under in the YouTube app. It does not read pages, does not touch other tabs, and does not alter the player or the ads.

It keeps one thing, for as long as the browser stays open: the id of the tab it opened, so that pressing its button twice does not open two.

What YouTube's TV interface does inside that tab, including any account you sign in with there, is between that browser and Google.

Questions

Write to [email protected]. A person reads it.