Last updated 12 October 2026
Cholochitro Diary ("we", "us") is a diary for Bengali films, an initiative by the West Bengal Film Provenance Lab. This page explains what we collect, why, and what you can do about it. We don't sell your data, and today we don't run ads. Ads are planned (the About page says how they will work), and this policy will be updated to say exactly what they collect before the first one appears.
When you create an account we store the username and email address you chose, plus your password, never in readable form: it's hashed with bcrypt (cost 12) before it touches the database, so nobody here, including us, can read it back. We email you a verification link and record when you confirmed it. If you write reviews, ratings, lists, likes, or a watchlist, that content is stored against your account. If you follow other users, that relationship is stored too. If you fill out the Contact form, we store what you submitted.
If you fill in your profile, we store what you add: a display name, a short bio, links to your accounts elsewhere (Instagram, X, Letterboxd, YouTube, a website), a profile picture, a cover image, up to four favourite films, and the date you last changed your username. When you change your username we keep a record of the old one and when you changed it.
We also keep lightweight first-party analytics: page views and interaction events (a film viewed, a review posted, a like) tagged to a random per-browser-session id and, while you are signed in, to your account, used to power the "Recommended for you" feature and to understand traffic. If an admin has configured Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Microsoft Clarity, those third-party scripts run too, but only when an ID is actually set; a blank field means the script simply doesn't load. We don't run any other trackers.
Unexpected errors are logged (a message, a stack trace, the route involved) so we can fix bugs, never your reviews or private data as part of that log.
Your profile page is public: anyone can see it, signed in or not. It shows your username, display name, bio, links, profile picture, cover image and favourite films, alongside your public reviews and lists. If you have public reviews or lists, search engines may index it. Leave a field blank and nothing is shown for it.
Reviews, diary entries and lists can each be public or private. Only what is public is ever shown to anyone else.
Films picked for you (“Because you liked Nayak”) are worked out from your own diary: what you logged, rated, reviewed, liked and put on your watchlist, including private entries, for your picks only. They also draw on the public ratings and reviews, and the film likes, of the people you follow, and on the public ratings of other members whose ratings agree with yours (taste neighbours), whether or not you follow them. Your public ratings are used the same way for other members. Nothing private is ever read on anyone else’s side. A reason never names another member; it names a film. Members whose ratings agree with yours may be suggested to you under Who to follow, and you to them, but only through what they and you have made public.
Account emails, such as verifying your address or resetting your password, are sent whatever your choices, because the account needs them. Two others are sent only if you ask for them: the newsletter, and the weekly letter. Both are off unless you tick the box when you sign up or turn them on later in your email preferences (Profile, Settings). We record when you agreed and where (the sign-up form or the settings). Every one of these emails has a link that turns it off in one click, and your mail app’s unsubscribe button does the same.
The weekly letter, “Your week in the diary”, goes out on Monday mornings, and only in a week when something happened: you logged a film, people you follow wrote reviews or were watching the same films, or your diary has films from that week in earlier years. It is built from your own diary (including private entries, since it goes only to you), from the public reviews and public diary entries of people you follow (never a review marked as containing spoilers), from films picked for you, and from new articles and films opening that week. We keep one small record per week for each member who has it turned on: which week, whether a letter was sent, skipped or had nothing to say, and when it was sent, so nobody gets the same week twice. A letter waiting to be sent is held with its content in our mail queue until it goes. Our delivery log keeps a masked form of the address (like k***@gmail.com), the subject and whether it was delivered, not the email itself.
A session cookie keeps you signed in after you log in (30 days, HTTP-only, so page scripts can't read it). Changing or resetting your password ends every existing session on the account, including any you'd forgotten about. A separate cookie exists only for the admin login. Your theme preference (light/dark) is saved in your browser's local storage, never sent to us. None of this is used for cross-site tracking or advertising.
Film metadata (posters, cast, genres, overviews) comes from The Movie Database (TMDb), used under their terms, along with the score TMDb’s own users give a film, shown on its page with the number of votes. We send TMDb nothing about you. Emails (account emails, the newsletter and the weekly letter) are delivered by our email provider, which sees the address and the content of each message, nothing else. The site and its database run on our own server in Mumbai, rented from Hostinger, and pages reach you through Cloudflare. Cloudflare Turnstile checks the sign-up and contact forms for bots, using signals from your browser; it does not read what you type, and we use it for nothing else. Each processes data on our behalf under its own security practices, not as an independent user of your data.
You don’t have to ask us for either of these. Both are buttons in your own account, under Profile → Settings → Your data.
Analytics rows that referenced your account are not deleted along with it. They are detached from you instead, so what remains is an anonymous page view with no link back to a person. Deleting them outright would silently rewrite historical traffic counts, and once detached they hold nothing personal.
The delivery log of emails we sent is not tied to your account: each entry holds only a masked form of the address and a one-way hash of it, the subject and whether it was delivered. It is not deleted with your account; entries older than 90 days are removed once the log passes 50,000 entries.
Two honest limits. Content you posted publicly, a review or a list, may already have been seen, cached, or shared by others before you deleted it, and we can’t reach into every copy of the internet. And a deleted account is genuinely gone: we keep no backup copy to restore it from, so please export first if you might want it. Anything else, write to [email protected].
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top and, for anything significant, say so on the home page. Continuing to use Cholochitro Diary after a change means you've accepted the update.
Questions about this policy: [email protected], or use the Contact page. Governed by the laws of India; disputes fall under the courts of Hooghly, West Bengal.