Privacy Policy

Account information: when you sign in, we collect your email address.

Profile details: to complete onboarding we ask you to provide your name, a public handle, your gender (male, female, or prefer not to say), your date of birth, your nationality (country), and a contact phone number. Your handle is your public identity and appears on the surfaces described in section 6; your name is never shown publicly. These details are self-provided. We use your phone number only to contact you about your account if we need to, and we may use it in future to send sign-in codes by SMS. We use your nationality, gender and age only to understand our audience in aggregate. These details are analysed by our own team on our own infrastructure and are not shared with any third-party analytics provider, because we no longer use one.

Usage information: we collect watch history (the content you view and your playback progress) and records of any voluntary contributions you make.

Community requests and votes: if you use the requests board, we record the titles you request, the votes you cast, and any reason you optionally attach to a request. Your handle and your gender are shown publicly on the board next to titles you requested — your gender is used only to write the sentence around the request in correct Arabic, and your name is never shown. Your reason is never shown publicly and is read only by our team.

Technical and log data: we automatically collect basic technical information such as your IP address, browser type, device information, operating system, language, approximate location derived from your IP, referring pages, and log timestamps, for security, analytics, and reliability purposes.

Analytics events: we measure how the Service is used with our own analytics, running on our own infrastructure. We record that an event happened — a page was viewed, a video was played, a contribution was started or completed, a sign-in occurred — together with the page template rather than the full address, the interface language, where you arrived from, your browser, operating system and device type, the country derived from your IP address, and, on a title's page, the identifier of that title. Page-performance measurements and the video quality a playback used are recorded the same way.

Individual analytics events are never stored. Each one is added to running totals — counts per day and per hour, and a lifetime view total for each title, which is shown publicly on that title's page — and only those totals are kept. None of it is linked to you: a per-title count records that a title was opened, not who opened it, and one person's viewing cannot be reconstructed from these totals. They carry no contribution amount and no card data. Your watch history, described above, is separate: that is linked to your account, and it is what lets the Service resume where you left off.

We use cookies and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, and operate the Service. You can control cookies through your browser settings, but disabling them may affect functionality such as staying signed in.

Our analytics set no cookies. They do keep a randomly generated session identifier in your browser's session storage, which exists only for the life of that browser tab and is discarded when you close it; it is sent only to us, and it cannot recognise you on a later visit. To count visitors without identifying them, our servers combine your IP address and browser type with a secret value that is randomly generated each day and then discarded, and keep only the resulting code. Your IP address is never stored alongside these analytics, the code cannot be traced back to you, and because the secret changes daily the same person visiting on two different days cannot be recognised as the same person.

Because we set no persistent analytics identifier, there is nothing to opt out of and no analytics cookie to refuse.

Voluntary contributions are processed by Moyasar, a third-party payment processor. Full card data (such as your card number, expiry, and security code) is collected and handled directly by Moyasar and is not stored by us. We retain only limited records of a contribution, such as its amount, date, status, and a processor reference.

Moyasar's handling of your payment information is governed by Moyasar's own privacy policy.

We rely on a small number of trusted third parties to operate the Service: Moyasar (payment processing), Google Cloud (cloud infrastructure, located in the Kingdom), Resend (transactional email such as sign-in codes), and The Movie Database (TMDB), whose catalog we query — via our servers — when you search for a title to request. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. These providers process data on our behalf and may process limited information necessary to deliver their services. We do not use a third-party analytics provider: usage analytics are collected and processed by us, on our own infrastructure. We never share card data with any of these providers. The home page also embeds Discord's public community widget, so your browser requests member avatars directly from Discord's servers and Discord therefore receives your IP address and browser type; this happens on page load, and Discord's own privacy policy governs it.

We use the information we collect to: provide, maintain, and improve the Service; authenticate you and keep your account secure; remember your watch progress; record and acknowledge voluntary contributions; communicate with you about the Service; understand usage through analytics; and detect, prevent, and address fraud, abuse, and security issues, or to comply with legal obligations.

Some information is published on pages that anyone can view, including people who are not signed in, and search engines. When you create an account we publish a public profile at an address based on the handle you choose. It shows your handle, your avatar colour, the badges you have earned, the month you joined, how many episodes you have watched and completed, and the titles you have requested. It does not show your name, your email address, your date of birth, your nationality, your phone number, which specific titles you have watched, or how much you have contributed.

If you use the requests board, your handle and your gender appear next to the titles you request. If you make a voluntary contribution, your handle, avatar colour, badges and position may appear on the top-supporters board; the amount is never published.

Apart from what is published as described above, we do not sell your personal data. We share information only with the third-party processors described above, where required by law or to respond to lawful requests by public authorities, or to protect our rights, safety, and property or those of others. If the Service is involved in a merger, acquisition, or asset transfer, information may be transferred as part of that transaction.

We retain personal information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service, and thereafter for as long as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, and enforce our agreements. Contribution records may be retained for longer periods where required for accounting, tax, or legal reasons.

Subject to applicable law, you may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information. You can update some information directly in your account, or contact us using the details below to make a request. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, and some information may be retained where we have a legal basis or obligation to do so.

The Service offers general-audience, family-friendly content and is not specifically directed at young children. Any age information we collect is self-reported. Where required by applicable law, a user below the age of legal capacity may use the Service only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian, who is responsible for supervising that use.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child in a manner that violates applicable law. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information without the required parental or guardian consent, please contact us using the details below and we will take appropriate steps to address it. We also intend to introduce parental controls in the future.

We are based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Service runs on infrastructure located in the Kingdom: your account, your watch history, our records of your contributions, and our usage analytics are all stored and processed there.

Some of the third parties named in section 4 may process limited data outside the Kingdom in order to deliver their own services, such as sending an email. By using the Service, you consent to that processing in locations that may have data-protection laws different from those of your jurisdiction. Our analytics are not among them: no analytics data about your use of the Service leaves the Kingdom.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Changes are effective when posted. Your continued use of the Service after any change constitutes your acceptance of the updated Policy.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your rights, please contact us at hala@shedballad.com.