Privacy

Your account. Your email address, used only to sign you in and to send account emails such as password resets; it's never shown to other people. Your username, which is public. Your password is stored by our sign-in provider only in scrambled form; nobody at ArchiVHS can see it.

Your collection and wantlist. The tapes you own and want, with the details you add (grades, condition, notes, barcodes). These are private to you. The price you paid and your personal notes always stay private, even if we later add a way to show collections to others; we'd tell you before any such change and you could keep yours private.

What you add to the catalog. Titles, versions, facts and photos you add to the shared catalog are public, and each version's history shows the username of whoever made each change.

Photos. Photos added to a version are public. Photos you take before a tape is identified (“Waiting for details”) stay private until you finish them, and are removed once they've gone 60 days untouched, the next time you open My Collection. Photos are shrunk before upload.

Back Pages listings. When you list a tape for sale or trade, the listing is public: your username, the tape, its price, shipping, the condition you describe and your note, and how many deals you've finished. If you choose to show your wantlist to traders, they see its titles only, never your notes or prices. The rest of your collection, and what you paid, stay private.

Messages. Conversations about a listed tape are private to the two of you. ArchiVHS reads a conversation only if one of you reports it, to deal with the report. Your blocks and reports are private too. We keep the times messages were sent and read, and limit how many can be sent, to keep out spam. When someone writes to you, or a tape on your wantlist is listed, we can email you (at most once an hour per conversation, and once a day for your wantlist); you can turn either off in Settings.

Your settings. Choices such as the display style (skin) and Anorak mode.

We use cookies only to keep you signed in and to remember display choices (the skin, the DOS colours and effects). There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies.

To see which pages are popular and what people search for, we count visits with Vercel Web Analytics. It uses no cookies and doesn't identify you: it sees the page visited (with the words of a search, but nothing else from the address), the kind of device and browser, the country, and the site you came from.

We also count, without names, what's searched for, which barcodes couldn't be identified, and which features are used, so we know what to add to the catalog and what to improve. Each record holds only what was looked for or used, when, and whether the person was signed in; never who. These records are kept for 12 months.

When you scan tapes, barcodes the catalog doesn't know yet are listed in your phone's own browser storage, not on our servers, until you clear them.

A few services run parts of the site for us and handle data only to do that job:

• Supabase: the database, sign-in and photo storage.
• Vercel: hosting and the anonymous visit counts above. Like any web host it keeps short-lived technical logs (such as your IP address, browser and the pages requested) for security and fixing problems.
• Resend: sends those emails. It receives your email address and the email itself, and nothing else.
• OMDb: title pages ask it for a film's details (poster, director, plot) by the film's IMDb number. Nothing about you is sent with it.
• UPCitemdb: when a scanned barcode isn't in the catalog, the barcode number alone is sent to UPCitemdb to look up the product name. Nothing about you is sent with it.

“Find a copy” links to eBay and Amazon are plain links: nothing is sent to those sites unless you click, and then their own privacy policies apply. We earn nothing from them.

We don't sell your personal information or share it for advertising, as US state privacy laws define those terms. We'd only hand it over if the law required us to.

You can remove tapes, wants, drafts and the photos you uploaded yourself, at any time. You can also download your collection as a spreadsheet from My Collection.

To delete your whole account, use “Delete my account” at the bottom of your account page (or email info@archivhs.com from the address you signed up with). It happens straight away. When an account is deleted, its email, collection, wantlist and settings are removed, along with your listings and the messages you sent; the other person keeps the conversation, marked as from a deleted account. Facts and photos added to the shared catalog stay, because other collectors rely on them.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted. We'll honour those requests for everyone: email info@archivhs.com.

ArchiVHS is for people aged 16 and over. We don't knowingly keep information about anyone younger, and we delete accounts we learn belong to someone under 16.

Private information is protected so only you can reach it, and the site is only served over secure (https) connections. No system is perfect, so we can't promise it will never be breached; if it is, we'll tell affected people as the law requires.

If this page changes, the date at the top changes too, and we'll point out big changes on the site. See also the Terms of use.

Questions about privacy, or a request about your information: info@archivhs.com.