Privacy Policy

Watchdarkly LLC, a Colorado limited liability company (“watchdarkly”, “we”, “us”), operates a horror motion-picture catalog at watchdarkly.com. This policy explains what data we collect, why we collect it, and the choices you have.

What we collect

Account data

Authentication is handled by Clerk. When you create an account we receive your email address, a Clerk-issued user ID, and any profile info you choose to add. We do not store passwords — Clerk handles that. See Clerk's privacy policy for details.

Activity you create

• Ratings and review text you submit on films.
• Helpful / unhelpful votes you cast on other reviews.
• Films you add to your watchlist or favorites, and your favorites ordering.
• Films you submit for catalog inclusion.

Usage signals

• Product analytics via PostHog: page-view and page-leave events, plus a small number of explicit click events on conversion surfaces (e.g. signup call-to-action buttons). PostHog assigns a persistent pseudonymous identifier stored in a first-party cookie so visits across sessions can be counted as one user. When you sign in, we associate that identifier with your account id and email address, so repeat visits can be recognized and internal traffic excluded from our analytics. It is never used for advertising. Requests are proxied through our own domain (/ingest) so blocking PostHog blocks all our analytics rather than only some of it. Click-tracking autocapture is disabled; the events we capture are only the ones we add explicitly in code. Session replay is described separately below.
• Session replay via PostHog, on a minority of sessions. Recording starts only if you click one of our call-to-action buttons. It then captures a reconstruction of that session: changing page content, clicks, scrolling and navigation, plus up to one minute of activity from immediately before that click. Sessions in which you never click one are not recorded at all. It is not video, and it captures nothing outside this site. Text you type into form fields, including passwords, is masked inside your browser before anything is sent. Because a recording reproduces the pages you were looking at, it can include your own ratings, watchlist or review text where those were on screen. Recordings are deleted after 30 days. We use them only to find where account creation and other flows are failing.
• Standard request logs (IP address, user agent, timestamp) retained for abuse-prevention and rate-limiting. These rotate out of our logs within 30 days.

What we do not collect

• We do not run third-party advertising trackers.
• We do not sell your data.
• We do not collect precise location data, biometric identifiers, or contact lists.

How we use it

• To operate the service: show your ratings, favorites, and watchlist back to you.
• To compute personalized recommendations. We build a 5-dimensional taste vector from your ratings and compare it against unrated films. The computation stays on our servers; we never expose another user's ratings to you.
• To rank reviews using a Bayesian helpfulness score (no profile data feeds this).
• To prevent abuse via per-account and per-IP rate limiting.
• To send transactional email (account changes, important service notices) via Resend. We do not send marketing email.

Who we share it with

We share data only with the subprocessors required to run the service:

• Clerk — authentication and account management.
• Vercel — frontend hosting and edge delivery.
• Railway — backend and PostgreSQL hosting.
• Resend — transactional email delivery.
• Sentry — error reporting (request URL, stack trace, user ID).
• PostHog (US Cloud) — product analytics and session replay. Receives the page-view, page-leave, and explicit click events described above, your account id and email address once you sign in, and session recordings for sessions in which a call-to-action was clicked. A recording can include ratings, watchlist contents or review text that were displayed on screen while it was running.
• Cloudflare — authoritative DNS for watchdarkly.com, Email Routing for our inbound mail aliases (support@, dmca@), and privacy-preserving page-view analytics. The analytics beacon uses no cookies, no persistent identifiers, and does no cross-site tracking.

Film metadata and poster art come from TMDB. Visiting watchdarkly does not send your personal data to TMDB; we fetch on the server and your browser only loads poster images from TMDB's CDN.

Your choices

Access & correction

You can edit your ratings, reviews, watchlist, and favorites from your account at any time. Reviews lock for 30 days after submission against score changes; review text remains editable.

Deletion

You may delete your account from the settings page or by emailing support@watchdarkly.com. Deletion removes your profile, ratings, reviews, watchlist, favorites, and vote history. We retain anonymized aggregate data (rating averages, helpfulness counts) so the catalog remains coherent.

GDPR / CCPA

If you are in the EEA, UK, or California, you have additional rights to access, port, correct, or delete the personal data we hold about you. Email support@watchdarkly.com and we will respond within 30 days.

Data retention

• Active account data: held while your account exists.
• Request logs: 30 days.
• Backup snapshots: 30 days.
• Sentry error data: 90 days.
• Deleted accounts: purged within 30 days of deletion request.

Children

watchdarkly is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe we have, email support@watchdarkly.com and we will delete the account.

Changes

We may update this policy. Material changes will be announced on the site for at least 14 days before they take effect.

Contact

Questions or requests: support@watchdarkly.com.