What we collect
When you create an account: your email address, the display name you give, and, if you sign in with Google, the name, email address and profile picture Google returns. We never see your Google password.
What you fill in yourself: your username, and optionally a bio, location, website, avatar and profile banner.
What you do on the site: your ratings, reviews, diary entries, watchlist, likes, lists, comments, follows and notifications. Most of this is the point of the service, since a diary you cannot see is not a diary.
Technical data needed to serve the site: your session cookie, and the country your request appears to come from, taken from a header our CDN adds. We use that country only to decide which cinema listings to show you, and we do not store it.
What we do not collect
We do not run analytics, session recording, or any tracking script of our own. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising beyond what the advertising section below describes.
We never receive your payment details, because the service does not take payment.
Advertising
This site carries advertising from Google AdSense. That is the one third party whose code runs in your browser here, and it is how the site is paid for.
To show and measure ads, Google may read and write cookies in your browser and receive your IP address, the page you are on, and general information about your device. We do not send Google your name, your email address or your account activity, and Google does not receive anything that identifies you as a FirstCinema member.
Where the law requires your consent, we ask for it before any of that happens, using Google's consent tool. Until you agree, advertising cookies are switched off and any ads you see are non-personalised — chosen from the page you are reading rather than from anything about you.
You can change or withdraw that choice whenever you like, using the advertising-choices link in the footer of every page. Withdrawing is as easy as giving it, and nothing else about your account changes when you do.
Google's own account of what it does with this data is in its privacy policy and its advertising-technologies page. You can also turn off personalised advertising across every Google product at myadcenter.google.com, which is a setting on your Google account rather than one we control.
Why we are allowed to hold it
We process your account data to provide the service you asked for. That is the contractual basis under the GDPR.
We process your activity to build recommendations, and to keep the service secure and free of abuse, on the basis of our legitimate interest in running a working, non-hostile site. You can object to this; see "Your rights" below.
Advertising cookies are different: those we place only with your consent, which you give and withdraw through the advertising-choices link in the footer. Consent is the basis, so no legitimate interest is claimed over them and refusing costs you nothing but the personalisation.
What other people can see
Public by default: your username, avatar, banner, bio, location and website; your reviews, ratings, lists, comments, likes and follows; and the activity feed on your profile that describes them.
Never public: your email address, your sign-in details and your notification history.
A public profile is public to the internet, not only to members, and search engines can index it. Treat anything you write in a review or a list as something a stranger will read, because they can.
Who else processes it
We use a small number of providers to run the service, and they only ever process data on our instructions:
- Our hosting and database providers, which store everything above.
- Cloudflare, which serves the site, stores uploaded avatars and banners, and sends transactional email: sign-in, verification and password resets. It receives your email address.
- Google, in two separate roles: as a sign-in provider if and only if you choose to sign in with it, and as the advertising network described above, which is on every page whether or not you have an account.
Film metadata and images come from The Movie Database (TMDB) and IMDb. Those are sources we read from; we do not send them anything about you.
How long we keep it
Your account and its content stay until you delete them. Sessions expire on their own. Backups are kept on a rolling schedule and age out. What deletion destroys, and what it leaves behind with no name attached, is set out below.
Content removed by moderation is hidden from the site immediately but retained for a period so the decision can be reviewed or reversed.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself, from settings on the website or in the app. We ask you to type your username to confirm, because after thirty days it cannot be undone.
It happens in two stages. The moment you ask, your account is blanked and signed out everywhere: your username is replaced with a placeholder, and your display name, bio, avatar, banner, location and website come off every page. Nothing is destroyed at this point. If you sign back in within thirty days, all of it returns and the deletion is cancelled.
Thirty days later the purge runs, and that step is final. It destroys your sign-in credentials, your email address, your ratings, your diary entries, your watchlist and the films you marked as watched or liked, the lists you saved, who you followed and who you blocked, any reports you filed, your notifications and settings, your activity feed, and the model of your taste we had built for recommendations.
Your reviews, lists, comments and the likes you left on other people's work stay on the site, with nothing on them that says who wrote them. This is the one thing deletion does not remove, and it is deliberate: replies and other members' saved lists are built on that content, and taking it away would silently rewrite their pages.
Deletion cannot reach copies other people made either. A list someone copied to their own account is theirs from that point, and quoted text in someone else's comment stays where they wrote it. Backups age out on the ordinary schedule.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict what we do with it, or object to processing we base on legitimate interest. Write to us and we will act on it within one month.
If you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your local data protection authority. We would rather you came to us first, but the right is yours either way.
Children
FirstCinema is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes we update the date at the top of the page. For a change that materially affects your rights we will tell account holders by email or in the product before it takes effect.
Contact
For anything in this policy, including a request about your own data, the address is on our contact page.
Questions about this document go to our contact page, or straight to the support address.