Privacy and telemetry

Playlist Mirror does not collect personal data. Your playlists, the channels you copy, and your Google sign-in never leave your own container — the OAuth token stays in DATA_DIR, and the only thing that ever sees a playlist or video id is YouTube itself.

To get a rough idea of how many people run this, and how — and therefore how much it is worth maintaining — the application sends a small anonymous ping. It is sent once on startup, after every manual or daily run, and otherwise once a day.

What is sent

Everything, in full. There is nothing in the payload that is not in this table.

Field	Example	Meaning
instanceHash	9f2c…	Random id for this installation, so repeat pings count once
appVersion	1.0.0	The version you are running
executionMode	CONTAINER	SOURCE, CONTAINER or KUBERNETES
pythonVersion	3.12.7	Which Python the image or your checkout runs on
connected	true	Whether the Google sign-in has been completed
jobCount	4	How many jobs exist, in total
videosAdded	812	How many videos have been copied, in total
unitsCharged	40600	Quota units spent over this installation's life
dailyRunCount	1	How many jobs are set to run themselves each day
quotaDailyLimit	10000	The daily allowance in force
telegramEnabled	false	Whether Telegram notifications are set up

Counts and flags, and nothing else. No Google account or email, no channel ids, no playlist ids, no video ids, no titles, no URLs, no Telegram bot token and no chat id.

connected and quotaDailyLimit are there for one reason each: the sign-in is the step people get stuck on, and the raised-quota figure says whether the app should assume 10,000 units or more.

About that instance id

It is a random UUID, generated once on first run and stored in the SQLite database under DATA_DIR. It is not derived from your Google account, your channel, or anything else about you — there is nothing behind it to guess.

That distinction matters. A hash of an identifier that other people can enumerate — an email address, a channel id — can be confirmed by anyone holding the hash and a list of candidates. A random UUID cannot, because there is no preimage to test. This app asks for only the youtube scope, so it never learns your account email in the first place, and it is written that way deliberately.

Two consequences worth knowing: wiping DATA_DIR looks like a brand new installation, and the same person on two machines counts as two. For "how many people run this", both are arguably the right answer.

Turning it off

There is no TELEMETRY_ENABLED flag, on purpose — the whole value of the ping is knowing the install count, so I ask you to leave it on. If that is a dealbreaker, there are two ways to stop it:

• Point it somewhere harmless. TELEMETRY_URL is a normal environment variable. Set it to an address that goes nowhere and the send fails, which costs one debug log line and nothing else — the application does not care whether the ping succeeded, and nothing in the interface changes.

  services:
    playlist-mirror:
      environment:
        TELEMETRY_URL: http://localhost:1

• Block it at the network level. telemetry.itobey.dev in your DNS sinkhole, or an egress rule that only lets the container reach Google. Same outcome, enforced outside the application.

The ping runs on its own daemon thread and every failure is swallowed. An air-gapped install, a dead DNS entry or a deliberately broken URL all boot and run exactly as normal.

If you are comfortable with the anonymous information described above, please consider leaving telemetry on. It is genuinely useful to me: it shows how many people use Playlist Mirror and helps me decide whether continuing to maintain it is worth the time and effort.

Outbound requests, in full

Google, Telegram if you asked for it, and the ping. Nothing else:

Host	Why	When
youtube.googleapis.com, www.googleapis.com	Reading the source and writing your playlist — the entire point of the app	While a job runs
oauth2.googleapis.com	Exchanging and refreshing the sign-in token	At sign-in, then as the token expires
api.telegram.org	The optional notifications	Only if you set them up
telemetry.itobey.dev	The anonymous ping described above	Startup, after runs, otherwise daily

The sign-in itself happens in your browser, at accounts.google.com — the container never sees your Google password.

Auditing it

The whole thing is one file, about two hundred lines with the comments: app/telemetry.py. The payload is built in one function, _payload(). If you still have concerns, open an issue.