Privacy
Orlok is a listings site. It needs to know almost nothing about you, and it is built that way: everything personal starts and stays in your browser unless you ask for otherwise.
Without an account
Your list, the films you have marked seen, the screenings you are going to and the cinemas you have chosen are stored in this browser and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded. Clearing your browser data deletes all of it, and we cannot get it back for you.
With an account
Signing in keeps a second copy on a server so the same list reaches your other devices. It holds what is listed above, and your Letterboxd username if you connected one.
It does not hold your email address. Your account is found by a one-way hash of it, so we can recognise you when you sign in again and cannot read the address back or write to you. The database is in Frankfurt, inside the EU.
Signing in uses Google, who tell us your email address and nothing else. We ask for no access to anything of yours there.
Letterboxd
If you give us your username we read your public Letterboxd diary — the same page anybody can see — to work out what you have already watched. We re-read it when you open Orlok and it has been more than half a day, so it stays current without you pressing anything. We never write to Letterboxd, and we could not: they have no way to let us.
Notifications, and the one thing that happens while you are away
If you turn notifications on, we keep your browser’s push subscription with your account. Twice a day a job reads your saved list, compares it against what cinemas have newly scheduled, and sends you a message if something you want has a date. That happens without you being here — it is the only thing in Orlok that does.
It reads your list and nothing else, sends at most one message a day, and never tells you the same thing twice. Turning notifications off deletes the subscription and stops it.
Deleting it
On the You page, “Delete my stored data” removes the server copy immediately — the list, the history, the Letterboxd username and any push subscriptions. What is in your browser stays until you clear it, which is yours to do.
What we do not do
We send no email, ever. We sell nothing and share nothing with anybody. There are no advertising or tracking scripts on any page. Your taste is worked out in your browser, not on a server: when Orlok recommends something, it asks what a set of films were made of and does the comparing on your device.
The only measurement is a count of page views through Vercel Analytics, which sets nothing on your device and identifies nobody. It answers one question — whether anyone opens this twice.
Asking about any of this
Orlok is one person’s side project, not a company. If you want to know what is held about you, or want it gone and cannot reach the button, write to hello@orlok.app and it will be dealt with by hand.