Privacy policy

Movie Grip is a viewing diary and physical-media catalogue for iOS. This policy explains exactly what the app stores, where it goes, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read rather than to be survived.

The short version: there is no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no third-party tracking in this app. Your viewing history is not a product.

Who is responsible

Movie Grip is an independently operated app. The operator is the data controller for everything described here, and can be reached at privacy@moviegrip.ca.

What the app stores

Your account

To sign in you provide an email address, a username and a password. Passwords are never stored as text — they are hashed with bcrypt, and the original cannot be recovered from what is stored. You can optionally add a display name, a short bio and a profile picture.

What you put in the app

Everything the app is for is stored against your account:

What	Details kept
Diary entries	The title, the date you watched it, an optional rating out of five, anything you wrote, where you watched it, whether it was a rewatch, and any tags
Collection items	Format, condition, region, purchase date and price, where the item is kept, whether it is a special edition, a barcode if you entered one, and your notes
Watchlist	The titles, your priority and ordering, and any notes
Watched and liked titles	The title and the date you marked it
Lists	The list name and description, the titles in it, their order, your notes, and whether you marked the list public
Loans	The borrower’s name, the date lent, the date due back, and your notes

Ratings, reviews and notes are free text. Whatever you type is stored as typed.

A note about loans

Loan records contain somebody else’s name because that is the point of them. Please keep them to what you need in order to get your disc back — a first name is usually enough. Do not store other people’s contact details, addresses or anything sensitive in a notes field.

Technical records

Signing in creates a session record holding a refresh token and its expiry, so you are not asked to log in constantly. Signing out invalidates it.

The server keeps operational logs of requests made to it. These can include your IP address, the time of the request and which endpoint was called. They exist to diagnose faults and to spot abuse, they are not used to build a profile of you, and they are not combined with your diary.

What the app does not do

• There is no analytics or telemetry SDK in the app.
• There is no crash-reporting service.
• There is no advertising, and no advertising identifier is read.
• Your data is not sold, rented, or shared for anyone’s marketing.
• Your location is not collected. Where you watched something is a text field you fill in yourself, not a GPS reading.
• Your contacts, photo library, calendar and microphone are not read. Choosing a profile picture hands over only the image you picked.

Who else is involved

The Movie Database (TMDB). Film and television details, posters and search results come from TMDB. Those lookups are made by our server, not by your phone, so TMDB receives a request from the server and does not see your IP address, your account, or which titles belong to you. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

The server host. The app’s API and database run on a virtual server rented from DigitalOcean. They host the machine; they are not given access to your account, and they do not process your data for their own purposes.

Apple. The app is distributed through the App Store and TestFlight. Apple handles the download and any purchase, under Apple’s privacy policy. The app does not send Apple your diary.

Nothing is shared with anyone else, except where the law genuinely requires it.

This website

The page you are reading is a static site. It has no cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels and no embedded third-party content — the typefaces are served from this domain rather than from a font service. Visiting it tells nobody anything. The web server records ordinary access logs, as above.

How long things are kept

Your account and its contents are kept until you delete them — either in the app or by asking. Operational logs are short-lived and are rotated out in the normal course of running the server. Expired sessions are discarded.

Your choices

You can edit or delete any individual entry, collection item, list or loan from inside the app at any time, and deleting it removes it from the database.

Deleting your account

You can delete your whole account from inside the app, without asking anyone: open Profile, scroll to the bottom, and choose Delete account. You confirm with your password, and that is the end of it.

Deleting your account removes your profile and, with it, every diary entry, collection item, loan, watchlist entry, list, and everything you marked watched or liked. Your profile picture is deleted from the server as well.

This is immediate and permanent. Nothing is retained in a disabled state, there is no grace period in which it could be restored, and support cannot bring it back afterwards. If you want to keep your records, ask for a copy first.

Asking by email

Write to privacy@moviegrip.ca and you can:

• get a copy of everything stored against your account;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your account, if you would rather not do it in the app or no longer have access to it.

Requests are answered within 30 days. If you are in the UK or EU, these are your rights under the GDPR; in Canada, under PIPEDA. Either way you are welcome to them, and you do not have to cite a law to ask.

Children

Movie Grip is not directed at children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has made an account, write to the address above and it will be removed.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything material will be called out in the app before it takes effect. Past versions are in the project’s public source history.

Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@moviegrip.ca Everything else: support@moviegrip.ca