Privacy policy

NumberReels is a video site. You can watch everything on it without an account. The only things you can choose to give us are an email address (for the newsletter, or to hear when a reel you requested is made) and the text of a reel request.

What is stored on your device

The site keeps a few small things in your browser’s local storage: whether you have muted the player, your playback settings (speed, captions, data saver and whether clips start by themselves), whether you chose the light or dark theme, which clips you have watched (so it can mark new ones and show your progress through a series), your guesses in “guess the number”, whether you chose to play along in game mode, which poll options and requests you voted for, the clips you saved for later, your last few searches (so the search box can offer them again), whether you have dismissed the introduction and swipe hints, your answer to the analytics question, and, if you allowed analytics, the date of your first visit. All of it stays on your device, is readable only by this site, and is never sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data removes it. While you browse, session storage also counts the ad cards shown in this visit (see Advertising); it is gone when you close the tab.

Analytics

We measure how the site is used with Google Analytics 4: which pages are viewed, and events such as a clip being played or watched to the end, a share, a vote or a signup, and how the interactive chart is used (for example that a filter or a period was picked, or that a line was added — never the words you typed into its search box). Results are seen in aggregate; we do not use them to identify you, and Google Analytics does not store IP addresses. Page addresses are recorded without their query strings, so nothing you type into search is included — the one exception is the campaign label on links we publish ourselves (the utm_ tags on a link from our YouTube description, newsletter or profile bio, saying only where the link was posted). It is read on the page you arrive on and then removed from the address bar. Embedded players on other websites run no Google Analytics and set no cookies (see “Counting without cookies” below).

Google Analytics uses first-party cookies (named _ga) to tell a returning visitor from a new one. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, those cookies are only set once you say yes in the banner we show there; until then only cookieless, aggregate measurements are sent. “Privacy & cookie settings” in the footer reopens that choice at any time, and a browser that sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track is treated as having said no. Analytics never feeds Google’s advertising features (Google signals and ad personalisation are switched off for it); advertising consent is asked separately, as described under Advertising. Google processes this data under its partner-sites policy, and you can opt out entirely with Google’s Analytics opt-out add-on.

With those events the player also reports how well playback went: how long the video took to start, how many times it paused to buffer, and whether it had to switch to a simpler video format. These are measurements of the connection and the player, not of you, and are counted in aggregate like everything else above. The events also carry a few facts about your visit — the kind of device (phone, tablet or desktop), the type of connection your browser reports, whether you came from inside another app’s browser, and which version of the site you were on — and, if you consented, whether you have visited before. When you sign up, send a request or vote, the server can also send that single action to Google Analytics itself, using your Google Analytics cookie, so that a blocked script doesn’t lose it — only if you consented, so never for a visitor with no cookie.

Counting without cookies

Some counts are kept by the site itself, with no cookie and nothing stored on your device, and they do not depend on Google. Each page you open adds one to a per-day total for its type (home, video, topic…) and your visit to a daily visitor tally (a cardinality sketch that cannot be read back as a list of visitors); watching a video adds the seconds you watched, whether you did it by pressing play, and how smoothly it played (start-up time, pauses, fallbacks). An embedded player or chart on another website counts a load, a play, a finish and a click through to this site, together with the hostname of the page it sits on — and nothing else about you or that page. None of this is linked to a person: the only thing derived from you is the same one-way hash of your IP address and browser, which changes every day, and the counts expire after 16 days. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, your page visits are not counted at all. Visits from the site’s own team are marked and left out.

To rank what is trending, the site also counts plays per clip per day, and how many visitors opened a clip’s interactive chart, in its own data store. The same store keeps poll tallies, the vote count of each request on the request board, and, for “guess the number”, the average answer and how many guesses fell in each twentieth of the slider’s range — counts only, never who guessed what. To count each visitor once, it keeps a one-way, salted hash of your IP address next to the action — never the address itself, and never linked to anything else — which expires after at most 30 days (or when a poll closes; a request-board vote’s after a year). Daily play and chart counts are deleted after 16 days.

Newsletter

The newsletter is run by Buttondown. If you subscribe, your email address, the page you signed up from, and your IP address (which Buttondown uses to filter spam signups) are sent to Buttondown and handled under its privacy policy. You confirm your address before anything is sent, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe.

Reel requests

A reel request is published as a public issue on GitHub so others can see and upvote it. Once we have read it, it may also be listed on this site’s request board, where anyone can vote for it. Only the text you write in the form is published. If you ask to be emailed when it is made, your address goes to Buttondown (see above) — it is never added to the public request.

Server logs

The site is hosted on Firebase App Hosting (Google Cloud), and its videos are served from content delivery networks (Cloudflare for the video files, and Bunny.net for the adaptive stream the player uses). Like any web host, these record standard request information — IP address, time, page requested, browser user agent — to serve pages and to spot abuse. We do not combine that with anything else or use it to identify you.

Advertising

This site shows ads through Google AdSense: labelled display ads on some pages, below the video, and an occasional labelled ad card between clips in the video feed. Ads never cover or interrupt a playing video, and embedded players on other websites show none. To keep ads from repeating, your browser counts how many ad cards it has shown in this visit (numberreels:ads, in session storage; it is deleted when you close the tab and never leaves your device). A browser that sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track is only ever shown non-personalised ads.

Google and its partners may use cookies or similar technologies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads to you based on your visit to this and/or other sites on the internet.

You can opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings, or opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies at aboutads.info. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, you are asked for consent before any advertising cookie is set, and you can change that choice at any time from the consent link in the page footer.

For more on how Google uses data from sites that use its services, see Google’s partner-sites policy.

Links to other sites

Support and sponsor links, and links to our profiles on YouTube, Instagram and X, take you to those sites, whose own privacy policies apply. Links in the newsletter to a sponsor carry a campaign label so the sponsor can see the visit came from us; nothing about you is added.

Embedded content

Some pages link to the same clip on YouTube. Following such a link takes you to Google, whose own privacy policy applies. Nothing from YouTube is loaded into these pages unless you click through.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.

Contact

Questions about any of this can go to the address on the contact page.