Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 10, 2026
Who is responsible
WatchTrail (https://watchtrail.app) is a free TV show and movie tracking service published by Alex Godard, a private individual (non-professional publisher), who decides how the data described here is used. Contact for any question or request: contact@watchtrail.app. See also the legal notice.
What we process, why, and for how long
Your account
Email address, password (hashed, never readable, by our authentication provider). With Google, X or Apple: the name, email and picture that service sends us.
Why: to sign you in. Legal basis: performing the service you ask for. Kept until the account is deleted.
Your tracking and your profile
Shows, episodes and movies you check, ratings, reviews, comments, reactions, votes, lists, badges, game results, Advent calendar boxes, shows you unfollowed (kept to give them back if you follow them again), username, display name, picture, bio, the members you follow, blocks.
Your profile, library and activity are public by default, like on Letterboxd: this is stated at sign-up, and the "private profile" mode in settings hides your profile and removes your activity from the feed and leaderboards. Your comments, votes and likes stay visible where you left them.
Legal basis: performing the service. Kept until the account is deleted.
Notifications
In the site: deleted 90 days after being read; the others, until the account is deleted. By email and push: every type is on by default (new episode of a show whose bell you turned on, a movie from your list arriving on your platforms, a cancelled show, social activity…); you set each type and each channel in Settings → Notifications, and every email has an unsubscribe link.
After you sign up, up to three welcome emails (the next day, at three days and at seven days), each one only if you haven't yet done what it suggests: picking your shows, checking off a saga, playing the daily challenge. We keep the date of each one, so it is never sent twice, until the account is deleted. The unsubscribe link in each of them stops all our emails. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in helping you discover the service you just joined.
For push, we keep the technical address given by your browser or phone, until you turn notifications off or the service reports it expired. Legal basis: performing the service; for push, the permission you give your browser.
Weekly email
Your email and language, only if you sign up and confirm. Legal basis: your consent. Kept until you unsubscribe (one click in every email); a sign-up that is never confirmed is deleted after 30 days.
Audience measurement (PostHog)
Only if you accept it in the banner: until you answer, no measurement script is loaded. Measured: page views (address without its parameters), clicks (without the text or field contents), device type. If you are signed in, it is linked to your account by a technical ID, never your email or username.
Recording of your visit (since October 10, 2026): what is shown on screen, your scrolling and your clicks are recorded so we can replay a visit and spot where the site is hard to use. What is shown can include your library or profile if you are signed in. Everything you type into a field is masked before it is sent, neither the console nor network traffic is recorded, and search as well as the settings, calendar and import pages are never recorded.
Legal basis: your consent, which you can withdraw at the bottom of this page. If you accepted before October 10, 2026, that consent did not cover recording: the banner asks you again. Retention: PostHog keeps events for at least a year and visit recordings for 30 days; deleting your account does not erase them automatically, write to us and we will.
Where you came from
The source of your first visit (search engine, social network, shared link, landing page), saved in your profile at sign-up, only if you accepted audience measurement. And, if you answer it, the optional "how did you hear about us?" question. Legal basis: your consent. Kept until the account is deleted.
Without that consent, a single piece of information: the page of the site from which you opened the sign-up page (an article, for instance), taken from that page's address when your account is created, without storing anything on your device. It tells us which pages make people want to sign up. Legal basis: our legitimate interest. Kept until the account is deleted.
With no identity data and regardless of the banner, we count sign-ups and completed imports (date, file format, numbers of episodes and movies).
Security and moderation
Reports (with a copy of the reported text, so it can be judged even if it changes), hidden content, anti-abuse limits (number of actions per account or IP address, counted as a hashed fingerprint, never the address or account in clear, and deleted after 8 days). Legal basis: our legitimate interest in protecting the service and its members. A closed report is deleted after one year (365 days).
The host also keeps technical logs (IP address, requested page), for a short period it sets.
AI features
The episode quiz and "What to watch?" send Anthropic titles and summaries of works (for "What to watch?", titles taken from your watchlist), without your identity. Translating a comment would send the comment's text; it is part of a paid plan that is not open yet.
We use no data for advertising and sell none. No precise geolocation: your country, derived from your IP address, is only used to show streaming platforms in your region.
Cookies and storage in your browser
Always present, because they are needed: the session cookie (sign-in), your language preference, your choice in the measurement banner, and the pages the app keeps to work offline (cleared at sign-out and account deletion).
Only if you accept audience measurement: PostHog's cookies and the source of your first visit. Refusing or withdrawing your consent deletes them.
No advertising cookies, no cross-site trackers.
Who else has access
Providers working for us, each for its own role:
— Supabase: database, accounts, files (profile pictures). Data stored in Ireland (European Union).
— Vercel: hosting; pages are rendered in Paris. US company.
— Resend: email delivery, from Ireland, with no open or click tracking. US company.
— PostHog: audience measurement and visit recording, servers in the European Union, only if you accepted it. A data processing agreement (GDPR Article 28) has been signed with PostHog since October 2, 2026.
— Anthropic: the AI features above, without your identity. US company.
— Google, X, Apple: only if you sign in with them; and your browser's or phone's notification services (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple) if you turn push on.
Your browser also contacts TMDB (posters and images) and Giphy (GIFs in comments; your search words go through our servers, without your identity) directly: they see your IP address, under their own rules.
When an anti-bot check is shown (sign-in, sign-up, sending a link by email), your browser contacts Cloudflare Turnstile (Cloudflare, a US company): it sees your IP address and technical information about your browser, just long enough to check that a person is behind the screen. It protects our sign-in emails against automated sending.
WatchTrail has accounts on Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook. When you view them, the platform processes your data under its own rules; we only get overall statistics from them (views, followers, clicks), never your identity or your list. Links to the site only carry the name of the platform the visit comes from (the utm_source parameter), read only if you accept audience measurement. No button or tracker from these networks is loaded on the site.
For our articles we sometimes publish community statistics: always aggregated, never below three members, never naming a private profile.
Transfers outside the European Union
Vercel, Resend and Anthropic are US companies. Vercel participates in the EU–US Data Privacy Framework; Supabase, a Singapore company, provides the European Commission's standard contractual clauses for any transfer it makes. For the others, the safeguards are those in their terms of service. TMDB, Giphy, Cloudflare, Google, X and Apple only receive data because your browser contacts them or because you choose to sign in with them.
Your rights
At any time you can access your data, correct it, take it with you, have it erased, object to or restrict a processing, and withdraw a consent.
— Take your data: Settings → Export my data. You get a ZIP file with everything linked to your account, table by table, your profile picture, and your history in a re-importable format.
— Delete your account: Settings → Delete my account. It is immediate and permanent: your account and everything linked to it are erased, along with your profile picture, your weekly email subscription (for the account's email) and the notifications your actions had sent to other members. Only community universes you may have created remain, without your name, and the PostHog measurement history, which we erase on request.
— Without access to your account, or for any other right: write from your account's address to contact@watchtrail.app. Answer within one month.
If you believe your rights are not respected, you can lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority (www.cnil.fr).
Minors
WatchTrail is open to everyone: there is no minimum age, and we never ask for your age.
— If you are under 15 and live in France: audience measurement only starts with your consent, and the law requires that consent to be given together with one of your parents. Without their agreement, choose "Decline": the site works exactly the same.
— WatchTrail is not designed for children under 13 and asks them for nothing more than any other member.
— The episode quiz and "What to watch?" are written by an AI instructed to stay suitable for all ages, and the "For the family" mood only suggests titles rated for all audiences. The catalog itself also contains adult works, like any movie and TV database.
— A parent can write to contact@watchtrail.app to have their child's account and all its data deleted.
Actors, directors and other public figures
Person pages (actors, directors, writers) show what the public TMDB database publishes about their work: name, photo, biography, date and place of birth, filmography.
— Why: to inform about works and the people who make them, like any film database. Legal basis: legitimate interest in informing the public about people with a public activity.
— What we do with it: nothing but display it. This information is not stored in our database; it is read from TMDB and cached for 24 hours at most.
— Correct or remove: errors are fixed at the source, on TMDB. A person concerned can also write to contact@watchtrail.app to ask for their page to be removed.
Security
Encrypted connections (HTTPS), hashed passwords, and in the database each member can only reach their own private data. The database is backed up before every update of the site.