Installing an extension that syncs video means clicking past a warning that says it can read and change all your data on the websites you visit. That warning is accurate, and it should give you pause. An extension with that permission, on a page where you are signed in to your bank, is technically in a position to read that page.
So the honest version of "is it safe" is not a yes or a no. It is: here is what the permission is for, here is what you should check before trusting anyone with it, and here are our answers.
Why an extension like this needs all sites
Its job is to find the <video> element on the page you are watching, read its position, and ask it to play or pause. To do that, a small script has to run on the page itself.
Which page? Nobody knows in advance. You might watch on YouTube tonight, a course platform tomorrow, a news site's documentary after that. There is no list of sites to request access to — that is the whole point of hooking the page's own player instead of integrating with named services, and it is what makes the tool cover sites nobody wrote an integration for.
The script also runs in every frame, because players are often inside an iframe, and it looks inside shadow DOM, which many embedded and corporate players use.
So the broad permission is not a red flag by itself. What matters is what is done with it.
Five questions worth asking
Ask these of any watch-party extension, including this one.
1. Does the video go through their server? If it does, they are carrying your stream and your evening depends on their bandwidth. If it doesn't, the extension is only exchanging small messages about position and play state.
2. What permissions does it ask for, and is each one explained? "All sites" is expected for this job. Access to your browsing history, your bookmarks or your downloads is not.
3. What is stored, and where? There is a real difference between something that keeps a record of which video you watched and something that only notes when a room was open and who was in it, never what played.
4. Does it load analytics or advertising code? An extension that runs on every page you visit is an unusually powerful place to put a tracker.
5. Who runs it, and can you reach them? A named operator with a contact address and a privacy policy that matches the code is a different proposition from an anonymous listing.
Our answers
The video never passes through our server. Everyone plays the original in their own browser with their own account. What crosses the wire is a small JSON message: position and play state once a second, a play/pause/seek command when someone acts, chat text, and the host's page URL and title — only from the host, so the room can offer "Open the video".
Every permission, and what it is not used for:
| Permission | Why it is needed | What it is not used for |
|---|---|---|
| All sites + content script | Find the video, read position and ad state, draw the sync button and chat toast over the video | Reading page content, forms, cookies or passwords. On a page with no video element the script waits and sends nothing |
tabs | Know which tab holds the video; share the host's page URL and title with the room | Reading other tabs' content — only URL and title, only for the tab in the room |
storage | Keep your preferences and session data on your device | Sending anything out of the extension |
sidePanel | The interface opens in Chrome's side panel | — |
scripting | Inject the content script into tabs that were already open at install or update | — |
alarms | A once-a-minute alarm so the Manifest V3 service worker doesn't sleep and the connection stays open | — |
notifications | Show an incoming chat message while the panel is closed | Any other kind of notification |
What is never collected: browsing history or a list of the sites you visit; the video content, your watch history, or any record of which video you watched; the text of chat messages — relayed and gone; the page, title or video a room was on; your name, phone number, address or ID; card details; analytics, advertising or tracking data; location.
No analytics, anywhere. Neither the extension nor this website contains an analytics, advertising or tracking SDK. The site's fonts are served from the site itself, so no request goes to Google Fonts while you read this.
No cookies either. When you sign in on the site, the session key sits in the browser's localStorage — not a cookie, never sent automatically, and deleted when you sign out.
What does exist, stated plainly
An account layer means some data is stored, and pretending otherwise would be worse than the storage itself:
- Your account: e-mail address, an argon2id hash of your password (never the password), display name, language, subscription status, and the payment records accounting requires. Card numbers never reach us; payment happens on the provider's own page.
- Security records: open sessions, so you can drop them all if something looks wrong, and an audit log that holds a hash of the IP address rather than the address itself.
- Room session records: when a room closes, one record of it — whose room it was, when it opened and closed, how long at least two people were in it together, the most people in it at once, and the account ids of those who joined. No room code, no page, no video, no chat. It is used to run the service, plan capacity, spot abuse and make product decisions from real use; it is kept for 400 days, and deleting your account removes you from it.
- A server administrator can see which rooms are open right now, how many people are in each, and the e-mail addresses inside them — to follow faults and act on abuse reports. That view reads memory, doesn't survive the room closing, masks room codes, and does not include the page being watched. Not even an administrator sees who is watching what.
Chat is not stored at all, and a room's contents — the page, the playback state, the connections — are dropped from memory when the last person leaves. Only the short session record above remains.
What sits on your device
In Chrome's extension storage, and never sent anywhere: display name, last room code, auto-connect preference, language and theme persist; chat messages (the last 200) and the id, URL and title of the tab holding the video live only until you close the browser. Removing the extension deletes all of it.
A word about updates
The realistic risk with browser extensions is rarely the version you install — it is the update after an extension changes hands, when a useful tool becomes an ad injector overnight. Two habits help, and neither is a promise anyone can make on your behalf: look at who publishes an extension before installing it, and be wary of one whose ownership you can't determine.
Ours is run by the project's owner, the relay is a single server at relay.iwatchuwatch.com with no address setting to change, and the privacy policy is written section by section against the code — permissions from the manifest, message fields from the protocol, storage keys from the source. If the code changes, the text changes.
The short version
The permission an extension like this asks for is broad because the job is broad. The question is what happens next: whether your video goes anywhere, whether anything is written down, and whether the people running it can be found. Download · Privacy policy · All the questions, answered plainly