Privacy policy

Séance is designed so that your data stays with you. This policy explains which personal data we process when you visit our website, buy a license, email us or use the app: why, for how long, who it is shared with, and how to exercise your rights. It complies with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (the General Data Protection Regulation, “GDPR”) and the French Data Protection Act (Law No. 78-17 of 6 January 1978). As we are based in France, the GDPR applies to all our processing, wherever you live.

This English version is provided for convenience; in case of discrepancy, the French version prevails.

Summary

• Séance has no account, no ads, no analytics and no telemetry: we receive nothing about your library or how you use the app.
• Your library, profiles and watch history stay on your Mac.
• To fetch title information, your Mac contacts third-party services directly (TMDB, TVmaze, Apple, Wikimedia), which see your IP address and the titles looked up. Offline mode stops this.
• Apple Intelligence features run on your Mac.
• The website sets no cookies and contains no tracking tools.
• If you buy a license, the reseller processes your payment; we receive your email address and order details to manage your license.
• We do not sell or rent your personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Data controller

EURL ZENATI, 60 rue François Ier, 75008 Paris, France. For any question about your data, email us at [email protected].

We have not appointed a data protection officer, as this is not required for our activity.

What we don’t do

• No account: you don’t have to give us your identity to use Séance.
• No tracking: no analytics, no advertising, no pixels or trackers, whether on the website, in the app or in our emails.
• No telemetry: the app sends us no usage statistics and no crash reports.
• No profiling: no automated decision is made about you.
• No data trade: we do not sell, rent or share your data for advertising.

Visiting the website

The website is static. To send you its pages and the Séance installer, our hosting provider’s servers necessarily receive technical data.

• Data: IP address, date and time, page or file requested, technical information sent by your browser (type, language).
• Purposes: displaying the website, letting you download Séance, and protecting the service against abuse.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running a working and secure website (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).
• Retention: we do not enable access logs, so we do not keep this data; our hosting provider only processes it for as long as needed to deliver pages and secure its infrastructure.
• Recipient: Cloudflare, Inc., our hosting provider, acting as our processor.

The website sets no cookies: see our Cookies page.

Buying a license

You pay on the checkout page of our reseller, Paddle.com Market Limited (Paddle). It acts as an independent controller for payment, invoicing, taxes and fraud prevention, under its privacy policy. We never have access to your payment details, such as your card number.

The reseller sends us the information we need to manage your license:

• Data: email address; name, if you provided it; country and, in some countries, postcode; date, product, amount, currency and taxes; order number; the license key assigned to you.
• Purposes: supplying your key and resending it if you lose it; checking your purchase when you ask for support, a refund or a transfer; handling guarantee claims; telling you about updates needed to keep Séance in conformity, a security issue or an important change affecting your license.
• Legal basis: performance of the contract (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR); for information about updates, our legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR and Article L224-25-25 of the French Consumer Code); for security notices, our legitimate interest in protecting our customers (Article 6(1)(f)).
• Retention: for as long as your license can be used, so that we can resend your key and confirm your rights, unless you ask us to delete this data (in which case, keep your key safe yourself). Accounting records are kept for ten years, as explained below.
• Recipients: us, and our email provider acting as our processor.

This information is needed to conclude and perform the contract: without an email address, we could not supply your key. We do not send you marketing emails.

Emailing us

• Data: your email address, your name if it appears, the content of your messages, and any attachments you choose to send (such as a screenshot or details about your Mac).
• Purposes: answering your questions, providing support, handling complaints and requests about your rights.
• Legal basis: our legitimate interest in replying to you (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR) or, if you are a customer, performance of the contract (Article 6(1)(b)).
• Retention: three years after our last exchange, or until any dispute is resolved.
• Recipient: our email provider, [Prestataire de messagerie à choisir] ([Pays d’hébergement]), acting as our processor.

Please do not send us your video files, or sensitive information we don’t need.

Accounting obligations

• Data: records relating to your purchase (reseller statements and invoices, order number, amount, country).
• Purposes: meeting our accounting and tax obligations; establishing, exercising or defending legal claims.
• Legal basis: our legal obligations (Article 6(1)(c) GDPR); our legitimate interest in defending our rights (Article 6(1)(f)).
• Retention: ten years for accounting documents and supporting records (Article L123-22 of the French Commercial Code); for information relevant to a dispute, until the applicable limitation periods expire.
• Recipients: where applicable, our chartered accountant, who is bound by professional secrecy, and authorized public authorities on request.

Séance on your Mac

Séance works without an account and sends us no data. Everything the app stores stays on your Mac, in the ~/Library/Application Support/Seance folder and in macOS preferences: your catalog, each profile’s watch progress and lists, your household’s profiles (names, avatars, kids mode), your settings (including your TMDB API key, if you entered one), cached images, intro and credits markers, texts generated by Apple Intelligence, and the backups of your library that Séance keeps before each update. We have no access to any of it. You can delete this data at any time by deleting that folder, which you can reach from Réglages › À propos.

Title information

To fetch posters, synopses and cast, your Mac contacts the services below directly. It sends them a title and year derived from your file names, or an identifier, and downloads images, but never your file paths, the content of your files or your watch history. Like any internet connection, these requests reveal your IP address to them, as well as technical information such as the name and version of the app and of macOS. Some of these services, such as Wikimedia’s, also attach cookies to their responses; those cookies are covered by their own privacy policies, and we have no access to them.

These services process this data under their own responsibility; we receive none of it. To the extent that we determine these exchanges, they are based on performance of the License, that is, providing the features you use (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR). You can stop them at any time with offline mode (Réglages › Métadonnées): Séance then keeps working with the information already saved.

Apple Intelligence

“Précédemment…” recaps, translation of synopses into French and suggestions are produced on your Mac by the Apple Intelligence model, through Apple’s frameworks. Séance sends nothing, either to us or to Apple, for these features. How Apple Intelligence itself works is Apple’s responsibility.

Other connections

AirPlay streaming and access to your network drives go through your local network and do not involve us. To play certain formats, Séance uses a small internal server that can only be reached from your Mac. Finally, as with any downloaded app, macOS may check Séance’s signature with Apple: those checks are Apple’s responsibility.

Recipients

Your data is only disclosed to the following recipients, each for its own part:

• Cloudflare, Inc., the website’s hosting provider, acting as our processor;
• our email provider, acting as our processor;
• Paddle.com Market Limited, our reseller, for your purchase, as an independent controller;
• where applicable, our chartered accountant and authorized public authorities;
• the third-party data services listed above, which your Mac contacts directly.

Our processors only act on our instructions, under a contract that meets the requirements of Article 28 GDPR.

Transfers outside the EU

Some recipients are based, or use providers, outside the European Union. Data transfers are then covered by a European Commission adequacy decision, for example for the United Kingdom or for US companies certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, or otherwise by the standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission.

• Hosting: Cloudflare, Inc. (101 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA). Its content delivery network may serve pages to you from a server near you, including outside the European Union. Our hosting provider, based in the United States, is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, and its data processing addendum includes the standard contractual clauses.
• Reseller: Paddle.com Market Limited (Judd House, 18-29 Mora Street, London EC1V 8BT, United Kingdom) safeguards the transfers it makes as described in its privacy policy.
• Data services: some are based outside the European Union, in particular in the United States. Your Mac contacts them directly; we send them no data.

Security

We protect the data we hold with appropriate measures: encrypted connections (HTTPS), access restricted to those who need it and protected, and data kept to the strict minimum. Séance’s data stays on your Mac, protected by macOS; we recommend turning on FileVault.

Your rights

You have the following rights over your data:

• access: find out what data we hold about you and get a copy;
• rectification: have inaccurate data corrected;
• erasure: have your data deleted, unless we must keep it, for example to meet our accounting obligations;
• restriction: have the use of your data temporarily suspended;
• portability: receive the data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format;
• objection: object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to processing based on our legitimate interest;
• instructions after death: set instructions for what happens to your data after your death (Article 85 of the French Data Protection Act).

To exercise your rights, email us at [email protected] or write to our registered office. We reply within one month, which may be extended by two months for complex requests, in which case we will let you know. We only ask for proof of identity if we have reasonable doubts.

The data Séance stores on your Mac is under your sole control: we can neither see nor delete it. For data processed by the reseller or by third-party data services, please contact them directly; we are happy to help.

If, after contacting us, you believe your rights have not been respected, you can lodge a complaint with the data protection authority of the country where you live or work, or where you believe the infringement took place. In France, this is the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés), Service des plaintes, 3 place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris, cnil.fr; complaints to the CNIL must be written in French.

Children

Séance is not specifically intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect any data about them. Séance’s kids profiles are simply settings stored on your Mac: they are never sent to us. Licenses must be bought by an adult.

Changes

We may update this policy, for example when Séance evolves. The date of the latest update appears at the top of the page. If we make an important change, such as a new feature that would send data, we will let you know before it takes effect, in the app or on the website.

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