Privacy Policy

OpenCritics protects your personal data better than other sites storing ratings and reviews:

• Because OpenCritics does not sell any products we neither need nor ask for your home address or bank information. That way we do not have the capability to match your reviews to real world data (unlike internet shops).
• We have a Transparency page where you can easily see all information stored about you (mainly: What movie did you rate how?) - regardless of whether you are registered user or not. [in development]
• As a German project, we are governed by EU data protection laws, which are much stricter than those in the US and other parts of the world.

We do not and never will sell any of your personal data. Your e-mail address or movie preferences are no one else's concern.

Information submitted to this website

All information you submit on the OpenCritics website is only used in the context for which it was submitted. For example, if you as a user choose to register with an e-mail address, we will only use this e-mail address to remind you of lost passwords. We do not send out newsletters unless you specifically agree.

Realizing that the best way to protect data is simply not collecting it, we only ask for data we must have to run this service.

Voting and Review Information

To protect the OpenCritics database from fraud (voting on the same movie multiple times, using bots to vote or send reviews ..) we are forced to store all data which can help identify fraud when a user rates a movie or writes a review. This data includes the IP address, browser and OS-version, partner site where the vote was counted and setting a cookie on the user's computer. We guarantee that this data is only used to protect the OpenCritics database integrity and will never be sold or used to track the user activity between sites.

Users can always access the OpenCritics Transparency page to see exactly what data is stored about them and users can always choose to erase all data, votes and reviews on that page.

Statistical Information

In the course of fraud prevention, we also generate statistical information on partner sites. For example: Say movie A gets a 3-star rating on average on a large number of partner sites. Now suddenly on a certain partner site it is voted 5-stars by many users. This could (we would never rely on such statistics alone!) be evidence of fraud and we would investigate further.

We believe that such information can be very useful for the partner sites and make such information available to them. Of course, statistical information on a certain partner 'site A' is only available to the partner 'site A', and not to anyone else. We will never distribute or sell such information.

We furthermore collect the normal statistical information most web servers collect (browser used, referrer URL etc.) to improve our service. This data is not referenced to any of the other information mentioned above, is made unattributable, and deleted after statistical evaluation.

If you have any questions or suggestions about our Privacy Policy, please do not hesitate to contact us!