Privacy Notice

Our aim is to walk you through how Fermented Pickles handles personal information so that, by the end, you know what we hold, why we hold it, who else sees it, and what you can do about any of it. It applies to the Fermented Pickles website and any related services that link back here (together, the “Fermented Pickles Services”). Using any of those means you accept what’s described below.

We’ve ordered the sections so the most important things come first, and the legal scaffolding comes later. If you want the short version, the next section is for you. If you want the full picture, keep reading top to bottom.

Information arrives in two ways. Knowing which is which makes the rest of this notice easier to follow.

1. Things you hand to us. Whenever you sign up, set up a profile, log a film, rate a show, write a personal note, send someone a recommendation, or build a Toplist, the content of that interaction is recorded. Nothing in this category is collected silently — you’re typing it, choosing it, or attaching it. You’re free to leave fields blank or hold things back, but features that depend on the missing information won’t be available.
2. Things your device communicates as you use us. As soon as your browser talks to ours, technical signals begin flowing in: an IP address, the pages you visit, how long you spent there, whether something failed to load. This is normal for any modern online service, and the appendix breaks it down. We don’t capture it for its own sake — every piece is feeding one of the purposes listed in the next section.

We do not receive information about you from third-party data brokers, advertising networks, or external login providers.

For a full list of what each category looks like in practice, see the appendix.

Every piece of personal information we hold is doing a job. Here are the jobs:

• Running the service. Sign-ins, profile management, watchlist storage, recommendations between users, follow relationships, and the day-to-day plumbing that lets the product function.
• Keeping it secure. Detecting suspicious activity, preventing abuse of the follow and recommendation systems, and protecting accounts from unauthorised access.
• Making it better. Fixing bugs, identifying performance problems, and refining features. Where this involves your personal information, we use it in aggregate and minimise what’s needed.
• Communicating with you. Account messages, replies to support questions, and notifications you’ve turned on.
• Showing you advertising. Studios, distributors, streaming platforms, and festivals advertise their films and series on Fermented Pickles. If you’ve consented to personalised advertising, we use your viewing data (titles you’ve logged, ratings, watchlist, genre preferences) to decide which film ads to show you. If you haven’t, you’ll see general film advertising that isn’t tailored to you. The advertisers themselves never see your personal data — see “How advertising works on Fermented Pickles” below.
• Producing anonymous, aggregated insights. We may produce anonymised and aggregated trend data — for example, “60% of users on the platform rated this title 4 stars or higher” — and share those insights with third parties such as studios, streaming platforms, or festivals. By the time data is used for this purpose, it has been stripped of any link to you.
• Meeting legal duties. Some uses of information are required by law (tax, accounting, response to lawful requests), and we comply with those requirements.

If we ever want to use your personal information for a genuinely new purpose that isn’t compatible with the above, we’ll either ask you first or rely on a legal basis we can clearly point to.

Fermented Pickles is free, and advertising is how we keep it that way. Because advertising involves your personal data, we want to be specific about how it works, what we do, what we don’t do, and what choice you have.

Who advertises

Our advertisers are film studios, distributors, streaming platforms, and festivals promoting films and series. We do not run banner ads from unrelated brands, gambling companies, or general-interest advertisers.

Personalised advertising (off by default — opt-in)

If you have turned personalised advertising on in your settings, our system uses your viewing data — the titles you’ve logged, your ratings, your watchlist, the genres you watch — to choose which film ads to show you. For example, a user who has logged a lot of horror films may see an ad for an upcoming horror release. This is a form of profiling under Article 4(4) of the GDPR, and we rely on your consent (Article 6(1)(a)) to do it.

Non-personalised advertising (the default)

If you haven’t consented, you’ll still see film advertising on the service, but it will not be tailored to your viewing data. It may be based on the page you’re looking at (for example, an ad for a sci-fi film shown next to a sci-fi title’s page), but not on your personal profile.

What advertisers do not receive

No advertiser receives your name, email, username, profile picture, watchlist, ratings, notes, or any other identifier that could link back to you. The targeting decision happens entirely inside Fermented Pickles. From the advertiser’s perspective, they pay to reach “users who watch genre X” and we deliver that — they never see who those users are.

No third-party ad networks, no cross-site tracking

We do not sell ad inventory through programmatic ad-tech networks. We do not allow third-party ad trackers to set cookies on your device through our service. Your viewing data is not shared with the advertising industry’s tracking ecosystem.

Your choice

Personalised advertising is off until you turn it on, and you can turn it off again at any time in your settings. You can use the full Fermented Pickles service whether or not you consent to personalised advertising. We do not condition access on it.

Ads to minors

Personalised advertising is not available to users under 18, regardless of consent. Users between 13 and 17 will only see non-personalised film advertising. This applies even where the user (or a parent) would be willing to consent.

Fermented Pickles is free and doesn’t run a subscription tier. Two things keep the service running:

1. Advertising on the service. Studios and distributors pay us to promote their films and series to our users, in the way described in the section above.
2. Anonymous, aggregated insights sold to third parties. Examples of the kind of insights we mean:

What this means concretely:

• We do not sell, license, or transfer personal information that identifies you, or that could reasonably be combined with other information to identify you.
• The data used for these insights is fully anonymised and aggregated before it leaves Fermented Pickles. Once anonymised in this way, the data is no longer “personal data” within the meaning of the GDPR.
• No buyer of these insights ever receives your name, email, username, profile picture, watchlist, ratings, notes, follow list, or any other identifier tied to you.

We will, in later stages, also generate revenue through:

• Paid placement partnerships with streaming platforms (for example, indicating that a particular title is available to stream on a particular service). These do not involve sharing your personal data with the platform.
• White-label licensing of the Fermented Pickles technology to streaming services, cinema chains, or networks. This involves licensing the software, not your data.
• Festival or distributor partnerships for content promotion to relevant audience segments, based, again, only on anonymised taste data.

When we ever introduce a revenue model that involves a different way of using your personal data, we will update this notice and obtain your consent where the law requires it.

Most of what makes a modern service feel personal — staying signed in, remembering your privacy settings, knowing which profile (out of your up-to-five) you’re using — is delivered by cookies, local storage, and equivalent identifiers. From here on, we’ll call them all “cookies” for simplicity.

Cookies do four main jobs for us:

• They keep you signed in and route you to the right profile within your account.
• They store your preferences and settings (including your advertising-personalisation choice).
• They support diagnostics and security — for example, detecting unusual session behaviour.
• They help us understand, in aggregate, how the service is performing so we can improve it.

We do not allow third-party advertising trackers, behavioural targeting cookies, or cross-site tracking pixels on the service. The cookies we use are first-party (set by Fermented Pickles) or set by our infrastructure providers solely to deliver the service.

You’ll be asked about non-essential cookies on your first visit through our cookie banner, in line with Swedish e-privacy law. Several Fermented Pickles features won’t work without essential cookies — turning them off entirely will block sign-in, ratings, Watchlists, Toplists, and anything else that requires an account.

For more detail on which specific cookies we set, see our separate Cookies and Advertising Choices page.

We don’t sell personal information. The honest summary of what does happen is this: information leaves Fermented Pickles only in the limited situations below.

Suppliers we rely on to operate the service

Fermented Pickles is built on a small number of infrastructure providers, each handling a specific job:

• Supabase — provides our database, user authentication (including the encrypted handling of your password), and storage for the images you upload. Supabase processes your data on our instructions under a data processing agreement.
• Cloudflare — provides hosting (Cloudflare Pages) and content delivery for the service. As part of this, Cloudflare may automatically receive technical data such as your IP address.

These providers are processors acting on our instructions. They are not permitted to use your personal data for their own purposes.

Advertisers — but only as anonymised audience reach

Advertisers receive aggregated reporting on the performance of their campaigns (“your ad was shown N times, was clicked M times by users in genre-preference cohort X”). They do not receive any personal data about individual users.

Authorities and others, where the law requires it

Personal information will be released when doing so is appropriate to comply with the law, to enforce our Terms of Use, or to protect Fermented Pickles, our users, or others. We push back on overbroad requests and only disclose what is strictly necessary.

Corporate change

As the business evolves, we may merge with, acquire, or be acquired by another business. User information typically moves with such transactions, but it remains bound by whatever privacy notice already covers it (unless you agree otherwise).

In any situation outside those above, we’ll tell you before personal information is shared with a third party and give you the chance to decline.

Fermented Pickles is operated from Sweden. Some of the infrastructure providers listed above (notably Cloudflare and, depending on configuration, Supabase) operate globally and may process your data on servers located outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States.

Where your personal data is transferred outside the EEA, we rely on the safeguards permitted under Chapter V of the GDPR — primarily the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, supplemented by appropriate technical and organisational measures (such as encryption in transit and at rest). Where a country or scheme has been recognised by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of protection (for example, transfers to organisations certified under the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework), we may also rely on that decision.

You can request a copy of the relevant safeguards by contacting us using the details at the end of this notice.

Security and privacy are designed into the service rather than added on at the end.

• Information moving between your device and the service is protected with TLS encryption.
• Passwords are managed by Supabase Auth and are never stored in plain text.
• Access to your data within the platform is governed by Row Level Security policies, which mean that, at the database level, each user can only access their own data.

Your part matters too. Pick a unique password for Fermented Pickles that you don’t reuse anywhere else, keep your devices secure, and remember to sign out when using a shared computer.

We retain personal information for as long as you keep your Fermented Pickles account active. When you delete your account, we permanently remove your profile information, your watchlist entries, ratings, notes, Toplists, uploaded images, follow relationships, and recommendation history.

Some material is retained for longer where the law requires it — for example, basic operational records that we need to keep for tax, accounting, or fraud-prevention reasons. Where we keep something on this basis, we keep only what we have to and for no longer than the relevant law requires.

Backups containing your data may persist for a short period after deletion, in line with normal disaster-recovery rotation, before being overwritten.

This is the section that tells you what you can actually do.

Reviewing and updating your account

Your account settings let you view and change your profile name, profile picture, username, privacy setting (Friends Only, or Private), watchlist, ratings, notes, Toplists, follow relationships, online-status visibility, advertising-personalisation choice, and notification preferences.

Choosing what you share

• You can decline to provide certain information, knowing this may limit what’s available to you.
• You can switch your profile to Private at any time, which makes it invisible to other users.
• You can disable the visibility of your online status in your privacy settings.
• You can turn personalised advertising off at any time in your settings. Doing so stops the further use of your viewing data for ad selection from that point forward.
• You can delete your account at any point, which permanently removes your data (subject to the legal-retention exceptions described above).

Your GDPR rights

Because Fermented Pickles is established in the EU, the GDPR applies directly to our processing. Subject to its conditions, you have the right to:

• request access to the personal data we hold about you;
• ask for it to be corrected if inaccurate, or completed if incomplete;
• ask for it to be erased — the so-called “right to be forgotten”;
• request data portability — receive a copy of your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or have it transmitted to another controller where technically feasible;
• object to processing carried out on the basis of our legitimate interests;
• ask that processing be restricted in particular cases;
• where you’ve consented to a specific use (such as personalised advertising), withdraw that consent at any time, after which further processing for that purpose stops — withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal;
• not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you — note that we do not carry out such decision-making.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details at the end of this notice. We will respond within one month. That period may be extended by up to a further two months for complex or numerous requests, and we will tell you if that applies.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, IMY) at imy.se, or with the data protection authority of the EU member state where you live or work.

We are required to be specific about this because of how advertising works on the service.

What we profile

Where you have consented to personalised advertising, we analyse your viewing data — the titles you’ve logged, your watch statuses, ratings, watchlist contents, and the genres you tend to watch — to infer general taste preferences (for example, “interested in science fiction,” “interested in international cinema”). These inferences are used solely to choose which film advertisement to show you.

The logic, in plain terms

Our system groups titles by genre and other film-metadata attributes and matches the genre profile of an advertised film to the inferred taste profile of users who have consented to personalisation. There is no behavioural prediction beyond film taste, no scoring of you as a person, and no decision affecting your access to the service or to any feature.

The consequences for you

The only consequence of this profiling is which film advertisements appear in your interface. It does not affect what you can do on Fermented Pickles, what content you see in your watchlist, who can follow you, or anything else.

No automated decision-making with legal or similar effect

We do not make decisions about you that produce legal effects or similarly significantly affect you within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR.

You can switch personalised advertising off at any time in your settings.

The service isn’t built for anyone under 16. If you’re under 16, please don’t sign up for Fermented Pickles Services or submit information about yourself. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from a child under 16, we will delete it.

Personalised advertising is not available to users under 18. Users between 16 and 17 will see only non-personalised film advertising on the service, regardless of any consent given by them or their parents.

This section sets out the formal anchors that sit underneath everything above.

Legal bases under the GDPR

The GDPR requires a legal basis for each use of personal information. Ours are:

• Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) — when we deliver the Fermented Pickles Services to you under our Terms of Use, manage your account and profiles, store your watchlist and ratings, and operate the follow and recommendation systems you’ve chosen to use.
• Consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR) — for personalised advertising (i.e., the use of your viewing data to choose which film ads to show you), and for any non-essential cookies. You can withdraw consent at any time without affecting earlier processing.
• Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) — when we secure the service, prevent abuse, debug and improve features, show non-personalised film advertising, and produce anonymised and aggregated insights from data we already hold for the purposes of our business model. We have weighed these interests against your rights and consider that they do not override yours, given the safeguards in place. You can object to this processing at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation, and you have an absolute right to object to any processing for direct marketing.
• Compliance with a legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR) — when the law requires us to use your information (for example, to respond to a valid legal request, or to comply with tax and accounting law).

We do not process special categories of personal data within the meaning of Article 9 GDPR, and we do not carry out automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR.

Governing law and Terms of Use

Using Fermented Pickles Services means accepting both this notice and our Terms of Use. Any privacy dispute is governed by Swedish law, without prejudice to your mandatory rights under the GDPR — including your right to bring a complaint to your local data protection authority or to a court in your country of residence.

Updates to this notice

The business changes, and so will this notice. We recommend checking back from time to time. Unless we say otherwise, the current version applies to all the information we hold about you and your account. We will not, however, materially weaken the protections that already cover information collected previously without first obtaining your consent or otherwise complying with the law. Where changes are material, we will notify you in advance through the service or by email.

For any privacy question, request, or concern, you can contact us here.

Because Fermented Pickles is established in Sweden — i.e., within the European Union — we are not required to appoint an EU representative under Article 27 of the GDPR.