Stream Together — Privacy Policy
Effective 19 September 2026. Applies to the Stream Together iOS app, distributed for beta testing via TestFlight.
Contact: [email protected]
The short version
Stream Together has no server of its own. Everything the social half of the app stores is held in Apple's CloudKit, in a container tied to your own iCloud account, and it is stored in CloudKit's public database. That last point matters and is explained in full below, because it means your chat messages and profile are not private.
The app never collects, stores, transmits or logs your Netflix or Prime Video password.
There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no third-party SDK of any kind.
What is stored, and where
On Apple's CloudKit servers
When you use the social features — a profile, friends, rooms, chat, playback sync — the app writes records to its CloudKit container.
| What | Specifically |
|---|---|
| An account identifier | The iCloud user record identifier Apple issues for this app. It is generated by Apple, is specific to this app, and is not your Apple ID, your email address or your name. |
| Your profile | Display name, handle, avatar symbol and colour, and whether you share presence. |
| Your handle claim | Your handle, recorded so that no one else can take it. |
| Friends and blocks | Which account identifiers you have sent requests to, accepted, or blocked. |
| Presence | That you are online, when you were last seen, and — if you are in a room — the room code and which provider you are using. Only if you leave presence sharing on. |
| Rooms | The room code, its type, whether chat is on, and who created it. |
| Membership | Which room you are in, when you joined, your display name and handle, and the title of what you are currently watching. |
| Invitations and removals | Who invited whom to which room; who was removed from one. |
| Playback state | Whether playback is running, the current position and duration, and when that was observed. |
| Chat messages | The message text, your display name, handle and avatar, and when it was sent. |
| Reports | If you report someone: your identifier, what you reported, the reason, anything you typed, and a copy of the message complained about. |
On your device only
- A diagnostic log at
Documents/diagnostics.log, recording playback events to help work out why a video failed. It stays on your device. It is never uploaded, and the app contains no code that could upload it. - Provider session cookies, held by the system WebKit data store in the app's own sandbox, exactly as a browser holds them. The app does not read them and does not send them anywhere.
Please read this: your data is in a public database
Stream Together uses the public CloudKit database. This is a deliberate design decision — it is what lets two people who have no shared document find each other by handle — but it has a consequence you should understand before you type anything into chat:
- Every record described above is readable by anyone else using the app, and by anyone able to query the container through Apple's CloudKit API.
- Chat messages are not private and are not encrypted end-to-end. Do not send anything in Stream Together chat that you would mind a stranger reading.
- Only the person who created a record can change or delete it. Nobody can edit or delete your messages or your profile except you.
- Room codes are eight characters from a 31-character alphabet — roughly 40 bits, so a room is not realistically found by guessing. That is obscurity, not security, and it is the only thing separating your room's chat from someone who goes looking.
- As the developer, I can read all of it, including chat, through Apple's CloudKit Console. I read reports. I do not read anything else routinely, but I am able to, and you should assume nothing in this app is confidential.
If this is not acceptable to you, do not use the social features. The player works without an iCloud account and without a profile.
What is never collected
- Your Netflix or Prime Video credentials. You sign in on the providers' own pages, served over HTTPS inside the app's web view. The app never presents a login form of its own, never reads what you type into theirs, and never writes credentials or DRM material to any log.
- Your browsing inside the web view. Pages you visit are not recorded or transmitted anywhere by the app. The one exception is the title of what you are playing, which is shared with the room so the room can be named — it is listed in the table above.
- Location, contacts, photos, camera, microphone, calendar, health, financial information. The app requests none of these permissions and holds none of these entitlements.
- Advertising identifiers. There is no advertising.
Tracking
The app does not track you as the App Store defines it. No data is shared with data brokers, linked to third-party data for advertising, or used for advertising measurement.
Who your data is shared with
- Apple, as the operator of CloudKit, which stores it. Apple's handling is governed by the Apple Privacy Policy.
- Other people using the app, as described above.
- Nobody else. There is no third-party processor, no analytics vendor, and no advertising network.
Netflix and Prime Video receive whatever your own session with them normally involves, directly from your device, under their own privacy policies. That relationship is between you and them; Stream Together is not a party to it and does not intermediate, proxy or inspect that traffic.
Keeping and deleting your data
Records persist until they are deleted. You can delete yours:
- In the app — Settings offers deletion of your profile, which removes your profile, your handle claim, your presence and your friend edges.
- By email — write to [email protected] and I will delete what is yours from the CloudKit container.
Two honest caveats. Deleting your profile does not retroactively remove chat messages you have already sent to rooms; ask by email if you want those gone too. And records written by other people that merely mention your identifier — a block, a report someone filed about you — belong to them, not to you.
Children
Stream Together is not directed at children. It embeds a web view with unrestricted access to the web, and it hosts user-written chat. It is rated for adults accordingly, and it should not be used by anyone under the age shown on its App Store listing.
Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or erase your personal data, and to object to its processing. Write to [email protected] and I will respond within 30 days. The data involved is small and I would rather just do it than argue about jurisdiction.
Changes
If this policy changes materially, the effective date at the top changes and testers are told through TestFlight's release notes.