What is PeerTube?

mascot

PeerTube is a self hosted federated (ActivityPub) video streaming platform using P2P directly in the web browser.

It is a free and open-source software, under the AGPLv3 licence.

For more information, please visit joinpeertube.org.

P2P & Privacy

PeerTube uses the BitTorrent protocol to share bandwidth between users. This implies that your IP address is stored in the instance's BitTorrent tracker as long as you download or watch the video.

What are the consequences?

In theory, someone with enough technical skills could create a script that tracks which IP is downloading which video. In practice, this is much more difficult because:

The worst-case scenario of an average person spying on their friends is quite unlikely. There are much more effective ways to get that kind of information.

How does PeerTube compare with YouTube?

The threats to privacy in YouTube are different from PeerTube's. In YouTube's case, the platform gathers a huge amount of your personal information (not only your IP) to analyze them and track you. Moreover, YouTube is owned by Google/Alphabet, a company that tracks you across many websites (via AdSense or Google Analytics).

What can I do to limit the exposure of my IP address?

Your IP address is public so every time you consult a website, there is a number of actors (in addition to the final website) seeing your IP in their connection logs: ISP/routers/trackers/CDN and more. PeerTube is transparent about it: we warn you that if you want to keep your IP private, you must use a VPN or Tor Browser. Thinking that removing P2P from PeerTube will give you back anonymity doesn't make sense.

What will be done to mitigate this problem?

PeerTube is in its early stages, and want to deliver the best countermeasures possible by the time the stable is released. In the meantime, we want to test different ideas related to this issue: