Privacy policy

Movie Club is a film club site at movieclub.party, run by the person who operates that domain. We are the data controller for everything described here. Reach us at [email protected].

Your account:

• A username and a display name, both chosen by you, and an avatar image if you set one.
• A password, stored only as a scrypt hash. We never hold the password itself and cannot read it or tell you what it was.
• A recovery code, also stored only as a hash, for the same reason. Nobody here can look yours up.
• No email address is required to sign up, and we do not ask for one. If you choose to sign in with Discord instead, we store the account identifier Discord gives us, and whatever name, avatar and email address it sends with it.
• The dates your account was created and your password last changed.

What you do in a club:

• Which clubs you are in, and whether you run any of them.
• Films you put forward, films you were recommended, and films you recommended.
• Watches recorded against you: the film, the date you watched it, whether it was on time, and whether it was a rewatch.
• Your rating and review of a film, when your Letterboxd entry carries one, along with a link to that entry.
• Anything you write in a club discussion.
• Points you have scored, and any adjustment an admin has made along with the reason they gave for it.

If you link Letterboxd:

• Your Letterboxd username, and the date it was verified.
• Entries from your public diary. We keep a short-lived copy of your recent entries so that checking two films in one sitting does not mean reading your diary twice, and we keep the details of entries that matched a film your club was watching.
• A taste profile, built from the same reads. Every check returns your last fifty diary entries; we count what each one was and keep the counts, so this ends up saying things like “twenty-three horror films, mostly from the 1990s”. It is totals only: the entries themselves are discarded, and nothing anywhere records that you watched a particular film on a particular evening unless it was one of your club's. It decides the points for watching outside your usual type, and it is shown on your profile page to people you share a club with. Unlinking Letterboxd deletes it.

Technical:

• Failed sign-in and recovery attempts against a username, so that guessing at a password can be slowed down. These are kept briefly and then age out.
• A record of when you asked us to check your diary, which is what enforces the limit on how often that can happen.
• Ordinary web server logs, which may include your IP address and browser user agent. These are short-lived and used for keeping the site running and secure.

• No analytics. There is no tracking script on this site, no pixel and no third-party measurement of any kind.
• No advertising cookies. We do not currently serve advertising. If that changes, this policy and the cookie policy will be updated first, and anything that needs your consent will ask for it before it runs.
• We do not sell your data, or share it for anyone else's marketing.
• We do not profile you or make automated decisions with a legal or similarly significant effect on you. The points and the wheel decide nothing outside the game itself.

Under UK and EU data protection law, our lawful bases are:

• Performing our contract with you. Running your account and your club is the thing you signed up for, and it cannot be done without the account and club data above.
• Legitimate interests. Keeping the site up and secure, limiting how fast somebody can guess at passwords, and dealing with abuse. We think these are uncontroversial and none of them involves building a profile of you.
• Consent. Linking a Letterboxd account is entirely optional and is consent to read the public diary of the account you name. You can unlink it at any time.

Other people using the site:

• People in your club see what you put forward, what you watched, when, your rating and review once the week's ratings open, your points, and anything you post in a discussion.
• Your profile page is visible to people you share a club with. Somebody with no club in common sees your name and nothing else.
• The signed-in dashboard shows films other clubs have picked and how those films were rated across the site. This is aggregated and never attributed: it names no club and no member, an average is only shown once at least two different people have rated a film, and ratings only appear after the week they came from has finished and its ratings have opened to that club.

Other companies:

• Letterboxd. We request public pages from Letterboxd from our own server. Your browser is not involved and Letterboxd does not receive your IP address through us. Our requests identify this site so a human at their end can see who is asking.
• TMDB, and IMDb as a fallback. When you search for a film, the text you typed is sent to a film database to find matches. Nothing about you is sent with it.
• Discord. Only if you use it: signing in with Discord, or being in a club whose admin has set up a Discord webhook, in which case what that club is watching is posted to that channel.
• Our hosting. Whoever provides the server and network this runs on necessarily handles traffic to it.

We will also disclose information where the law requires it, or to protect the site and its members from harm.

Data is stored on servers in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area. Some of the companies above are outside that area, and any transfer to them relies on the safeguards in the law, such as standard contractual clauses.

We keep your account and club activity for as long as your account exists. Security records like failed sign-in attempts and diary check attempts are kept only as long as the limits that use them need, which is hours, not years. Delete your account and the account and its activity go with it.

You can ask us to:

• Give you a copy of what we hold about you, in a portable form.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Delete your account and everything attached to it.
• Stop or restrict a particular use of it, or object to one.
• Withdraw consent, such as by unlinking Letterboxd, at any time.

Most of this you can do yourself from your account page, including changing your details, unlinking Letterboxd, and deleting the account outright. Deletion there is immediate and needs no request to us. For anything else, or if you signed in with Discord and so have no password to confirm with, email [email protected]. We aim to answer within a few days and the law gives us a month.

Two things a deletion does not do. A club you run carries on without you if anybody else is in it, because the club belongs to its members and not to whoever started it: it passes to another admin, or if there is none, the members get a week to vote on who takes over. A club you were alone in is deleted with you. And where an admin adjusted somebody else's points and gave a reason, that club keeps the record of the adjustment, with your name removed from it.

If you think we have got something wrong and we have not put it right, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, or to the equivalent authority where you live. We would rather you told us first.

This site is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly hold data about them. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us at [email protected] and we will remove it.

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change is significant, such as introducing advertising, we will make it obvious in the site itself rather than quietly editing this page.

Privacy questions and requests: [email protected]. Anything else: [email protected].