Privacy
The short version: we keep what the site needs to run your wheels and games. Other members see your nickname, never your email. There are no ads and no advertising trackers, we don't sell anything about you, and you can delete your account from your profile at any time.
Who we are
The Movie Wheel (themoviewheel.com) is a free, non-commercial site for picking movies with friends, run by one person, called "the site admin" below. Questions about this page go to the address under Contact.
What we keep
- Your account. Your email address and how you sign in (Google, Discord, or email and password). If you use Google, Google shares your name, email address and profile picture with us. If you use Discord, Discord shares your Discord id, username, display name and email address.
- Your profile. Your nickname, the photo you upload (shrunk to a small square), your signature, crowned favorites and any Letterboxd lists you link.
- What you do here. The wheels you're in, the movies you add and pick, ratings, reviews, notes, your watchlist, who was watching a movie night (and who left early), movie requests, daily game scores and streaks, Fright Fight votes, and the bug reports, feature ideas and reports you send.
- Your tickets. Your ticket balance, what you've bought at Concessions and switched on (your ride, wheel theme and looks), the perks you hold, your Bet the reel bets, and a short log of how your tickets changed and why. Tickets aren't money and can't be bought or cashed out.
- Error reports. When something on the site breaks, your browser sends what went wrong, which page you were on and what kind of browser it was, linked to your account, so we can fix it.
- Safety records. People you block, reports about you or your posts, and bans from a wheel.
Who can see it
- People in your wheels see your nickname, photo, picks, ratings, reviews, notes and scores, whether you're watching a movie night, your Bet the reel bets, and your ticket balance and what you've switched on from Concessions (your car in the drive-in lot, your name colour, frame and card).
- Other signed-in members can see your profile card (nickname, photo, favorites, scores).
- Only the site admin sees email addresses, reports and requests to join the site. A request to join a wheel, and the note you add to it, goes to that wheel's hosts. Hosts of a wheel see the people in it by nickname, not by email.
- Discord. If a wheel's host connects Discord, that wheel's alerts post to their Discord server: for example "Now watching", with the picker's nickname and the nicknames of who's watching, and the wheel's status in the bot's commands.
- If you block someone, their reviews, notes, photo and lists are hidden from you.
Services we use
The site runs on these services, which handle your data only to provide their part:
- Google Firebase: sign-in and the database where everything above is stored.
- Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise (through Firebase App Check): looks at signals from your browser to tell people from bots. Google's privacy policy applies to it.
- Cloudflare: hosts the site and its small server functions. Like any web host it sees your IP address when you visit. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page visits without cookies and without identifying you.
- Google Fonts: the site's fonts load from Google, which sees your IP address.
- DiceBear: draws the default avatar for anyone without a photo. It receives your account id (a random code, not your name or email).
- YouTube: trailers play in YouTube's player, under Google's privacy policy.
- Your browser's push service (Google, Apple or Mozilla): if you turn on notifications, alerts travel through it, encrypted so it can't read them.
- TMDB and OMDb: movie search, posters and ratings. They receive the movie titles you look up, not who you are.
- Letterboxd: when you link a public list, we read that list.
- Discord: only for wheels whose host connected it (see above).
Their servers may be outside your country.
On your device
The site uses your browser's local storage to remember things like your last tab, game progress and settings. There are no advertising cookies and no tracking across other sites; the only analytics is Cloudflare's cookie-free visit count. reCAPTCHA may set its own cookies to do its job.
What we don't do
We don't sell or rent your data, show ads, or share your data with anyone beyond the services listed above, unless the law requires it.
Deleting your data
Go to your profile and choose Delete my account. Your sign-in, profile, nickname, photo, signature, Letterboxd lists, favorites, likes, watchlist, your movies on every wheel you're still on, your stats, your tickets and everything you got at Concessions, your personal wheel and everything on it, notification settings, a linked Discord account, and the bug reports, ideas, reports and invites you sent are deleted for good.
What stays: your ratings and reviews of movies the wheel picked, your daily game scores and your Spooky Lab and Fright Fight votes, so other people's stats don't change. They show as "Former member", though the stored copies still carry the nickname you had. Movies you added to a wheel you were removed from stay until that wheel's host clears them. Reports about you and error reports stay with the site admin. If you own a wheel, you can hand it to another member first.
We keep weekly backup copies of the site's data for up to 8 weeks, so deleted data can stay in a backup that long before it's gone for good. Backups are only used to repair the site.
You can also ask the site admin to see, correct or delete what we keep about you: email [email protected].
Kids
The Movie Wheel isn't for anyone under 13, and we don't knowingly keep data about children under 13. If you think a child has signed up, tell us and we'll delete the account.
Changes
If this page changes in a way that matters, we'll say so on the site. The date at the top shows the latest version.
Contact
Questions: [email protected]. Privacy and data requests (see, correct or delete what we keep): [email protected].