Privacy

spooled is operated by Spooled Media, which is responsible for your personal data. Reach us about anything on this page at privacy@spooled.me.

Because you gave it to us:

- Your email address. It identifies your account and is where a sign-in link, a sign-in code or an address-change confirmation goes. - Your handle and display name. Both are public. A handle is derived from your email address the first time you sign in (the part before the @, with any +tag removed), and you can change it. - What Google or Apple tell us, if you sign in with them: your name, your email address and, from Google, your profile picture. If you use Apple's "Hide My Email", we receive a relay address instead of your real one. We never receive your contacts, friends list or password. - Anything you choose to add: a bio, a profile picture, a profile backdrop. - Your settings: whether your account is private, whether your activity is shown, who sees a new review by default, your theme, which catalogue you prefer, and whether swearing is hidden.

Because you used the product:

- Your log. Every film, show, season, episode or book you record, the day you say you watched or read it (or that you are not sure), the shelf you put it on, whether it was a rewatch or reread, the format (a paperback or an audiobook, say), and how far through something you are. Logs made before we removed star ratings still carry the star you gave them. - Your writing. Reviews, including anything behind a spoiler split, who each review is visible to, and your replies to other people. - Likes and reposts of other people's reviews. - Your lists, including Up Next, and whether each one is public. Lists you subscribe to or copy. - Who you follow, and who you have blocked. - Dates you put on your calendar in the app. - Files you import. If you upload a CSV export from Letterboxd, Goodreads, StoryGraph or a spreadsheet, we read it to create your logs, reviews and lists, and keep a record of each import and how each row was matched. - Reports you file. A report records who filed it and about what, so that ten taps from one person do not read as ten people. - Feedback you send, and a screenshot if you attach one. - Your daily puzzle results. If you play signed out, your round is kept in a cookie on your device instead; it is added to your account when you sign in.

Collected automatically:

- Your IP address, when you ask for a sign-in link or code. We count requests per address and per email address so nobody can flood an inbox or our mail provider; these counters are overwritten as each short time window passes. - Standard request logs kept by our hosting provider: IP address, browser type, the page requested and the time. - Your time-zone offset, so "today" in your diary and in the daily puzzle is your day rather than ours. - A push notification token, if you allow notifications in the app. It lets Apple deliver our notifications to your phone and identifies nothing else.

We do not ask for your real name, your date of birth, your location, or a payment card. Nothing on spooled costs money today.

- To run the product you signed up for — your diary, lists, profile, writing, notifications and settings. - To publish what you choose to make public, to the people your settings allow. - To order the feed and suggest things. We compare how you and other members shelved the same works to rank reviews in the Everyone and Following tabs, to suggest people, and to recommend films, shows and books. This is done automatically from what you have logged. The score it produces is never shown to anyone, you included, and every recommendation states why it was made. - To keep spooled usable. We limit how quickly an account can post, follow or send sign-in emails, refuse a small list of slurs and threats, and refuse a review that copies one you already published. When somebody reports content, we review it and may hide it or suspend or close the account involved. - To answer you, when you send feedback or email us.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not send marketing email, and we do not sell it.

The legal basis for each. Running the product, publishing what you make public, ordering the feed and making recommendations rest on our agreement with you (the Terms). Abuse prevention, security and request logs rest on our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe. Responding to legal requests rests on legal obligation. Push notifications and signing in with Google or Apple rest on your choice to turn them on.

This is the distinction worth reading twice, because it is the one people are usually surprised by on other sites.

- Public: your profile, your handle and display name, your bio and picture, your public reviews and replies, your public lists, and the films, shows and books you have logged. Anyone can see these without an account, and search engines can index them. - Private, always: your email address, Up Next, your calendar, your imports, your reports and your settings. These are never shown to anyone else, whatever your privacy setting says. - Private if you ask: - Turning on private mode in settings hides your profile, writing and lists from everyone but you, and keeps them out of search engines. - Each review can be Public, Public, not in the feed (on the work's page and your profile, but never pushed into anyone's feed), or Private (only you, in your diary). You choose a default in settings and can change any single review.

Blocking somebody hides your writing from them and theirs from you. It is a mute between two accounts, not a deletion — their writing still exists for everyone else.

A profile picture, or a screenshot attached to feedback, is stored in public file storage, which means anyone with the file's address can open it directly, even if your account is private. That is a property of how the images are served, not a setting, so treat an uploaded picture as public the moment you upload it.

Every cookie spooled sets is our own, and none of them tracks you across the internet:

- A session cookie, once you sign in, so the site knows it is you. Signing out clears it. - A theme cookie, remembering whether you chose light, dark or system. - A time-zone cookie, holding your offset from UTC. - A swearing cookie, if you choose to hide swearing. - A puzzle cookie, if you play the daily puzzle signed out. It expires after two days. - An invite cookie, if you arrive with an invite code.

Your browser and the app also keep a little state on your device — for instance a draft, or whether you dismissed a prompt — which never leaves it.

There is no advertising, no advertising network, and no third-party analytics on spooled. Nobody is measuring you here on somebody else's behalf. Because we do not track you across other sites, there is nothing for a browser's "Do Not Track" signal to switch off.

We use a small number of services to run spooled. They process data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own:

- Vercel — hosting, request logs, and storage for profile pictures and feedback screenshots. - Neon — the database everything above is stored in. - Resend — sends sign-in links, sign-in codes and address-change emails. It sees your email address. - Google and Apple — only if you choose to sign in with them, and only to confirm who you are. Apple also delivers the app's push notifications. - GitHub — our issue tracker. A report or a piece of feedback becomes an issue there, carrying your handle, what you wrote, the page it was about and any screenshot. The repository is private.

Film, television and book information comes from third parties, and that flows one way: we fetch catalogue data from them and send them nothing about you. The one exception is artwork. Posters, stills and covers load directly from The Movie Database's and Open Library's image servers, so your browser's request — including your IP address — reaches them the way it would on any site that shows their images. See Legal for who they are.

We may disclose data if the law requires it, and if spooled is ever sold or merged, your data would move with it under this policy. If we are ever required to hand something over by law, we will say so publicly unless we are prohibited from doing that.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Our database and hosting are in the eastern United States, and each provider above may process data in the United States. If you are in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, your data is transferred there under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and its UK Extension, and, where a provider relies on them, the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

- Your account and everything in it stays until you delete it. - Sign-in links expire quickly and are single-use. Sign-in codes expire after ten minutes. - Sign-in rate counters are overwritten as each short window passes. - Request logs are kept by our hosting provider for one day. - When you delete your account, it is removed from the live database at once, together with your log, writing, lists, follows, notifications and profile picture. A few things outlive it for a while: - the database's point-in-time history, for up to six hours; - issues opened from your reports or feedback, and any screenshot you attached, which we delete on request; - copies of your public pages that a search engine has already cached, until it next visits.

Depending on where you live you may have rights to see, correct, export or delete your data, to restrict or object to how it is handled, and to complain to a data protection authority. We will honour those requests regardless of where you live, because drawing that line by geography would be a strange thing to do.

- Correct it: most of it is editable in settings right now. - Limit who sees it: private mode, per-review visibility and blocking are all in your hands, and take effect immediately. - Export it: a self-service export is not switched on yet. Until it is, email us and we will send your data to you. It is free and will stay free. - Delete it: go to Settings → Privacy, on the web or in the app, and delete your account. It is immediate and cannot be undone. If you created your account with Apple in the app, deleting it from the app also revokes spooled's access to your Apple ID. You can also email privacy@spooled.me from the address on your account. - Anything else, including a copy of what we hold about you: email us. We will reply within one month.

spooled is not intended for children under 13, and under 16 in the UK and the EEA. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has an account here, email us and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing the page and moving the date.

Questions about any of this: privacy@spooled.me.