Privacy Policy

In short

TV Catch is a personal show-tracking app. It holds the shows you follow and the episodes you have marked watched, so it can tell you what to watch next.

There are no ads, no analytics, and no third-party trackers. Nothing is sold or shared for advertising. You can export everything, at any time, from your Profile.

What is stored

Tied to your account:

• Your username, display name, and a bcrypt hash of your password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from the hash.
• Your settings: profile visibility (private by default), colour theme, language, and your shareable invite code.
• Your tracking activity: the shows and movies you follow, which episodes you have marked watched and when, and which titles you flagged as favourites or archived.
• Your friendships: pending and accepted friend requests between you and other accounts.
• If you upload a TV Time export: the shows, episodes and watch dates contained in that file.
• If you turn on notifications: a push subscription for that device, which is the address the browser gives us to deliver notifications to, plus its encryption keys. Turning notifications off deletes it.

What is not collected

No advertising or analytics SDKs are present in the app. There is no location tracking, no contact-list access, no device fingerprinting, and no cross-site tracking. The app asks for no device permissions other than the notification permission you can grant or refuse.

Cookies

Only functional cookies, all first-party:

• session: keeps you signed in for 30 days. HTTP-only, so page scripts cannot read it.
• tvc-lang and tvc-theme: remember your language and colour theme.
• admin_session: only ever set on operator accounts, never on user accounts.

Who else sees your data

The service runs on infrastructure operated by others, and one feature reaches a third party directly:

• Vercel hosts the app and processes requests. Its server logs include IP addresses, as with any website.
• Neon hosts the database that stores everything listed above.
• TVmaze supplies show and episode information. Posters and episode images load into your browser directly from TVmaze's servers, which means TVmaze receives your IP address and browser user-agent when a page shows artwork. This happens whether or not you have an account.
• If you enable notifications, the push service built into your browser or phone (Google, Apple or Mozilla, depending on the device) delivers them. It sees the delivery address and the encrypted message.

What other users can see

New profiles are private by default. A private profile is not listed in the Friends directory, and only accepted friends can open it and see its shows and statistics.

Making your profile public lists it in the Friends directory along with your episode count, hours watched and recently watched shows.

One thing applies to everyone, public or private: on a show's page, signed-in users can see who else on this instance follows that show, by display name and username. This is how people find each other here. It does not reveal anything else about a private profile, but if you would rather not appear there, do not follow that show.

Getting your data out, and deleting it

Your Profile has an Export button that downloads your entire history as a JSON file, including per-episode watch dates. It is the same format the importer accepts, so you can take it elsewhere.

To delete your account, open your Profile and choose Delete my account. You will be asked for your password, and the deletion happens immediately. It removes your account, your follows and watch history, your movies, your friendships and your push subscriptions. It cannot be undone, so export first if you want to keep a copy.

If you cannot sign in, email [email protected] from an address we can reply to, saying which username to remove. Requests made that way are carried out within 30 days.

Signing out everywhere is available on your Profile at any time and immediately invalidates every session on every device.

How long data is kept

Account and tracking data is kept until you ask for deletion. This is a tracker, so its value is the history it accumulates. Push subscriptions are deleted as soon as you disable notifications, or automatically once the push service reports the device as gone.

Security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Sessions are signed tokens that can be revoked from your Profile. Traffic is served over HTTPS. No system is perfect, and this is a small personal project rather than an audited commercial service, so please use a password you do not reuse anywhere else.

Children

TV Catch is not directed at children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to the address below and it will be removed.

Changes

If what the app collects changes, this page changes with it and the date below is updated. Material changes will be announced in the app.

Contact

Questions, data requests and deletions: [email protected]