Privacy policy

Part A — Website convertag.app

Hosting and server logs

The website is hosted on Firebase Hosting, a service of Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland. When a page is requested, access data is logged automatically: IP address, time of the request, requested address, amount of data transferred, referrer and browser and operating system identifiers.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The legitimate interest is the technical operation of the website and defence against attacks. The data is not combined with other sources or used to analyse usage.

A data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is in place with Google. A transfer to the United States cannot be ruled out; it is based on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

Contact by email

If you write to me, I process your details to answer your enquiry. The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR if it concerns the app or a purchase, otherwise Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. The message is kept as long as needed to deal with it or as required by statutory retention periods. Email is handled by OVH SAS, 2 rue Kellermann, 59100 Roubaix, France.

What the website doesn’t do

• No cookies and no similar storage in your browser.
• No audience measurement, no analytics, no tracking.
• No third-party content — images are served from this website’s own server, fonts come from your device, nothing external is loaded.
• No contact form, no newsletter, no registration.

Part B — Convertag app for Mac

Principle

Convertag has no user account and doesn’t ask for your name or contact details. The app contains no advertising, no usage statistics, no crash reporting and no libraries from advertising or analytics providers. It doesn’t track you across other companies’ apps and websites.

Your videos

Analysis, conversion and text recognition of image subtitles run entirely on your Mac. The built-in conversion engine (FFmpeg) is built without network features; text recognition uses the one built into macOS. Videos, subtitles, file names and folder paths are not transmitted.

Convertag can only access files and folders you give it yourself — by dragging, the Open dialog or choosing a folder. The app remembers the permission for a folder as a bookmark on your Mac.

Title, description and artwork

If the setting “Add title, description and cover” is on (the default), Convertag looks up matching info for every video you add. To do this, the app reads title, year and, where applicable, season and episode from the file name. If the setting is off, Convertag makes no connection for this.

Built-in service

Without your own TMDb key, Convertag queries its own lookup service, which runs on Cloudflare. The following is transmitted:

• the title read from the file name, the year and the type (film or TV show),
• for details and artwork, the identifier of the chosen title (IMDb ID), and for TV shows season and episode,
• a random installation ID that the app creates once and stores on your Mac. It is used only to limit the number of requests per installation (60 per minute) so the service can’t be abused,
• the app’s version number and, for technical reasons, your IP address.

The service forwards the lookup to OMDb (omdbapi.com) and Wikidata (Wikimedia Foundation). These providers only receive the service’s request — neither your IP address nor the installation ID. Results are cached on Cloudflare for up to 90 days so the same lookup isn’t repeated each time; the cache key is the search term or title identifier, without IP address or installation ID. The service keeps no usage log; only in case of an error may an error message containing the search term briefly appear in Cloudflare’s error output.

Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, USA, processes the data as a processor under Art. 28 GDPR. Cloudflare is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework; the transfer is based on the European Commission’s adequacy decision.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR — looking up info is a feature you explicitly use through the setting — and Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR for limiting requests. Storing the installation ID on your Mac is strictly necessary for this service (Section 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG).

The Movie Database (TMDb) with your own key

If you enter your own TMDb key under Settings → Info, Convertag first asks TMDb directly (api.themoviedb.org, artwork from image.tmdb.org). Your key, title, year, language and, where applicable, season and episode are transmitted, along with your IP address. These requests are governed by your own relationship with TMDB, Inc. (USA) and its privacy policy. The key is stored only on your Mac.

Settings on your Mac

Settings, watched folders, folder bookmarks, the TMDb key, the installation ID and a list of files already processed (path, size, modification date; the last 5,000), so watched folders don’t convert anything twice, are kept only in the app’s settings on your Mac. They are not transmitted. They live in the folder ~/Library/Containers/io.codemile.movie-convert and are gone once you delete it.

Intermediate files (artwork, subtitles from text recognition) are put in the temporary folder and deleted after use. Depending on the chosen destination, the app writes artwork (poster.jpg) and NFO files with title info next to the MP4.

TV app, QuickTime and Finder

“Add to TV App”, “Play” and “Show in Finder” open the file in the respective Apple app, just like “Open With”. What these apps do with it is governed by Apple’s privacy policy.

App Store

Convertag is distributed through the Mac App Store. When you download it, Apple processes data under its own responsibility, such as your Apple Account and the purchase; I only receive aggregated statistics from Apple. Apple’s privacy policy applies.

Your rights

You have the right of access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and to object to processing based on legitimate interests (Art. 21). Contact me at the address above. Because the lookup service keeps neither accounts nor logs, I usually can’t link requests to a person.

You can also lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR). The competent authority is the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Rhineland-Palatinate (LfDI Rheinland-Pfalz).