Privacy policy
Last updated 29 August 2026.
tubem3 is a personal YouTube client. It runs on your own device and, if you choose, keeps your viewing history on a server you run yourself. This policy describes what it handles and where each thing goes. It is short because the application does little that needs describing.
1. There is no company between you and YouTube
tubem3 talks to YouTube’s API directly from your device, using your own Google sign-in. Your use of the application does not pass through any service we operate on your behalf, and nothing about you is sold, shared or sent to any third party. There is no advertising in the application and no business model that would want your data.
1a. The history server, if you run one
tubem3 can keep your viewing history on a server, so that suggestions can be built from more than the device happens to remember. That server is yours. It is software in this project that you install on a machine you control, and the build you are using names its address. If that address is blank, nothing is sent anywhere and the application works from what the device measured itself.
Where a server is configured, it holds, for each signed-in account:
| Data | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Which videos you watched, and when | To build suggestions from what you actually watch |
| Which channels those belonged to | The strongest single signal of what you like |
| What you searched for | Intentions in your own words, which a view count cannot express |
| Your Google account identifier and address | So one household member’s history is never shown to another |
The application proves who it is to that server with a Google identity token, which asserts which account is asking and nothing more. It deliberately never sends the token that would let a server read your YouTube account on your behalf. Each account can read only its own rows.
Because the machine is yours, so is everything on it: its backups, its retention and its deletion are in your hands, and no request to us is needed or would achieve anything.
2. What is stored, and where
Apart from the history server described above, everything the application knows is kept in a database on your device, encrypted with a key held in the device’s own secure keystore. That includes:
| Data | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Your subscriptions and the videos in them | To show the feed without asking YouTube again on every scroll |
| What you have watched, and how far | To resume, and to hide what you have finished if you ask it to |
| Your rules, filters and parental settings | They are the point of the application |
| Your Google access and refresh tokens | To stay signed in without asking again |
None of it is transmitted to us or to anyone else.
3. What the application asks Google for
| Permission | What it is used for |
|---|---|
youtube.readonly | Reading your subscriptions, playlists and video details. Requested when you sign in. |
youtube.force-ssl | Only requested if you ask the application to change something — create or edit a playlist. It is not requested at sign-in. |
The application asks for the narrower permission first and the wider one only when you use a feature that needs it.
4. What we do not do
- No analytics. No usage statistics, no event tracking, no advertising identifiers.
- No crash reporting to a third party. Errors are written to a log on your device, which you can read.
- No profile of you anywhere we can see. Recommendations are computed on your device. Where you run a history server, the counts they are built from live on your machine and reach no one else.
- No cookies or trackers on this website. These pages load nothing from another host.
5. The parts that are not absolute
Two honest qualifications, because a policy that claimed perfection would be untrue:
- YouTube sees your requests. The application fetches from Google’s servers and plays video through YouTube’s own embedded player. Google therefore sees that activity, under Google’s own privacy policy, exactly as it would if you used YouTube directly. We have no control over that and do not claim otherwise.
- This website keeps ordinary web-server logs. If your device fetches an update from this domain, the server records the request in the usual way — including the IP address it came from — for operating the site. Those logs are not linked to any account, because there are no accounts.
6. Deleting your data
Signing out revokes the application’s access to your Google account and clears the stored tokens. Uninstalling the application removes the encrypted database and everything in it. Neither requires our involvement, because we hold nothing.
You can also remove tubem3’s access at any time from your Google account permissions.
7. Children
tubem3 includes a parental gate and a kids mode, which restrict what can be browsed and played on a shared device. These are local settings on that device and involve no data leaving it.
8. Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.