Privacy Policy

• No account, no sign-up, no email required.
• Zero telemetry in the application: no analytics, crash reports, IP logging or device identifiers.
• No tracking cookies, on this website or in the application.
• Your settings, history and media never leave your computer.
• The application connects to the internet only to download the media you asked for, and to check for updates.
• One optional, off-by-default feature lets you supply a cookies file for authenticated sites. What it does is described in full below.
• yt-dlp, FFmpeg and aria2 are never bundled. pvdownloader asks first, and can download them for you or use the copies you already have.

pvdownloader does not collect, log, or transmit any user analytics, crash reports, usage statistics, feature-usage data, IP addresses, or device identifiers. There is no PVDownloader server to receive them — the application is entirely client-side.

All configuration files, application settings, download history, logs and downloaded media are stored exclusively on your own file system. They are never uploaded, synced or backed up to any service operated by us. Deleting the application folder removes them permanently.

pvdownloader.com does not use tracking cookies, Google Analytics, advertising pixels, fingerprinting scripts or any other third-party tracker. We do not set cookies of our own, and no analytics script runs on the page — which is why the site needs no consent banner.

The site is served through Cloudflare’s network. Like any hosting provider, Cloudflare processes standard request metadata — IP address, user agent, timestamp and the page requested — in order to deliver and cache the page and to defend against abuse. That processing is governed by Cloudflare’s own privacy policy, not by this one, and Cloudflare retains it under its own retention rules.

Cloudflare also reports aggregate traffic statistics drawn from those same requests, which we can read in its dashboard: page views, bandwidth, referring sites, country and browser. Those are counts, not visitor records. They carry no IP addresses and no way to identify anyone, we cannot use them to follow an individual across visits, and we keep no other record of who visits this site.

External connections occur only in these cases:

• Downloading media from a URL you pasted. The request goes directly from your computer to the host platform. There is no middleman proxy and no central database recording what you download.
• Fetching metadata, subtitles or thumbnails required to complete that download.
• Checking for and downloading application updates from GitHub Releases (api.github.com and objects.githubusercontent.com). This means GitHub can see your IP address, and GitHub’s privacy policy applies to that request. You can disable update checks in the settings.
• Downloading an optional component that you explicitly requested — yt-dlp, FFmpeg or aria2. The file is fetched directly from that component’s official distribution, not from us. We are not involved in that transfer and cannot observe it.
• Resolving site-specific parsers, if you enable the optional component updater.

Some platforms require an authenticated session before they will serve a media stream. To support those sites, pvdownloader offers an optional cookie feature that is disabled by default and must be enabled explicitly in the settings.

When this feature is enabled:

• You supply the cookies yourself, as a standard Netscape-format cookies.txt file. There is no automatic harvesting of cookies from Chrome, Firefox or any other browser.
• The file is read from your local disk and stored locally. It is never uploaded to us — we have no server to upload it to.
• Cookie data is passed only to yt-dlp, and only for the specific request you initiated.
• Those cookies are sent only to the site you are downloading from, in order to authenticate your own request.
• Cookies are never sold, shared, aggregated, or sent to any third party or analytics service.

pvdownloader can write metadata into the media files it produces. This is off by default. If you enable it, fields such as the source URL, the video title, and the name of the channel or uploader (where available) are embedded into the output file. This happens locally on your machine; nothing is transmitted.

• Names, email addresses or any other personal identifiers.
• Your download history, search queries, or the URLs you paste.
• Advertising identifiers, device fingerprints or location data.
• Behavioural or product-analytics events of any kind.

Data protection laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA grant you rights of access, correction, deletion, restriction and portability over personal data held about you, along with the right to object to processing and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Because we do not collect or process any personal data, there is nothing for us to disclose, correct, export or erase. The data generated by the application lives on your device and is entirely under your control. We do not sell or share personal information, as those terms are defined by the CCPA.

pvdownloader is not directed at children under 13 (or under 16 in the European Economic Area). We do not knowingly collect information from anyone, and therefore from children in particular.

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date at the top of this page will change with it. Material changes will be noted in the release notes of the corresponding application version.

Questions or concerns about privacy can be sent to privacy@pvdownloader.com. Security-specific reports should go to security@pvdownloader.com.