What you're trusting GroupHug with

Cloudflare R2. R2 is Cloudflare's S3-compatible object storage, distributed across data centers worldwide. When you upload from your phone, the file goes straight to R2. When your TV plays it back, R2 serves it from the region closest to the TV.

Every file is encrypted at rest. The connection to R2 is HTTPS both ways.

Supabase. That's Postgres, hosted on AWS in the United States. It holds your email, your profile, the metadata for each video (title, who can see it, when it was added), and the membership list for each family circle. Encrypted at rest, with daily backups and seven days of point-in-time recovery.

• TLS 1.3 between your phone, your TV, and the server
• Server-side encryption at rest in Cloudflare R2
• Encryption at rest in Supabase
• No video frame is ever transmitted or stored unencrypted

Magic link. You type your email, you click the link, you're in. No password to store, because there isn't one. Sessions live in a cookie scoped to grouphug.tv. The Roku channel uses a six-digit pairing code that resolves to a session on the TV, so you sign in once on your phone and the TV remembers.

Your family circle. Nobody else.

The database enforces this at the row level. Every read query runs through a Postgres row-level-security policy that checks the requesting user against the circle membership table. There is no admin override that lets anyone casually browse your videos. The only time a video crosses that boundary is for a support ticket you've sent, or a legal request GroupHug is required by law to respond to.

Every video on GroupHug ends up as H.264 MP4. The same format your phone records, the same format YouTube serves, the same format every TV and laptop made in the last decade can play.

No proprietary container. No GroupHug-only player needed. If you ever walk away, you don't need GroupHug to watch what you took with you.

Every original you post stays downloadable — the same file that went in, from the video's own page, onto your machine. One at a time rather than all at once. The originals are yours, whether you keep paying or not.

This is the Always yours promise. If GroupHug ever stops operating — by choice, by accident, or by the operator getting hit by a bus — registered Circle owners get ninety days of email warning, then twelve months of read-only access while they export. The Roku channel keeps streaming what's already in your library during that window. Your originals stay downloadable the entire time.

• No ads. The product is the product. There is no ad slot to fill.
• No AI training on your video. GroupHug doesn't train models on your content, and doesn't let third parties do it either.
• No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Segment, no Pixel.
• No tracking across other sites. Nothing in GroupHug follows you anywhere else.
• No selling your data. There's nothing to sell.

GroupHug is run by Dave Phillips, a sole proprietor in British Columbia, Canada. One-person company. Paying subscribers fund the servers. No investors, no quarterly growth targets. The business stays healthy by serving the families that pay for it, not by squeezing more attention out of them.

Contact: [email protected] with any technical question this page didn't answer.