Backrow Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 15, 2026

Backrow is a chat extension for YouTube. This policy describes exactly what it does with your data. It is short because the extension keeps almost nothing.

What stays on your device

• Your nickname, your colour, your panel preferences and your active ping reminders.
• A random identifier generated on install, used only so the server can hand your own reminders back to you. It is not linked to any account, email or profile.
• All of this lives in your browser’s local extension storage and is never uploaded.

What passes through our server

• Room chat. Messages you send in a video’s room are relayed through our server and held in memory only while at least one person is in that room. They are not written to any database. Two minutes after the last person leaves, everything is deleted.
• Private chat. Messages in a one-to-one chat are relayed directly between two live connections and are never stored on our servers, not even temporarily. So that a dropped connection, a page reload or an accidentally closed tab does not destroy the conversation, the extension keeps a copy on your own device, in browser memory. It never leaves your device, and it is discarded when you close the browser or two minutes after the conversation ends.
• Video thumbnails and titles. A shared or pasted video link shows the video’s public cover image and title. The cover comes straight from YouTube’s own image CDN and the title from YouTube’s public oEmbed endpoint, both requested by your browser from the site you are already on. Those requests carry the video id and nothing about you, and neither one passes through our servers.
• Presence. While you have a video page open, the server knows which room you are connected to. This is discarded when you disconnect.
• Playback position. Other people in the same room can see where you are in the video. If you are on a different video from someone you are privately chatting with, they are only told that you are watching something else, never which video, unless you explicitly choose to share it.
• Ping reminders. When you ask to be pinged, the video id, its title and your random identifier are stored for at most two hours, then deleted automatically. Cancelling removes the record immediately.

What we do not do

• No accounts, no email addresses, no phone numbers, no real names.
• No analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising.
• No selling, renting or transferring of user data to third parties.
• No reading or modifying of any page other than the Backrow chat panel.
• No remote code. All code ships inside the extension package, including the fonts.

Retention

There is almost nothing to retain. Room history exists only while a room is occupied and is destroyed automatically afterwards. Private chats are never persisted on our servers; the only copy lives in your own browser’s memory so that a brief disconnection does not lose it, and it disappears when the browser closes. Ping reminders expire within two hours.

Children

Backrow is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

Questions or requests: [email protected]

Backrow is not affiliated with YouTube or Google.