Privacy Policy

About this app

Better Watch Later is a private app — set up and run by one person or organisation for their own use, not a big shared online service. Whoever set up and runs the copy you're using (we'll call them the operator) is responsible for the personal information it handles. The app and its data run on cloud servers rented from Amazon Web Services (AWS). This policy explains, in plain terms, what the app keeps about you, what it does with it, and how it is protected. If you have any questions, see How to contact us at the end.

What the app keeps about you

When you sign in with Google, the app saves the following in its database:

• Your Google account ID — the unique ID Google uses for your account. This is the only part of your Google identity the app saves. Your name, email address, and profile picture are shown while you're signed in, but they come from Google as part of your sign-in and are not stored in the database.
• Your sign-in keys — the digital keys Google gives the app so it can keep loading your feed and playlists on your behalf without making you sign in again every time. (These are technically called “access and refresh tokens,” or “OAuth tokens.”)
• A copy of your recent feed — a list of recent videos from the channels you subscribe to, so the app can show your feed quickly without re-fetching it from YouTube every time. Older entries are removed automatically as they age (see How long the app keeps your data).
• Notes about the channels you follow — for each channel, a small amount of internal status information, so the app knows when that channel posts a new video and can catch up if it ever misses one.
• Your default watch-later choice — which of your playlists you've picked as the default place to save videos. This is the only playlist information the app saves: your playlists and the videos in them are fetched live from YouTube while you use them, and are not kept in the database.

How the app uses your data

Everything the app keeps is used only to give you, the signed-in user, your feed and playlist features. Nothing is used for advertising, building a profile of you, or any purpose unrelated to those features. When you sign in, the app asks Google for permission to:

• confirm who you are, using your basic Google profile, so it can sign you in;
• see the channels you subscribe to and their recent videos, so it can build your feed in newest-first order; and
• view and manage your YouTube playlists, so the playlist features can list, add, remove, and reorder items for you.

How your data is protected

Your data is kept in a database on AWS servers in the United States, with the following protections:

• The whole database is encrypted while it is stored, and the connection between the app and the database is encrypted too — so your information is never readable in plain text, whether it is sitting in storage or travelling between them.
• Your sign-in keys get extra protection on top of that: the app scrambles them a second time before saving, so even someone who could see the raw database could not read them.
• Your sign-in keys and other sensitive values are never written to the app's logs.
• The app uses cookies only to sign you in and keep you signed in. They are required for the app to work, are not used for tracking or advertising, and are encrypted as well.

Keeping the servers and database secure is the operator's responsibility.

Other services involved

The only outside companies involved are Google and YouTube — which the app talks to in order to work, including Google's notification service that tells the app when a channel you follow posts a new video — and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts the app and stores its data on the operator's behalf and does not use your data for its own purposes. The app does not use any advertising networks, analytics services, or other third-party tracking. Beyond Google and AWS, your data is never sold, rented, or shared with anyone.

How long the app keeps your data

Most of your data is kept for as long as your account stays connected to the app. The one exception is the local copy of your feed: older videos in it are removed automatically after several months. This only affects the app's own copy — your real YouTube account and history are never touched.

Disconnecting the app (see Your choices) does not delete the data already stored about you. It stays in the operator's database until the operator removes it.

Your choices

• Cut off the app's access — at any time, visit your Google Account permissions page and remove this app. This immediately stops it from making any further requests to YouTube for you and ends your sign-in session. On its own, this does not delete the data already stored about you.
• Ask for your data to be deleted — contact the operator (see below) and ask them to delete your stored data. This is the only way to have it actually removed from the database.

Children

This app is meant for use by the operator and people they invite, and is not directed at children under 13.

Last updated: 2026-05-20