Privacy policy

The short version

FolderVideoPlayer collects nothing, sends nothing, and has no servers of its own. It talks to one thing: the file share on your own network that you point it at. Nothing you do in it reaches the developer or anybody else.

In the app there are no accounts, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no third-party services beyond the few connections listed under Network use. The Mac app's optional AI features run on your own Mac — see The AI features.

This policy is about the app. This website is separate: it uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, a cookieless, privacy-respecting counter, to see which pages people visit — see “About this website” below. It does not track you across sites and stores no personal information.

What is stored on your Apple TV

• The name you tag under, so your tags can be told apart from another person's on the same share.
• An identifier for this Apple TV, generated on the device the first time it is needed. It is a random string — not a hardware serial or an advertising identifier — and it exists so that two devices writing tags to the same share do not overwrite each other's files.
• Your playback preferences — the play order you last chose.
• Where you stopped watching, so the app can offer to carry on: the folder and file you were playing and how far into it you were.
• The connections you save, including the username and password for each share, kept in the system Keychain rather than in ordinary storage.

All of this stays on the Apple TV. Removing the app removes it.

What is written to your own share

If you use tagging, the app writes to a folder named .FolderVideoPlayer on the share you connect to:

• Your tags, as a JSON file named after you (earlier versions kept one per device).
• Poster frames it has generated for videos, so the same still does not have to be made again on another device.
• From the Mac app, for a profile kept on the share: the people you have named (each face's fingerprint and a small thumbnail), the transcripts of that share's videos, and the facts read off its files — dates, camera, quality and places — so your other Macs can use them.

That share is yours. The app is a guest on it, and what it writes there is readable, movable and deletable by you like any other file. This is also how tags made on your Mac appear on your Apple TV and the other way round — through your own share, not through anything of the developer's.

Network use

In normal use the app makes only these two kinds of network connection, both on your own local network:

• SMB to the file share you have named, to list folders and read video.
• Bonjour discovery to find file shares on your local network, so you can pick one from a list instead of typing an address.

The Mac app makes a few further connections:

• AI model downloads, only when you turn on an AI feature in Settings → AI: that feature's model files, from a public GitHub address (speech transcription comes from Hugging Face). It is a plain file download — no account, no identifier, nothing about your library is sent with it, and once the files are on your Mac the feature never connects again.
• Check for Updates, only when you choose it: the app asks GitHub for the latest release and, if you install it, downloads it from there. It never checks on its own.
• Place names, only when you turn on city or country names (they are off by default): for clips that carry a GPS location, the coordinates are sent to Apple's location service, which returns the city and country. Nothing else about the video goes with them.
• Share…, when you use it, hands a video to AirDrop, Messages, Mail or whatever you pick, as any Mac app does.

It makes no other connections. It does not phone home, and does not contact any analytics or advertising service. Apart from a video you choose to share, it never sends your video, your tags, or your file names anywhere off your network.

The AI features

The Mac app's optional AI — suggested tags, look-alikes, face recognition, speech transcription, and the safe/not-safe verdict — runs entirely on your Mac, through Apple's Core ML. Your videos, the frames it reads from them, the tags you accept or reject, the marks you make and the people you name are all worked out locally and stored under the app's own folder — and, for a profile kept on a share, in that profile's folder on your own share. None of it is uploaded, none of it is shared with the developer or anyone else, and no model leaves the computer it was downloaded to. Face recognition is off until you switch it on, and videos you have hidden are excluded from everything the AI does.

Children

The app collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

Third-party code

Video shares are read using SMBClient, an open-source implementation of the SMB protocol under the MIT licence. It is a protocol library running on your device; it transmits nothing to its authors or to anyone else. Its licence is reproduced inside the app under Settings → Acknowledgements.

About this website

This website (foldervideoplayer.tangrick.com) uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views — which pages are visited, roughly from where, and on what kind of device. Cloudflare Web Analytics is cookieless: it sets no cookies, uses no fingerprinting, and does not identify individual visitors or track them across sites. The counts are aggregate and are used only to understand what people find useful on the site. Nothing about your videos, your tags or your file names is involved — the app never talks to this website or to Cloudflare.

The support form on this website sends what you type — and any screenshots you attach — to the developer by email, through the transactional email service Brevo, and Cloudflare Turnstile checks that the sender is a person rather than a bot. Screenshots are resized in your own browser before they are sent, which also removes any location data the original file carried. Your message is used only to answer you; it is not added to any mailing list.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the new version replaces this page, with the date above updated.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be raised at richardtang@me.com.