Privacy Policy for CouchCinema

In short

You sign in with your account at The Movie Database (TMDB), where your ratings and watchlist live. For the community features, CouchCinema mirrors them to a server. Your ratings and profile are visible to other signed-in users. The app contains no ads. Usage statistics run only if you agree. You can delete your account in the app at any time.

1. Controller

2. Sign-in and film data through TMDB

CouchCinema uses the interface of The Movie Database (TMDB, Inc., USA). Films, shows, images and recommendations come from there; TMDB receives your IP address for technical reasons. With your TMDB account, the app reads and writes your ratings and watchlist at your request. Your TMDB account is covered by theTMDB privacy policy.

The app passes your TMDB password only to TMDB. The TMDB session id stays in your device's protected storage. At sign-in, my server uses it once to check that the account is yours and does not store it. CouchCinema does not ask for an email address of its own. You can use the app as a guest without an account; no profile is then created on the server in section 3.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (providing the app).

3. Profile, ratings and community through Supabase

For signed-in accounts, CouchCinema stores data in a database at Supabase (Supabase, Inc., USA; server location: Ireland):

• profile: TMDB account number, username, avatar, language and region;
• who you follow and who follows you;
• ratings, watchlist and recommendations for films, shows and episodes;
• activity such as new ratings that appears in the community;
• your choices in Tonight, namely which titles you swiped away with "Not for me" or added to your watchlist from there.

Visibility: other signed-in users can see your profile, ratings and activity; aggregated community statistics are also derived from them. Your Tonight choices are visible only to your own account.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR. The data stays stored until you delete your account (section 8).

4. Data on your device

Your settings, chosen streaming services, filters and cached lists and images stay on your device, among other things. If Android backup to your Google account is on, Android may include app data in it; Google processes this under its own responsibility according to theGoogle privacy policy.

5. Optional usage statistics

Only if you agree in the app does CouchCinema send events to a self-hosted Umami installation on my server at Hetzner Online GmbH (server location: Germany, Nuremberg). It sends the name of the event, such as "title rated" or "card swiped", simple details such as media type and rating, and a random id for this installation. It does not send your username, your TMDB account number, search terms or the advertising id.

The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, § 25(1) TDDDG). You can withdraw it at any time in the app's profile; the random id is then deleted.

6. Error reports through Sentry

If the app crashes or an error occurs, a technical report goes to Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., USA; data storage location: Germany). It contains details of the error, the device and the app version. The app deliberately leaves out default personal details such as the user's IP address. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in a stable app).

7. Other services and links

For trailers, the app loads preview images from YouTube (Google), which receives your IP address. Trailers, IMDb and social networks open only when you tap them. When sharing, you choose the target app yourself. CouchCinema is installed through Google Play; Google processes data about your account and device under its own responsibility, and I receive only aggregated numbers and technical crash reports from it. The app contains no ads.

8. Deleting your account and data

You can delete your account yourself in the app's profile. This removes your profile, ratings, relationships, activity and Tonight choices from the server in section 3. Your TMDB account is not affected; you manage it directly at TMDB. You remove data on the device by uninstalling the app.

9. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right at any time to

• access the data stored about you (Art. 15),
• rectification of incorrect data (Art. 16),
• erasure (Art. 17),
• restriction of processing (Art. 18),
• data portability (Art. 20),
• object to processing based on a legitimate interest (Art. 21).

You can withdraw consent at any time with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)). Contact me informally at kontakt@schweizerlelab.de. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection authority (Art. 77 GDPR); mine is the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision.

10. Changes to this policy

I update this policy when the app's data processing changes, for example through new features. The date of the last review is at the end of this page.