Privacy

Last updated 4 Nov 2026, for Radif 0.5.4

I don't run a server for Radif, and the app has no analytics, telemetry or crash reporting. Nothing about you or what you play is sent to me. The app does talk to the services below, and it keeps some data on your Mac. All of this comes from the source code, so you can check it.

What goes over the network

• Google and YouTube. You sign in on Google's own page in a window inside the app. Radif has no code that reads your password; it keeps the cookies Google sets. Those cookies sign its requests to YouTube Music for your library, search, likes, playlists and lyrics, and they go to yt-dlp, which fetches the audio and video. A hidden window stays signed in to music.youtube.com to keep the session fresh. Thumbnails load from Google's image hosts. Google's privacy policy covers what it does with this.
• Lyrics. When a track starts, its title and artist go to LRCLIB, Musixmatch and Genius, whether or not the lyrics panel is open. LRCLIB also gets the album and duration. A track looked up in the last hour is not looked up again. Musixmatch gets a token it issued to the app, not tied to your account. No Google account details go to any of them.
• Apple. The artist and title of the current track go to the iTunes Search API to look for higher-resolution cover art, and the art loads from Apple's image servers.
• GitHub. About 5 seconds after launch the app checks GitHub for a new version of itself. It also downloads yt-dlp from GitHub and checks for a new yt-dlp every 3 days. GitHub sees your IP address on these requests. These are the only requests that reach anything of mine, and all I can see is GitHub's download counts.

Only if you turn them on

• Last.fm (off by default). What you play and, if you turn on love sync, what you like go to your Last.fm account. One exception: scrobbles still queued from an offline session are sent at the next launch, even if you have disconnected Last.fm since.
• Discord (off by default). The current track goes to the Discord app on your Mac, and Discord shows it on your profile.
• Casting. Radif looks for Chromecast devices on your local network with an mDNS query. While you cast, the device gets the track's title, artist, duration and artwork link, and a small server on your Mac is reachable on that network so the device can fetch the audio. The device loads the artwork itself from the image host. The server shuts down when the cast ends.

Coming, not in 0.5.4

An open change would tell YouTube when you listen to a track, so plays reach your watch history. It is not in any release. If it ships, this page changes with it.

What stays on your Mac

• Your session cookies. They are stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM), but the key sits in a file next to them, readable only by your macOS user. The encryption won't stop other software running as you.
• Other copies of that session. A plain-text copy for yt-dlp, readable only by your macOS user, and the cookies macOS's web view keeps in its own storage for the sign-in and hidden windows. Signing out deletes both, along with the rest of what the web view stores for Google and YouTube. Starting Radif while signed out clears what older versions left behind. A download still running when you sign out can write the yt-dlp copy back, and that copy goes the next time Radif starts. The web view's storage is shared between accounts, so signing out of one ends the web view session of any other account you added, and that account will need signing in again once its saved cookies stop working. Signing out in Radif does not sign you out of Google either. To end the session everywhere, use your Google account.
• Your name, email and avatar from your Google account, for the account switcher.
• Cached audio, video and cover art for what you play. You can clear them in Settings. The optional auto-clean only removes audio and video that aren't in your library and aren't playing, and it leaves cover art alone.
• Your library and recommendations. Home recommendations, playlists, liked songs and library tracks are cached so the app opens fast, including music you haven't played.
• Settings, search history, the queue and fetched lyrics. If you connect Last.fm, this includes its session key, unencrypted, and a queue of scrobbles waiting to be sent.
• A log file in ~/Library/Logs. It is never sent anywhere. It holds track ids, errors and timing, and after you cast, the stream link with your Mac's local address and its access token. It rolls over at launch once it passes about 5 MB, so a long session can grow it further. If you attach it to a bug report, read it first.

Removing it

To remove the app and most of its data, run brew uninstall --zap --cask radif. That leaves a few things to delete by hand: the cache folder, if you moved it in Settings; yt-dlp's own cache in ~/.cache/yt-dlp; and, if you upgraded from an older YTubic build, its old app folders and Keychain item. Anything the services above already received is theirs to handle.

This website

This page is on my personal site, which uses Google Analytics and Vercel Analytics. They run on the website only, not in the app.

Contact

Questions go in a GitHub issue. See also the terms.