Privacy Policy: FreeTube Website Last Updated: March 2019
This privacy policy is to explain what information is collected by visitors of the FreeTube website (FreeTubeApp.io) and how it is used. This privacy policy may be changed or updated at any point in the future.
Your privacy is very important, which is why this site runs without any JavaScript and does not use Google Analytics. This website uses a self hosted instance of Matomo to track visitor statistics. This information is anonymous and cannot be used to identify you. The amount of data collected are as follows: an anonymized IP address, the used web browser, the used operating system, the type of device used, and outcoming / incoming links. An anonymized IP is defined as an IP address that has the last 2 points imitted. For example, if your IP address was 192.168.16.31, your IP will be logged as 192.168.0.0. You can opt-out of these analytics by disabling JavaScript on your browser or by enabling the Do Not Track setting within your web browser.
This information will never be sent out or sold to third parties.
Privacy Policy: FreeTube Application Last Updated: May 2021
This privacy policy is to explain what information is collected by users of the FreeTube application and how it is used. This privacy policy may be changed or updated at any point in the future.
Data Collected and How It Is Used
Your privacy is taken very seriously as a FreeTube user. Your subscriptions, history, favorited videos, and settings are saved and stored locally on your machine. This data is never uploaded or saved to any server. All information can be deleted at any time by the user by navigating to the settings page and deleting the information of their choosing.
FreeTube will make a connection to YouTube.com and various YouTube domains to serve data, images, and videos. This information is scraped from the site without running any JavaScript from the domains which prevents the usual tracking from these domains. We can't guarentee that these domains aren't tracking you in any way though we do our best to limit this as much as possible.
FreeTube has the option to connect to an instance running Invidious. A list of public instances can be found at https://instances.invidio.us/. Using FreeTube with an Invidious instance makes you subject to their privacy policy. An example Invidious privacy policy can be found at https://invidious.snopyta.org/privacy though different instances may have different privacy policies. Always ask the maintainer of that instance for an up to date privacy policy when needed. Using Invidious prevents a majority of the calls needed to YouTube and can potentially give you an increase in privacy. Invidious can also optionally proxy a video through the instance, further decreasing direct connections to YouTube. Using an Invidious instance along with video proxies can be enabled through the settings page within FreeTube.
FreeTube will make a connection to GitHub.com to check for updates and to provide changelog notes to the application. This can be disabled within the settings page.
FreeTube will make a connection to https://freetube.writeas.com/ to check for new blog posts and to link them within the app. This can be disabled within the settings page.
FreeTube has the option to use Sponsorblock (https://sponsor.ajay.app) within the application. When enabled, FreeTube will make a connection to a Sponsorblock instance of your choice and send along a hash of the video ID of the video that you are watching in order to obtain information regarding where sponsor segments are within a video. Using Sponsorblock within FreeTube subjects you to the SponsorBlock privacy policy. This feature is disabled by default and will not send any information to a Sponsorblock server without your permission.
Your IP and browser metadata are sent to the above domains. A VPN is highly recommended while using FreeTube to avoid sending your real IP.