Privacy policy

Last updated: 11 October 2026

Couchtab turns your phone into a remote for Chrome on your computer. It has two parts: the Couchtab extension in Chrome, and the Couchtab web app on your phone (app.couchtab.com). This page says what data they handle, where it goes, and who can read it.

In short

• What the extension shows on your phone (your tabs, what is playing, the page you are reading) goes only to the phones you paired with it, end-to-end encrypted.
• Couchtab has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Nothing is sold or shared.
• Our server only passes encrypted messages between your computer and your phone. It can't read them and stores none of them.

What the extension handles

To show and control your browser from your phone, the extension reads, in the Chrome window you are using:

• the tabs: their titles, addresses and icons, and whether they play sound;
• what plays in a tab: the title, artist, artwork and position of the media, and on YouTube the video, its playlist or suggested videos, and its chapters;
• the page you control: its scroll position, zoom, headings (for Contents), and for a PDF its page, page count and bookmarks.

It sends this to your paired phones, and it carries out what you do on the phone (switch, scroll, play, pause, zoom, close a tab). It does not read form fields, passwords, cookies or your browsing history, and it does not record anything you type.

When you open a PDF in the Couchtab reader, the extension downloads that PDF from its website itself, the same way Chrome would, to display it. The PDF goes nowhere else.

Where it goes

• Directly over your network. When it can, your phone and computer connect directly to each other (WebRTC, encrypted with DTLS). To find that connection, both ask a STUN server run by Cloudflare for their public network address; you can turn this off with "Local network only" in the phone app.
• Through our relay. To set up the direct connection, and when it can't be made, messages go through our relay at app.couchtab.com, which runs on Cloudflare Workers. Every message is encrypted with AES-GCM using a key from the pairing code, which never reaches the server: it lives in the QR code and in the part of the link after #, which browsers don't send to servers. The relay sees only that a computer and its phones are connected, when, how much they send, and their IP addresses. It keeps no messages and no logs of them.

What is stored, and where

• In Chrome (the extension's own storage): the pairing code, the server address, and your settings: which sites and PDFs you darkened, and whether PDFs open in the Couchtab reader. Removing the extension deletes them.
• On the phone (the web app's storage in your browser): the pairing code and your settings. Clearing the site's data deletes them. A photo of the pairing code is read on the phone and is not uploaded.
• On our server: nothing. A connection exists only while it is open.

"New pairing code" on the extension's setup page makes a new code; phones paired with the old one lose access at once.

Other services your phone contacts

To show tab icons and artwork, the phone app loads them from the addresses Chrome gives for them (the website, or YouTube's image server for video thumbnails). Those sites see your phone's IP address, as they would if you opened them yourself.

This website

couchtab.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics or third-party scripts; its fonts and images come from couchtab.com itself.

Service providers

This website, the web app and the relay run on Cloudflare, which processes network data such as IP addresses to deliver and protect the service, under the Cloudflare privacy policy.

Children

Couchtab is not directed at children and collects no information about anyone.

Changes

If this policy changes, this page will show the new version and its date.

Contact

Questions about privacy: use the developer contact on Couchtab's Chrome Web Store page.