Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Cinephilers (“we”, “our”, “the app”) is an independent movie and TV tracking service available at cinephilers.app. If you have any questions about this policy, contact us at support@cinephilers.app.

2. What data we collect

• Account data: email address, username, display name, and password (stored as a hashed value — we never store your plain-text password).
• Profile data: avatar image, bio, country, favorite genres, and any preferences you choose to set.
• Time zone: read from your device so that days (Today’s Pick, your diary, the activity feed) start at your midnight rather than ours.
• Activity data: movies, shows and episodes you mark as watched, rewatches, ratings, reviews, watchlist entries, favorites, custom lists, and your daily picks.
• Social data: follow relationships, comments, likes, notifications, and people you block.
• Safety data: reports you make about other people’s content, and, if a moderator ever acts on your account, the action taken, the reason given, and how long it lasts.
• Usage data: basic server logs (IP address, request timestamps) used for security and debugging. We do not build advertising profiles.

3. How we use your data

• To provide and operate the Cinephilers service.
• To send account-related emails (email verification, password reset).
• To display your activity to people who follow you (based on your privacy settings).
• To improve the app and fix bugs.

We do not sell your data. We do not use your data for advertising.

4. Third-party services

We use the TMDB API (The Movie Database) to fetch movie and TV data. When you browse or search for titles, requests are made to TMDB on your behalf. See TMDB's Privacy Policy.

We use Neon (PostgreSQL) for database hosting. Your data is stored on servers in the EU (Frankfurt).

We also rely on a small number of infrastructure providers to run the service: Vercel (application hosting, server logs, and cookieless visitor analytics — aggregated page-view counts with no cookies and no cross-site tracking), Resend (sends account emails such as verification and password reset — they process your email address), Upstash (short-lived rate-limit counters keyed by IP address, expiring within minutes), and Sentry (error monitoring, which may include technical request details when something breaks). None of these providers use your data for anything other than operating Cinephilers.

5. Storage on your device

Cinephilers keeps a copy of your own library — your watchlist, ratings, watch history, and the movie and show details needed to display them — in your browser’s local storage. This is what lets your lists appear instantly instead of being fetched every time, and it is only ever your own data. It is never used to track you, and it is never shared with anyone.

We also set two cookies, access_token and refresh_token, which are what keep you signed in. They are strictly necessary for the service to work, so we do not ask for consent to set them. We use no advertising cookies and no tracking cookies of any kind.

Clearing your browser data removes this local copy. Nothing is lost — your account data lives on our servers and comes back the next time you sign in. You can also sign out, which deletes the cookies immediately.

6. Data retention

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. You can delete your account at any time in Settings → Manage Account, or email us at support@cinephilers.app and we will do it for you.

When you delete your account, your profile, ratings, reviews, watch history, watchlist, lists and follows are permanently removed from our live database straight away. Two things outlast it:

• A small security log. We record security-relevant events — password resets, account deletions, and actions taken by admins — along with the username and IP address involved. This is what lets us answer questions like “my account was deleted and it wasn't me”. We keep these entries only while there is a genuine security need for them.
• Database backups. Our database provider keeps encrypted backups so we can recover from a failure. Deleted data remains in those backups for a limited period until they roll over. We do not use backups for anything other than recovery.

7. Your rights

You have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Download a copy of your data in a portable format, at any time, from Settings → Data → Download your data.
• Request correction of inaccurate data.
• Request deletion of your account and data — you can do this yourself in Settings → Manage Account.
• Set your account to private, which hides your activity from non-followers.

To exercise these rights, email us at support@cinephilers.app.

8. Security

Passwords are hashed using bcrypt. All connections are encrypted via HTTPS. We apply rate limiting to sensitive endpoints (login, password reset) to protect against brute-force attacks. No system is perfectly secure — if you discover a vulnerability, please report it to us.

9. Children

Cinephilers is not intended for users under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Significant changes will be communicated via email or an in-app notice. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated.