Privacy Policy
Last updated 25 August 2026
FILMIO is made by Toby Johnson, trading as TJCreate, Lincoln, UK ("we", "us"). This policy explains what data FILMIO collects, why, and what you can do about it.
What we collect
- Email address — to create and secure your account, whether you sign up with Sign in with Apple or email and password.
- Account identifier — a unique ID tied to your profile, used to keep your ratings, chat messages and social connections attached to you.
- Ratings, reviews and watch history — the films you rate, mark as seen, save to your watchlist, or mark not interested. This is the core of the app: it's what your recommendations are built from.
- Chat messages and other content you post — messages in circle chat, written reviews, your bio, username and display name.
- Profile photo — if you choose to upload one, from your own photo library. We never access your photo library without your explicit selection.
- Friend and circle connections — who you're friends with, which circles you belong to, and what you've invited people to watch.
- Contacts you choose to check — only if you tap "Find people from my contacts" and allow access. See Finding people you know below for exactly what happens; in short, your contacts are scrambled on your iPhone, only the scrambled values are sent, and nothing about them is stored.
- Suggestions you send us — if you use Send a suggestion (or shake your iPhone) to tell us an idea or report a problem, we store what you wrote, which screen you were on, and your app version, iPhone model and iOS version, so we can understand and act on it.
We do not collect location data or advertising identifiers. We do not use analytics or advertising SDKs, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.
Why we collect it
Everything above exists to run the app: to generate your personal recommendations, to let you track what you've watched, and to let you watch things with people you know. We don't sell data, and we don't use your data for advertising.
Who we share it with
- Supabase (database and authentication hosting) — stores your account and app data securely on our behalf.
- The Movie Database (TMDB) — we send film titles and IDs to TMDB's API to fetch posters, cast and metadata. We don't send your personal data to TMDB.
- Apple — if you sign in with Apple, Apple handles that authentication step; we only receive what you choose to share (your email, or Apple's private relay address).
We don't share your data with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else.
Finding people you know
FILMIO can suggest people two ways.
The People you may know list is built only from connections already inside FILMIO: friends of your friends. It needs no permission and involves nothing from your phone.
Checking your contacts is optional, and only ever happens after you tap "Find people from my contacts" and allow access. When you do:
- Your iPhone reads the email addresses in your contacts. It does not read phone numbers, names, addresses or anything else.
- Each address is scrambled on your iPhone into an irreversible-looking code before anything is sent. The addresses themselves never leave your device.
- Only those codes are sent to us, and only to compare against the codes of people who already have a FILMIO account.
- We store none of it. The codes are compared and then thrown away with the request. Codes that do not match anybody are discarded in exactly the same way.
- The result you see is a list of FILMIO users, never a list of your contacts.
This means we never hold any information about a person in your contacts who does not use FILMIO. We will never message, email or invite anyone from your contacts, and we never share your contacts with anyone.
Being honest about one limitation: scrambling an email address is not the same as making it secret, because email addresses are guessable. It is how we avoid holding the addresses at all, not a security guarantee about the codes themselves. That is why we keep none of them.
You can stop this at any time by turning off Contacts access for FILMIO in your iPhone's Settings. There is nothing stored for us to delete afterwards.
Other people using FILMIO
Ratings you make public through your profile (your Top 10, favourites, and completed reviews) are visible to other FILMIO users who view your profile. Chat messages are visible to the members of the circle you send them in. You can report content or block another user at any time from within the app; blocking removes that person's messages and profile from what you see, and from what they can see of you.
Your rights
You can:
- Delete your account at any time from Settings → Delete Account. This permanently removes your profile, ratings, reviews, chat history and social connections. This action can't be undone. Suggestions you sent us are kept as product feedback, with your account no longer attached to them; email us if you would rather we deleted one outright.
- Ask us what data we hold about you, or ask us to correct it, by emailing hello@tjcreate.co.uk.
If you're in the UK or EU, you have rights under UK GDPR / EU GDPR to access, correct, delete, or export your data, and to complain to the ICO (or your local data protection authority) if you think we've mishandled it.
Children
FILMIO isn't directed at children and isn't intended for use by anyone under 13.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top and, for significant changes, let you know in the app.