Little to keep, nothing to sell.
- No accountNo sign-up, no profile, no email.
- No trackingNo ads, no analytics, no cookies.
- Memory onlyThe server forgets a hangout a minute after everyone left.
- Yours stays yoursYour name and settings live in your browser.
- Only while you watchThe server hears from you only in a hangout.
- Never the videoThe server learns where a video is, never what's in it.
Everything, in full.
On your device
hangout keeps these in your browser’s storage:
- Your name and color
- Shown to the people in your hangouts
- Synced
- Your settings
- How hangouts start, and who controls them
- Synced
- Saved hangouts
- Their codes and the names you gave them
- Synced
- A random ID
- Keeps your place when you reconnect
- This browser
What’s synced follows your Chrome profile when Chrome sync is on. The rest never leaves this browser.
On the server
Only while you’re in a hangout, it receives:
- Your random ID, name and color
- To show who's watching
- The hangout's code
- To put you in the right hangout
- The video page's address and title
- So your friends open the same video
- Play, pause, position, speed, loading
- To keep everyone on the same second
Everyone in a hangout sees the others’ names, colors and playback, and the video’s address and title. When you open hangout, it also asks how many people are in your saved hangouts.
How long it’s kept
In memory only, never on disk or in a database. A hangout is gone 60 seconds after its last member leaves, and a restart ends them all. The server doesn’t log requests, IP addresses, names or what you watch: its logs note starts, stops and errors.
On web pages
To sync a video, hangout runs on the pages you visit: it finds the video and puts its pill over it. It reads the video’s state (playing, position, speed), nothing else on the page, not your history, not what you type. When you start a hangout, it copies the link to your clipboard; it never reads your clipboard.
This website
No cookies, no analytics. The videos on the home page are clips served from this site, and so is everything else: nothing loads from YouTube or anyone else.
Where it runs
The server at onhangout.com runs on Fly.io in Frankfurt, Germany. Like any network, Fly.io handles your IP address to deliver the connection; hangout itself doesn’t keep it.
What we never do
Sell or share your data, use it for ads or profiles, or track you across sites. It’s only ever used to keep your videos in sync.
Your choices
Leave a hangout, and within a minute the server has forgotten it. Remove hangout to delete everything it kept in your browser.
Changes
If this changes, this page and its date change with it.