CouchReel Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 25, 2026

Who we are

CouchReel ("CouchReel," "we," "us") operates the CouchReel app and website at couchreel.com.

Liquid Monks, LLC, an Illinois limited liability company based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Liquid Monks, LLC is the data controller for CouchReel.

If you have questions about this policy or your data, contact us at dev@liquidmonks.com (or the support page at https://couchreel.com/support).

What we collect

CouchReel is built around a household, so most of what we collect is either tied to your account or shared with the household you belong to:

• Account basics — your email address (via our authentication provider) and a user ID, used to create and sign in to your account.
• Watch history, ratings, and hidden titles — the record of what you've watched, rated, or asked not to see, which is how the core "decide together" feature works. Household-scoped, not sold, not shared outside your household except where you make something public (see below).
• Lists and comments you create — including any list, comment, or profile bio you choose to make public. Public means public: anyone can see what you've deliberately shared, the same as any social app.
• Private notes, Favorites and Collection — notes you write on a title and the titles you mark as loved or owned. Only you can see them.
• Social graph — who you follow, and anyone you've blocked, so the follow/feed features work.
• Profile data — username, bio, and avatar if you set one.
• Reports — if you report content or another user for a safety reason, we keep a record of that report to act on it (see our community guidelines).
• Notifications and push tokens — if you turn notifications on, a push token for your device, used only to deliver the notifications you've asked for (a new episode of a show you track, a title arriving on your services, activity on your household's watchlist, and so on).
• Connected media servers — if you connect a Plex, Jellyfin or Emby server: its name, its address, and which catalog titles are on it, so CouchReel can offer "Play on your server". The sign-in token for that server stays on your device and is never sent to us.
• Calendar feed — if you turn on your household's calendar feed, we keep a private link that serves your upcoming episodes to your calendar app. Anyone with that link can see those dates, so you can reset it at any time.
• Usher questions — if you have CouchReel Plus and ask the Usher what to watch on the home page, or about a title, an episode or a person, we send your question to Anthropic to write the answer (see "Who we share it with"). We don't keep your questions with your account. The answer to a question is kept on our server for up to 6 hours so the same question isn't looked up twice. For the home-page Usher we also send your region and the streaming services you picked (if any), so it suggests what you can actually watch. If you tap "Report this answer", we keep the question, the answer and its sources with your account so we can check it. If you tap the microphone to ask out loud, your phone's or browser's own speech recognition (for example Apple's or Google's) turns your words into text; CouchReel receives only the text, never the recording.
• CouchReel Plus — whether your account has CouchReel Plus, and since when. Today Plus is given by hand to a few test accounts; there is no payment and we collect no payment information.
• TV voting guests — when someone votes on a "Couch on the big screen" room from their phone without an account, we keep their vote and the first name they choose to type (optional, up to 20 characters) for that room only. Rooms close after 3 hours and are deleted a day later.

Some things stay on your device and never reach us: the history files you import from another service (CouchReel reads them on your device and adds the titles, dates and ratings to your account), the monthly prices you enter in "Which services to keep", sign-in tokens for your media servers, and "Add to calendar" (CouchReel creates the event through your device's calendar and never reads your calendar).

We don't use analytics or advertising SDKs, tracking cookies, or third-party trackers, and we don't build cross-site profiles.

We do not collect your precise or coarse location, your contacts, or your photos/camera roll. We do not currently collect financial or payment information — CouchReel is free, and any future paid tier (see "Changes" below) will get its own update to this policy before it collects anything new.

Why we collect it

• To provide the service itself: the decision engine, tracking, lists, social features, and notifications only work with this data.
• To keep your account secure and to let you sign in.
• To improve the product, by looking at aggregate counts (for example, how many titles are on watchlists) — never by building an individual profile to sell or share externally.

Who we share it with

• TMDB — CouchReel uses the TMDB API for catalog data (titles, artwork, cast, where-to-watch information). TMDB does not receive your personal account data as part of this; it's a one-way data source, not a data destination. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
• OMDb — CouchReel uses the OMDb API to source supplementary ratings (e.g. IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes scores) for titles in the catalog. Like TMDB, this is a one-way data source, not a data destination — OMDb does not receive your personal account data.
• Trakt, Wikipedia and Wikidata — further one-way sources for title and people facts (a community rating, awards, a short biography). Our server asks them about a title or a person; nothing about you is sent.
• Where-to-watch data comes from JustWatch through TMDB, also one-way.
• Anthropic — when you ask the Usher a question (CouchReel Plus), our server sends Anthropic your question. For a question about a title, an episode or a person (CouchReel Plus) it also sends which one it is and how far you've watched that show (so the answer avoids spoilers), and Anthropic's software searches the web and writes the answer, which we show with its sources. For the home-page Usher it also sends today's date, your region and the streaming services you picked, and its software picks titles from TMDB's catalog. Your name, email address and account ID are not sent. Anthropic processes this for us as a service provider.
• Supabase — our database and authentication provider, which stores and processes your account data on our behalf, under contract, to run the service. It doesn't use your data for its own purposes.
• Expo — CouchReel uses Expo's push notification service to deliver the notifications you've opted into. Expo relays your device's push token to Apple/Google's own push services; it receives only what's needed to deliver a notification, never the content of your watch history or household data.
• Sign-in providers (Google, Apple, Facebook, X), if you use them — only used for authentication, and only if you choose that sign-in method.
• Your own media servers — if you connect Plex, Jellyfin or Emby, your device talks to your server directly to see what's on it; Plex sign-in goes through Plex's own service. Your device also reads what you've watched there and adds it to your CouchReel history, and, only if you turn on "Mark played" for that server, marks what you mark in CouchReel as played there.
• Your Trakt account, if you connect it — you approve CouchReel on Trakt's own site; the sign-in stays on your device. Your device reads your Trakt watch history and adds it to your CouchReel history, and, only if you turn on "Add my CouchReel marks to Trakt", sends the episodes and movies you mark watched in CouchReel to your Trakt history. None of it passes through our servers except the watches added to your CouchReel history.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with third parties for their advertising purposes. This is a stated product decision, not a legal minimum we're stopping at.

Your rights

If you're in the EEA/UK (GDPR): you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to certain processing, receive a copy in a portable format, and lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority. Account deletion and data export are both available directly in the app (Settings), not just on request.

If you're a California resident (CCPA/CPRA): you have the right to know what personal information we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of your personal information. We don't sell or share your personal information as those terms are defined by California law, so there is nothing to opt out of — stated plainly rather than left implicit. You also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

Everyone, regardless of location: you can delete your account and its data at any time from Settings. Deletion cascades through your data (watch history, ratings, lists, comments, profile) rather than leaving orphaned rows behind.

Deleting your account and data

You can delete your CouchReel account and all of its data at any time, whether you signed up with an email/password or a social sign-in provider (Google/Apple/Facebook/X).

In the app: Settings → Account → Delete account. This starts the same cascading deletion described above (watch history, ratings, lists, comments, profile) immediately — there is no waiting period to start deletion, and it works the same way for every account, including OAuth-only accounts.

Manual request: if you can't access the app, email dev@liquidmonks.com from the address on your account (or with enough detail for us to identify it) with the subject "Delete my account." We complete manual deletion requests within 30 days.

This page (couchreel.com/privacy#delete) is also the data-deletion URL we provide to platforms — including Meta, under Facebook Platform Terms — that require a public callback for account-and-data deletion requests.

How long we keep it

We keep your data while your account is active. If you delete your account, your data is deleted through the same cascade described above. TV voting rooms and their guests' names are deleted a day after the room closes. Counts that identify no one (for example, how many accounts exist) may be kept after deletion.

Children's privacy

CouchReel is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age where you live), and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided us data, contact us and we'll remove it.

International data transfers

Our database and authentication provider (Supabase) hosts CouchReel's data in the United States (AWS us-west-2, Oregon). Our web servers are hosted in the United States. If you use CouchReel from the EEA, UK or Switzerland, your data is therefore transferred to and processed in the United States; we rely on our providers' standard contractual clauses and equivalent safeguards for those transfers.

Security

We use industry-standard safeguards, including database-level access rules that scope your data to your account or household rather than relying on application code alone to enforce who can see what. No system is perfectly secure, and we'll notify affected users if we ever have reason to believe that protection has failed.

Changes to this policy

If we materially change what we collect or how we use it — for example, when introducing a paid CouchReel Plus tier — we'll update this page with a new effective date and, for material changes, notify you in the app before they take effect.

Contact

Privacy requests: email dev@liquidmonks.com with the subject "Privacy request". We answer within 30 days.