Nitrate Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 24, 2026

Nitrate is an iOS app that lists special film screenings — repertory programming, advance screenings, Q&As, 35/70mm presentations — in Los Angeles and New York. It is built to need as little of your data as possible, and this policy describes the little it touches.

The short version: Nitrate has no accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking, and no third-party SDKs. We do not collect, store, or sell any personal information. Your favorites and preferences live on your device, and your favorites and city choice sync through your own iCloud.

What the app stores, and where

Everything Nitrate remembers is stored on your device — a preference you set, or small state the app keeps for you:

  • Favorites — the screenings and venues you save.
  • City choice — Los Angeles or New York.
  • Optional location — if you use the "distance to theater" feature, either a ZIP code you type or a single location fix you grant.
  • App preferences — small settings you adjust in the app, such as your list filters, reminder timing, and nearby-distance radius.

Your favorites (screenings and venues) and your city choice also sync between your own devices through iCloud, under your Apple ID. That sync is operated by Apple and never passes through any server we run — we cannot see it. Everything else — your location (ZIP or coordinates), your filters, and other app preferences — is deliberately never synced anywhere; it stays on the device. You can clear your saved location in the app at any time.

The app also caches the public showtimes listing on your device so it opens quickly offline. That cache is public screenings data, not personal data.

What leaves your device

  • Fetching showtimes. The app downloads a public, read-only showtimes file from our server. The request carries no account, no identifier, and no personal data. Like any internet request, our hosting provider (Amazon Web Services) transiently processes your device's IP address to deliver the file; we do not log or keep request records.
  • Poster images. Most poster art is served from our own storage. For a small number of screenings the poster may load directly from the venue's or its content host's server, in which case that host sees a standard image request from your IP — the same as viewing the image on the venue's website. No identifier from the app is attached.
  • ZIP code lookup. If you type a ZIP code for the distance feature, it is sent to Apple's geocoding service to be turned into map coordinates. It is not sent to us.
  • Device location. If you instead grant location access, the app takes a single fix, uses it on-device to compute distances, and stops. There is no continuous tracking and no background location, and the coordinates are never transmitted.
  • Links you tap. Ticket pages open in your browser and addresses open in Apple Maps only when you tap them; those sites and services are governed by their own privacy policies.

Notifications

Screening reminders are local notifications, scheduled entirely on your device with iOS's permission system. There are no push notifications and no notification server.

Poster artwork attribution

Most poster artwork is supplied by TMDB. Nitrate uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Children

Nitrate is a showtimes listing intended for general audiences and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If the app's behavior ever changes in a way that affects your privacy, this policy will be updated first and the effective date above will change. Because we have no way to contact you (by design), the policy at this URL is the source of truth.

Contact

Questions about privacy: privacy@getnitrate.net