Privacy Policy

VideoFocus is built to be private by default: no advertising, no behavioral tracking, no third-party analytics, and we never sell your data. To make parental controls and a shared family library work across your devices, VideoFocus uses a parent account and syncs a limited set of data to our servers. This policy explains exactly what we collect, why, where it lives, and how you can review or delete it.

The account you create

VideoFocus is passwordless. A parent signs in with their email address and a one-time code we email to them. We use your email only to sign you in, to protect and recover access to your parental controls, and to sync your family's data across your devices. We do not use your email for marketing and we do not share it with advertisers.

What syncs to our servers

So that your parental controls and libraries follow you across devices, the following is stored on our backend infrastructure (hosted with our service provider, Supabase) under per-account access controls, and mirrored on each device you sign in on:

Account level

• Your parent email address
• Your parental passcode, stored only as a salted PBKDF2-SHA256 hash — never as the passcode itself, and never in a form we can reverse
• A per-day count of how many YouTube lookups your account caused, used only to keep one account from exhausting a shared limit (see “What our servers keep about YouTube requests”)

For each child profile you create

• The profile's name, avatar, and theme, and the child's age if you enter it
• Screen-time limits and the weekly schedule you set
• The channels, videos, and playlists saved to that profile
• Watch history and screen-time usage for that profile
• A device identifier used to reconcile usage and sync across your devices

All of this is tied to your account and is only accessible to you when signed in. It is deleted when you delete your account (see “Reviewing and deleting your data”).

What stays only on your device

Some data never leaves your device — for example theme and accent preferences, temporary caches, and transient interface state. Your parental passcode is also stored locally in the iOS Keychain, protected by your device's hardware security, in addition to the hashed copy described above.

YouTube and Google

VideoFocus shows content from YouTube. Two different kinds of connection are involved, and the difference matters for your privacy:

• Searches and video information go through our server, not straight to Google. When you search for a channel, browse a channel, or the app refreshes titles, durations, and view counts, the request goes to our own server, which asks the YouTube Data API on your behalf using our key. Google sees a request from us — not your device, your IP address, or anything identifying you or your children.
• Playback and thumbnails come directly from Google. Videos play in YouTube's official embedded player, loaded from youtube.com inside the app, and thumbnail images load from Google's image servers. Your device makes those connections itself, so Google and YouTube receive its IP address and may set cookies and collect information about playback as described in their policy — the same as watching an embedded YouTube video on any website.

VideoFocus never asks you to sign in to a Google or YouTube account, and never reads or changes anything in one. We do not send your email address, your passcode, your child profiles, or any other personally identifying information to YouTube, to the YouTube API, or to Google.

Your use of YouTube content through VideoFocus is subject to the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy.

What our servers keep about YouTube requests

To stay inside YouTube's daily request limits, our server keeps a small amount of information about YouTube lookups. None of it is a record of what your family watched:

• A shared cache of YouTube responses. When our server fetches something from YouTube — a set of search results, a channel's details, a video's length — it saves that response so the next family asking for the same thing gets the saved copy instead of a new request. Entries are filed under a one-way hash of the request and are not linked to your account, your device, or your child profiles. Nothing in an entry records who asked for it.
• A daily request counter. We count how many YouTube lookups your account caused each day, as one running number per day, so a single account cannot use up the limit for everyone. It is a count only — never a list of what was looked up or watched.
• A shared list of new uploads. So that checking for new videos does not cost a separate YouTube request for every family, our server keeps one shared list of the channels families have added — as public YouTube channel IDs, with no account attached — and checks them for new uploads on a schedule. The results are public YouTube information and carry no link to any family.

In keeping with YouTube’s requirements, none of this cached YouTube data is kept indefinitely. The shared cache and the shared new-uploads list are purged automatically, and no entry is retained for more than 30 days.

Voice search

VideoFocus offers optional voice search. If you use it, the app accesses the microphone and uses Apple's on-device and server-based Speech framework to transcribe what you say into a search query. Audio may be processed by Apple to perform the transcription, as described in Apple's privacy policy. We do not store voice recordings, and voice search is never required to use the app.

Children's privacy

VideoFocus is designed for families and is intended to be set up and managed by a parent or guardian. A parent creates the account, provides consent, and sets up each child profile. Children do not create accounts and are not asked for personal information by us. The parent can review, change, or delete any child profile and all of its data at any time from within the app.

We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children, we do not show behavioral advertising, and we do not sell or share children's data for marketing. The data we store for a child profile (listed above) exists only to provide the app's parental-control and sync features. Because VideoFocus connects to YouTube and Google as described above, parents should review Google's privacy practices if that is a concern.

Reviewing and deleting your data

You are always in control of your data:

• Delete Account — from the app's parent area you can permanently delete your account. This removes your account, every child profile, and all saved videos, channels, playlists, watch history, and screen-time data from this device and from every other device signed in to the account. This cannot be undone.
• Sign Out — signs you out on the current device and clears the app's local data there, without deleting your account.
• Email us — you can also request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data by contacting us. We honor deletion requests within 30 days.

Sharing and third parties

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or analytics companies. VideoFocus contains no third-party advertising SDKs, no analytics SDKs, and no cross-app tracking. The only parties involved in operating the service are:

• Supabase — our hosting and database provider, which stores the synced data described above on our behalf as a data processor.
• Google / YouTube — for video content, playback, and thumbnails delivered to your device, and for the video information our server requests on your behalf, as described above.

Your rights under GDPR and CCPA

If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or California, you have the right to access, correct, delete, or port your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. Because nearly all of the data we hold is directly manageable from within the app, you can exercise most of these rights yourself using Delete Account, or by contacting us for anything else. We do not sell personal information and we do not use it for behavioral advertising.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit using TLS. Your parental passcode is protected with salted PBKDF2-SHA256 hashing and, on your device, stored in the iOS Keychain. Access to your synced data is restricted per account with row-level security so that only you, when signed in, can read it. On your device, VideoFocus is protected by the standard iOS app sandbox.

Data retention

We retain your account data for as long as your account is active so the app can function across your devices. When you delete your account, or make a verified deletion request, we delete the associated data from our servers within 30 days, except where we are legally required to retain it.

The shared YouTube cache and the shared new-uploads list described above are not account data: they hold public YouTube information, carry no link to any account, and are purged automatically so that no entry is retained for more than 30 days. Deleting your account does not need to touch them, because nothing in them identifies you.

Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we'll update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. Material changes will be communicated within the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data? Email us at ventureinklabs@gmail.com.