Privacy

Popmelon has no database. Nothing you do in a party is written to a disk we own. This page says exactly what passes through our server, what stays in your browser, and what we never touch at all.

Last updated 14 September 2026.

The video never reaches us

Popmelon does not stream, relay, record, cache or proxy video or audio from Netflix or YouTube. It cannot: that content is DRM-protected inside your browser and is unreadable from an extension. Everyone in a party is playing their own copy from their own account. What we synchronise is a position in time — the same information as someone saying “go to 41 minutes” out loud.

What passes through the relay

While you are in a party, our relay handles:

• the room code, your display name, and the colour assigned to you
• playback position, whether you are paused, and which video the room is on
• chat messages you send
• clock-synchronisation pings, which are timestamps and nothing else

All of it lives in the server's memory and only for as long as the party does. A room is discarded a minute after the last person leaves, and everything is gone if the process restarts. There is no database, no message history, and no way for us to read a conversation back — including for us.

Voice and video chat

Voice and camera, when you turn them on, travel through a media server that forwards live streams between participants. The access token your browser is issued explicitly denies recording permission, and no recording is configured. Streams are forwarded and discarded; nothing is written down.

Voice starts muted every time, and the camera starts off. Neither turns on without you pressing the button.

Signing in with Google

Signing in is optional — you can watch, chat and use voice without an account.

When you do sign in:

• We ask Google only who you are. We do not request access to your Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar or any other Google service, and we receive no token that could be used to act on your behalf. There is no refresh token anywhere in the design.
• Google returns a signed identity token. We check its signature, that it was issued for Popmelon, and that it is less than five minutes old — then we discard it.
• We issue you our own session token, which contains your display name, your Google profile picture URL, and an opaque identifier. It is held in your browser, not by us.
• That identifier is a one-way salted hash of your Google account ID. We never store the Google account ID itself, and the identifier cannot be reversed back to it or matched against your account on any other service.

Signing out deletes the session from your browser. Since we store nothing, there is no account on our side to delete.

What your browser stores

Locally, on your machine, and readable only by the extension:

• your display name and the relay address, so you do not retype them
• your session token, if you signed in
• which party the tab is in, so it can rejoin when an episode ends

No advertising or analytics cookies. No tracking pixels. No third-party analytics.

Server logs

This is the one place we do retain something. Our web server keeps ordinary access logs — IP address, timestamp, and which URL was requested — as every web server does, to run the service and investigate abuse. Logs roll automatically and old ones are deleted; we keep roughly the last 30 MB and no more. They contain no chat content, no playback data and no audio.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or share your data. There is nothing retained to sell.
• We do not build a profile of what you watch.
• We do not read your chat messages; they pass through memory and are gone.
• We do not record voice or video.
• We do not track you across websites.

Who else is involved

• Google — only if you choose to sign in, and only to confirm who you are.
• Our hosting provider — runs the server the relay and this site sit on.

Netflix and YouTube are not partners of ours and receive nothing from us.

Children

Popmelon is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we handle, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

Questions about any of this: hello@popmelon.app.