Privacy Policy

Welcome to the Media Influence Map (accessible via mediainfluencemap.com). We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting the personal data you share with us. This Privacy Policy explains what we collect, how we use it, who processes it on our behalf, and the choices you have. It applies when you browse the map as a guest or create a contributor account.

Account & identity: your email address, and, if you sign in with Google, the basic profile information Google shares (name, email, avatar). If you register with an email and password, we store your email and a securely hashed password; we never see the password itself. Profile: the username and display name you choose. Demographics: your country, decade of birth, and gender identity, collected once during onboarding. Profile picture: if you add one, the image you upload, or a copy of your Google picture if you ask us to use it. Contributions: the works, connections, votes, comments and reports you submit, stamped with your account so they can be attributed and reviewed. Discussion: the topics, replies and poll answers you post in a hub, and the comments you leave on a connection. Hubs: which hubs you have joined. Your library and wishlist: the works you add to your personal shelf, which is a record of what you have read, watched or played, and the works you mark as wanted. Newsletter: if you opt in, the email address you give for it, which may differ from your login address. Support: the email address and message you send through our contact form. Technical: session cookies needed to keep you signed in, and standard server logs (IP address, request metadata) retained briefly for security and debugging.

We use this data to authenticate you and maintain secure sessions; to attribute and moderate your contributions; to respond to support requests; to send transactional email you have asked for (account, notifications you opted into, and support replies); to tailor your own Discover suggestions to your library and to the hubs you have joined, when you leave that option on; to send the newsletter if, and only if, you asked for it, with an unsubscribe link in every issue; and to aggregate demographics into broad, anonymous statistics about the map itself. Your library is never used to profile you or to shape what anyone else sees. We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal or demographic information, and we do not use it for advertising or feed-personalisation algorithms.

We rely on a small set of trusted processors: Supabase (database, authentication and storage), Vercel (application hosting, server logs, page-performance measurement and anonymous page-view counts), Cloudflare (object storage for cover images and for profile pictures, and the public hostnames they are served from), Google (only if you choose 'Continue with Google', governed by Google's privacy terms), and Resend (delivery of transactional email and, if you opted in, the newsletter). To enrich entries, our servers also query public cultural databases (Wikidata, Wikipedia, the Open Library and TheTVDB) about works, not about you; no personal data is sent to them.

We use only the cookies required to keep you signed in and to protect your session. We do not use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Browsing the map as a guest sets no account cookies. Pages also report anonymous loading-speed measurements to Vercel Speed Insights, which records timings rather than cookies, identifiers or anything about who you are. We also count page visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and records which pages are viewed rather than who views them.

Your account, profile, profile picture, demographic responses, hub memberships, library and wishlist are kept for as long as your account is active; removing a work from your shelf or wishlist deletes that entry immediately, and replacing or removing your profile picture deletes the previous image from storage rather than leaving it behind. Operational data is pruned on a rolling schedule: notifications, resolved support tickets and moderation records age out automatically, and contribution proposals that are never reviewed are cleaned up over time. Aggregate, fully anonymised statistics, which cannot be traced back to you, may be retained indefinitely.

MIM is a collective, open registry. The connections and works you submit become part of the public graph and remain visible after review, and so does anything you post in a hub discussion or on a connection. You also have a profile page, visible to anyone signed in: it shows your display name, username, profile picture, country, role, the month you joined, your bio, how many works and connections of yours are on the map, the hubs you have joined, and your most recent comments. It is not indexed by search engines. Joining a hub is a public act: your name appears in that hub’s member list and on your own profile. Your library and wishlist are NOT contributions and never join the map: each is visible on your profile unless you turn it off, with “Keep my library private” and the matching wishlist setting, on those pages or in your profile settings. A private library is invisible rather than locked, so nobody is told there is something they cannot see. A wishlist can also be shared deliberately, through a link containing a random token: anyone holding that link can open it without an account, so treat it as public once you have sent it. If you delete your account we remove your personal and demographic data, but contributions already accepted into the shared map may be retained in de-identified form so the historical record stays intact, the same way an edit persists on a collaborative encyclopedia after an editor leaves.

You can access, correct, or export your profile data at any time. You can also permanently delete your account yourself from Account Settings → “Delete your account”: this immediately erases your login, profile and demographic data, your profile picture (the image itself, not only the link to it), your votes, follows, notifications, hub memberships and poll answers, and your whole library and wishlist. What remains is the writing: works and connections you contributed stay on the public map in de-identified form (shown as “Deleted user”), and hub topics, replies and connection comments stay with your name removed from them, so a conversation other people took part in does not lose half of itself. It is the same way an edit persists on a collaborative encyclopedia after an editor leaves. You can also request erasure using the form below. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or CCPA; contact us to exercise them.

MIM is not directed at children under 13 (or the minimum digital-consent age in your country). We do not knowingly collect data from them; if you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

Media Influence Map is operated by an individual based in Portugal, who acts as the data controller for the purposes of the GDPR and Portugal's Lei n.º 58/2019. We may update this policy as the platform evolves; material changes will be reflected in the 'Last Updated' date above. The September 2026 revision named Cloudflare as a processor, and added profile pictures, hubs, discussions, the wishlist, the newsletter, public profile pages and anonymous page-view counting. For any privacy question, data-access or deletion request, reach the operator at hello@mediainfluencemap.com or through the form below.