Last updated: 2026-07-25
The Kernel is a small, independently-run film review project. This page describes, plainly, what it collects and why.
When you rate a film or leave a comment, that submission — the rating, the comment text (capped at 140 characters), and a timestamp — is written to an append-only, tamper-evident log alongside every other fact on this site (box office figures, critic scores, and so on). No account, email address, or real name is required or collected to submit a review.
The site logs which pages are visited and, if present, the referring page, so we can tell whether anyone's actually using it. Instead of storing your IP address, each visit is tagged with a one-way hash of your IP address, browser user-agent string, and the current date — this lets us count roughly how many distinct visitors showed up on a given day without storing anything that identifies you personally, and the hash changes every day so it can't be used to follow one visitor across multiple days.
The Kernel does not set tracking or advertising cookies, and does not use any third-party analytics or ad network.
Film metadata, posters, keywords, and streaming-availability data come from TMDb and, via TMDb, JustWatch. Ratings and box-office figures come from OMDb. Trailer view/like/comment counts come from YouTube. Following a trailer link, a "where to watch" link, or any other outbound link takes you to that service's own site, governed by their own privacy practices, not this one.
Audience review submissions and traffic logs are kept indefinitely, consistent with the append-only design described above.
This is an independent project without a formal support channel yet. If that changes, this page will be updated with a contact method.