Privacy

Effective 21 August 2026

Matinee is a personal journal for the films you watch. It keeps what you write so it survives a new phone, and shows parts of it to friends you have deliberately added. It does not advertise to you, does not track you, and has nothing to sell.

What Matinee keeps

Your account

When you first open the app it creates an anonymous account — a random identifier and nothing else — so your journal can be saved without you handing over anything. You can use Matinee this way indefinitely.

If you sign in, Matinee stores the email address you give it, or, with Sign in with Apple, the identifier Apple provides. If you choose Apple's Hide My Email, Matinee only ever sees the relay address, never your real one.

Your journal

• The films you log, with the date, the time of day, your score, and anything you write about them.
• Venues you create — the name, any address you type, and the map coordinates that address resolves to.
• Your watchlists, including lists you share with friends.
• Your display name and profile photo, and any photo you set on a venue, if you add them.
• Who your friends are, and the invitation links you generate.

What Matinee never does

• No advertising and no analytics. There is no advertising network, no tracking SDK, and no profile of your behaviour. Nothing is sold or shared with data brokers.
• It never asks for your location. Matinee has no access to where your phone is. Map coordinates come from the address you type or the theater you pick from a search — never from the device.
• It reads only the photos you pick. Choosing a picture uses Apple's system photo picker, which hands the app that one image. Matinee cannot see the rest of your library.
• It does not read your contacts, calendar, microphone or camera.

Who else can see it

Friends you have added

Adding a friend is mutual: someone scans or opens your invitation, and you confirm it. Once you are connected, a friend can see your display name and photo. If you tag them on a film you watched together, a copy of that screening appears in their journal, and each of you can see the other's score and note for that film. A list you share is visible to everyone on it. Nothing else in your journal is ever visible to anyone.

Removing a friend cuts that off in both directions.

The services Matinee runs on

• Supabase — the database, sign-in, and file storage behind the app. Your journal lives on their servers, in the United States.
• Resend — delivers the six-digit sign-in codes, so it handles your email address when a code is sent.
• Apple — Sign in with Apple, if you use it. Separately, when you type a theater's name, that text is sent to Apple Maps to find the place.
• TMDB — the film database. Searches are made by Matinee's own server, so TMDB is not told who searched. Posters and cast photos, however, are loaded directly by your phone from TMDB's image servers, which means those servers see your device's IP address, as any website you visit would.

That is the complete list. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Erasing it

Open Account in the app and choose Delete this account. That erases your journal, your venues, your lists, your photos and your profile, permanently and immediately. There is no waiting period and no reactivation.

Two things deliberately outlive it, and both belong to someone else:

• A friend's own copy of a film you watched together is their entry, with their score and their words. It stays in their journal — they simply no longer see your face on it.
• A shared list you started passes to whoever else is on it, rather than vanishing from their app. A list nobody else is on is deleted with everything else.

Sign-in emails already sent sit in your own inbox, and in delivery logs at Resend, for a short period afterwards. Signing out, by contrast, erases nothing — it only leaves your journal on the account it belongs to.

Keeping it safe

Traffic between the app and its server is encrypted. Every table is protected by row-level security, so one account cannot read another's rows even if it asks — friends' shared entries and shared lists are the only exceptions, and only for the people involved. No one operating Matinee reads your journal in the ordinary course of things.

Matinee is a small personal project, not a company with an operations team. There is no export feature yet, so if something in your journal is precious to you, it is worth keeping your own note of it too.

Children

Matinee is not directed at children under 13, and is not designed to collect anything from them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the revised version appears on this page with a new date at the top. Anything that materially changes what is collected or who can see it will be said plainly in the app as well.

Questions

Write to hello@matineejournal.com.