Privacy policy

Who this policy covers

This policy explains how Vlad Radu, the operator responsible for Flixby, handles personal information when you use flixby.app. Flixby is operated from the United States. It covers guest use, accounts, and support requests.

Information we use

• Account information. Email addresses, account and sign-in provider identifiers, and the name on your account with your chosen sign-in provider and, with Google, your Google profile photo, which is shown on your Flixby profile unless you upload your own (see “Your photo” below). Google sign-in requests basic identity, email, and profile access; it does not request your Gmail messages, contacts, or Google Drive files. Flixby does not receive your Google password.
• Your name. When you create an email account, you give your name and, if you like, what Flixby should call you. With Google sign-in, Flixby uses the name on your Google account instead. It is saved with your Flixby profile, used only to greet you and show on your account, and you can change it in My account. It is shown only to you, and to other people only as described in “Friends and your profile page” below. It is not included in the anonymous taste summaries on the evaluation dashboard.
• Passwords. If you choose a password, it is sent securely to our authentication provider, Supabase, which stores only a one-way hash of it. Flixby never stores your password and cannot see it afterwards.
• Your movie profile. TV shows are handled exactly like films: wherever this policy says films or movies, it covers the shows you swipe, save, rate, watch or add to lists too. Onboarding answers, preferences, passes, saved films, Tonight queue, Maybe list, watched history, ratings, reviews, your own lists, films or people you asked never to see, your streaming services, and feedback, along with settings and update timestamps. Signed-in profiles are stored in the cloud to support access across devices. Guest profiles are stored in the browser.
• Recommendation activity. When “Help improve recommendations” is enabled for a signed-in account, we record movie impressions and actions, ratings, movie identifiers and genres, recommendation scores and versions, timestamps, and related viewing context. These records are associated with your account. Review text is not included in these activity events; reviews are still stored as part of your profile.
• Requests and support. Movie search criteria and what you type or say to Flixby in chat, and information you send us by email.
• Feedback you send. When you use “Send feedback”, we keep your message, the kind you picked (a problem, an idea or something else), the page and screen you were on, your window size, your appearance setting, the Flixby version and your browser’s description (its user agent), together with your account and email address if you are signed in, so we can reply. It is stored on our servers and emailed to the operator. If you delete your account, your feedback is kept without your account or email address.
• Problem reports. When something goes wrong, Flixby records what failed so it can be fixed: for the server, the address that failed and the error; in your browser, errors from Flixby’s own code, with the page, the Flixby version and your browser’s description. Problem reports are not linked to your account and do not include your name, email, or profile. Repeats of the same problem are grouped and counted. The operator is emailed when a new problem appears. Please avoid including sensitive personal information in searches, chat messages or reviews.
• Saved search scores. For mood searches such as “feel-good rom coms”, Flixby saves how well each film fits that search, together with the search’s genres and moods or, when there are none, its wording, so the same search is quicker for everyone. These scores are not linked to your account or to any person.
• Technical information. Sign-in sessions, verification challenges, and security and service records. Hosting and authentication providers may process IP addresses, browser information, request details, and logs. Flixby uses hashed email and IP information for sign-in rate limiting.

Why we use it

We use this information to authenticate you, link sign-in methods, save and sync your collections, personalize movie recommendations, deliver sign-in emails, respond to requests, prevent abuse, and maintain the service. Optional recommendation activity helps us evaluate and improve ranking quality in a private operator dashboard. The same activity is also counted into overall usage totals there (how many people are active each day, how many come back after 1, 7 and 30 days, swipes per day, and how many saved films later get watched), which never list individual accounts. An operator-only tuning page also replays opted-in accounts’ swipe and rating decisions, under pseudonymous codes and without names, emails, reviews or lists, to test whether changed engine settings would recommend better. For accounts with “Help improve recommendations” enabled, the dashboard also shows a per-account taste summary under a pseudonymous code instead of your name or email: activity counts, average rating, favourite and least-liked genres, and a short automatic description of your movie taste. It does not show review text or try to guess personal characteristics such as age or gender. Authorized operational access may also be needed for support and troubleshooting.

Recommendations use preferences and movie characteristics to estimate taste matches. Scores are heuristic estimates, not calibrated probabilities or guaranteed predictions of what you will enjoy.

Where applicable law requires a legal basis, we rely on providing the service you request, legitimate interests in operating and securing it, consent where required for optional processing, and legal obligations. You can withdraw optional participation through the controls below.

Services that process information

We use service providers to operate Flixby:

• Cloudflare provides hosting and cloud storage for profiles, recommendation activity, and service operations. Cloud data is stored in the United States.
• Supabase handles email, password and Google authentication. Inworld turns microphone recordings into text and creates Flixby’s voice when you chat with Flixby by voice, and its language model helps read chat messages and rate how well films fit a mood search (see “Talking to Flixby”). Resend delivers verification emails and processes recipient addresses and email delivery information. It also delivers feedback, reports about other people, and problem alerts to the operator’s email; those emails contain what is described above.
• Google processes sign-in when you choose Google, under its own privacy policy.
• TMDB provides movie discovery and metadata. Search criteria are sent to TMDB; loading its posters connects your browser to its image service.
• YouTube provides trailers when you choose to play them. External links, such as IMDb and TMDB, take you to services with their own privacy practices.
• Google Fonts supplies fonts loaded by your browser. If you choose voice input, your browser’s speech-recognition service may process audio; Flixby uses the resulting text and does not store an audio recording.

These providers may process information in countries other than where you live. Flixby’s cloud data is stored in the United States; if you use Flixby from the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, your information is transferred there under the safeguards our providers offer for such transfers, such as the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. Their services and applicable privacy terms govern their own processing. We may also disclose information when legally required or reasonably necessary to protect users and the service. Flixby does not sell personal information or use it for targeted advertising.

Learning on your device

Flixby is testing a small learning model that runs in your browser and learns from your swipes and ratings. It is saved only on your device, per account, and does not change your recommendations yet. When “Help improve recommendations” is on, each recorded action includes the model’s 0–100 guess and how many examples it has learned from, so we can check whether it predicts your choices better than the current engine. Each recorded action also includes a list of numbers describing the film (its genres, themes and similar details in coded form), which says nothing about you beyond the action itself. Your device’s model is never uploaded. From time to time we train one shared starting model on everyone’s recorded actions and publish it with the site, so new devices start with better guesses; it contains only learned numbers, never anyone’s records, and is published only once enough different people are behind it. “Sign out and remove my data from this device” deletes your device’s model.

Talking to Flixby

If you use the microphone in the chat with Flixby, your recording is sent to our voice provider, Inworld, to turn it into text, and Flixby’s spoken replies are made by Inworld from the words shown on screen. Flixby does not keep your recordings, and Inworld does not keep them or use them to train its models. Inworld’s service can estimate things like age or emotion from a voice; Flixby discards those and never stores or uses them. You can always type instead, and the Mute button turns Flixby’s voice off on that device.

When Flixby can’t tell from the words alone what a chat message means, the message’s text is sent to Inworld’s language model, which only picks what kind of message it is (a film request, small talk, or a genre); it never writes Flixby’s replies. For mood searches, the search’s words and the candidate films’ titles, years, genres and plot summaries are sent to Inworld to rate how well each film fits. Your name, email and profile are never sent. Flixby’s server logs record only which way such a check went, never your message.

Your daily smart lists are chosen the same way: once a day Flixby sends Inworld the names of a few possible lists and a short summary of what you’ve liked lately (film titles and years, favourite genres, themes and directors) so its language model can pick the lists you’d enjoy most. Each list’s candidate films (titles, years, genres and plot summaries) are sent to rate how well they fit the list; those ratings are kept and shared across everyone, without any link to you. Your name, email and account are never sent.

When you add a taste tag Flixby doesn’t have (in Your taste on your profile), the words you typed are sent to Cloudflare’s text model and to Inworld’s language model, which only pick the closest tags Flixby already has. The words and the tags found are kept in Flixby’s cache for up to 30 days so the same words are matched once, with nothing that says who typed them. The tags you choose are saved in your profile like the rest of your taste.

In Find a film, when it isn’t clear whether you are typing a person’s name or a title, or you describe a kind of film rather than a title (“something scary”), the words you typed and the names and titles found are sent to Inworld’s language model to choose what to show first or which films fit. The answer is cached for up to 7 days with nothing that says who typed it.

Importing from Letterboxd or IMDb

If you import an export file from Letterboxd or IMDb, the file is read in your browser and is never uploaded or kept by Flixby. Only film titles, years and IMDb identifiers are sent to Flixby’s server to find each film on TMDB. The films you have rated, watched or saved there are then added to your Flixby profile like any other rating or saved film; review text in the file is not imported. Imported films are not recorded as recommendation activity.

Your country and language

When you open Flixby, our hosting provider (Cloudflare) tells us which country your connection comes from. Flixby uses only that country code, together with your browser’s language settings, to suggest films in your language and to pick your where-to-watch country. It is kept on your device, not stored on our servers, and we do not use precise location.

Where to watch

Streaming information comes from TMDB and JustWatch. If you choose your streaming services and country, they are saved with your Flixby profile so Discover can show films you can watch; they are not shared with those services. Until you choose a country, Flixby uses the country your connection comes from.

Friends and your profile page

You can choose a handle (such as @moviefan), which gives you a profile page at flixby.app/u/your-handle. Choosing a handle is optional, and nothing below happens until you do. Your handle, whether your page is public, and your friendships are stored with your account on our servers.

• Who can see your page. Your friends can always see it. Other people signed in to Flixby can see it only if you turn on “Public profile”, which is off by default. Anyone signed in who knows your handle can see your handle, your name and your photo, even when your page is not public.
• What your page shows. Your name (what you asked Flixby to call you), your photo (one you uploaded, or your Google photo) if you have one, your taste line, when you joined, your achievements, how many films you have watched and rated, your Top 5 films of all time if you picked them, the films you watched from Tonight, Saved for later or one of your lists (with the stars you gave them then, and the list’s name only if that list is published), and the lists you published to your wall.
• What it never shows. Your email address, account identifiers, your swipes (films you saved, added to Tonight, passed on or put in Maybe), films you marked as seen without planning them, ratings on their own, how many films you saved, lists you have not published, your reviews’ text, or anything about your recommendation activity.
• Friends. A friendship needs both people: one sends a request and the other accepts, or one opens the other’s invite link and confirms. Either of you can remove it at any time. Friends see each other’s walls in the Feed, which is read live from each profile; nothing is copied, so what you remove or unpublish disappears from your friends’ Feed at once.
• Movie night. You can start a movie night with a friend: you both swipe the same films, yes or no, and a film you both say yes to is a match. To build that shared deck without sharing your taste, your device ranks a set of films with your own taste and sends us only each film’s place in that ranking (leaving out films you have watched, passed on or chosen never to see). We store that ranking, the mood you picked, your yes and no answers, the films you both said yes to (Shared movies) and when each of you last had the movie night open, so the other person can see that you are there. Your friend never sees your answers or your ranking, only the films you both said yes to; Shared movies is visible only to the two of you. Movie night answers are not used for your own recommendations. If one of you picks a match for tonight, it is added to both of your Tonight lists. Starting fresh deletes the earlier answers and rankings; leaving a movie night deletes it but keeps Shared movies; removing or blocking the friend, or deleting either account, deletes all of it.
• Your photo. You can upload your own profile photo from your profile page. Your browser crops it to a square and makes a small copy before it is sent, which also drops details stored inside the original file, such as where it was taken or which camera was used. The copy is stored on our servers under a random address and shown wherever your profile photo appears: on your profile page, to your friends, and in their Feed. Anyone who has that address can open the photo. Choosing a new photo deletes the old one, and you can remove it at any time.
• Blocking. You can block someone from their profile page. Blocking ends any friendship or request between you; after that, neither of you can add the other or see the other’s profile page, and to them your handle looks as though it doesn’t exist. They are not told. You can unblock them from Friends.
• Reporting. You can report someone from their profile page. Your report (the reason and any note), your handle, their handle, and a copy of what their profile showed at that moment (their name, photo address, taste line and published list names) are stored on our servers and emailed to the operator, who reviews it and may remove content or accounts that break the rules. The person you report is not told who reported them.
• Deleting your account removes your handle, your profile page, your uploaded photo, every friendship, movie night, friend request and block, and reports made about you. Reports you made are kept so they can still be dealt with, but without your account.

Apps you connect (API keys)

You can let an app read and change your lists by making an API key in Settings → Apps & API. A key works only for your account and only for what you allowed when you made it: seeing your lists and the films on them (always), changing them, and publishing them to your profile wall. It never gives access to your email, sign-in, saved films, Tonight, Watched, ratings, reviews, passes, Maybe, friends or recommendation activity.

The app is run by whoever made it, not by Flixby. Once it has read your lists, what it does with that copy is up to its maker and their own privacy terms, so only connect apps you trust. Flixby keeps each key’s name, permissions, when it was made and last used, and a scrambled form of the key itself (never the key in readable form). Revoking a key in Settings stops it at once; deleting your account deletes all your keys. Requests made with a key count toward its usage limits; we keep those counters only until the limit window ends.

List links. If you switch on List links in Settings → Apps & API, each of your lists, plus Saved and Tonight, gets a private web address that apps such as Radarr and Sonarr can read. A link shows only the film and show ids on that one list (no names, email or anything else from your profile), and anyone who has it can read that list, so give it only to apps you trust. Flixby keeps the secret part of the links so it can show them to you again, and when they were last used. Reset links makes new ones and the old ones stop working; switching List links off or deleting your account deletes them. To give Sonarr the ids it needs, Flixby looks up and keeps the TVDB and IMDb ids of shows on your lists; that table holds show ids only, nothing about you.

Sharing links

When you share a film or a list, Flixby makes a link that contains only the film, or the list’s name and its films. Nothing is published or stored on our servers, and the link never includes your name, email or other parts of your profile. (Your profile page, if you set one up, is covered separately above.) Anyone with the link can see what it contains; people who open a shared list get their own copy, not access to yours.

Cookies and browser storage

Flixby uses session cookies for sign-in and browser storage for guest and account profiles, appearance preferences, temporary filters, pending changes, and retry queues. Browser copies and conflict backups help protect unsynced changes. Signing out does not erase all locally stored data. Clearing Flixby’s site data in your browser removes local copies but may lose unsynced changes and does not delete cloud data.

Flixby does not currently use advertising cookies. Embedded content and external services may use their own storage when you interact with them.

Your controls and deletion

• Optional activity: in Europe (the EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland and other European countries), “Help improve recommendations” starts off and Flixby asks you once whether to turn it on; nothing is recorded unless you say yes. Elsewhere it starts on. Flixby works the same either way. You can change it any time: open My account → Privacy & data and turn off “Help improve recommendations” to stop future recommendation-event submission and remove your account from the per-account taste summaries. This does not erase previous events or stop the profile syncing needed for your account.
• Export: “Download my profile” saves a copy of your movie profile. This is not an export of all authentication or operational records.
• Delete my account: in My account → Privacy & data. This deletes your sign-in (your email login, password and any linked Google login at our authentication provider), your cloud movie profile and lists, your uploaded photo, your handle and every friendship, movie night, friend request and block, your API keys and list links, your recommendation events, and every sign-in session, so you are signed out on all devices. It does not remove a separate guest profile in your browser or copies kept in other browsers you used; clear Flixby’s site data there to remove them. Earlier activity already folded into the shared starting model described above cannot be separated out, since that model holds only learned numbers.
• Other privacy requests: email flixby.admin@gmail.com to request access, correction, deletion, or other assistance. We may need to verify account ownership before acting. You can also revoke Google access in your Google account settings; this does not itself delete your Flixby data.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of personal information, restrict or object to processing, withdraw consent, or complain to your local privacy authority. Contact us to exercise applicable rights.

Retention and security

Cloud profiles and recommendation events do not currently have an automatic age-based deletion schedule. They are retained to provide your account and recommendation features until you delete them or request removal, subject to applicable legal or security needs. Sign-in sessions and verification challenges have limited validity. The operator also makes regular database backups so that no one loses their data. Each backup copy is deleted after at most 30 days, so data you delete is gone from these copies within 30 days. Provider logs and backups follow the relevant provider’s own retention.

We use safeguards including encrypted connections, restricted account access, and session protections. No online service or storage system can guarantee absolute security. Keep access to your email and sign-in accounts secure.

Children

Flixby is not intended for anyone under 16, or anyone below the minimum age required to use the service in their location. We do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has provided personal information, contact us so we can investigate and remove it as appropriate.

Policy updates

We will update the date on this page when this policy changes. For material changes, we will provide a prominent notice in the service or another appropriate notice, and obtain consent where required.

Contact

Flixby is operated personally by Vlad Radu. For questions, privacy requests, or support, email flixby.admin@gmail.com.