Privacy & cookies
No accounts, no sign-up, nothing to fill in. Here is what is measured, what pays for the site, and how to turn it off.
What Nitrate measures
Nitrate uses two analytics services to see which films people look for and where the site gets in their way:
- Google Analytics — page views, how visitors arrived, and rough location and device type.
- Microsoft Clarity — clicks, scrolling and mouse movement, replayed as anonymised session recordings and heatmaps. Clarity masks text you type.
Both only set cookies if you allow analytics. If you don't, they run in a cookieless mode: Google receives a page-view signal with no identifier attached, and Clarity treats every page as a separate, anonymous visit that cannot be linked to the next one.
Cookies and storage
| Name | Set by | Purpose | Kept for | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
nitrate-consent | Nitrate | Remembers your cookie choice | 6 months | Essential |
nitrate-region | Nitrate | Remembers the country you pick for streaming availability | 1 year | Essential |
_ga, _ga_* | Google Analytics | Tells visits apart so returning visitors are counted once | Up to 2 years | Analytics |
_clck, _clsk | Microsoft Clarity | Links the pages of one visit, and repeat visits, together | 1 year / 1 day | Analytics |
__cnt*, __cnss, __tlo | HilltopAds | Caps how often an ad is shown, and counts ads within one visit | Up to 24 hours | Advertising |
Microsoft and Google may also set their own cookies on their domains — such as MUID for Clarity — when analytics is allowed. Your viewing progress — so a film can resume where you left off — is kept in your browser's local storage and never leaves your device.
Other sites involved
Films, and some thumbnails, load straight from the Internet Archive or Wikimedia Commons, so your browser contacts archive.org or upload.wikimedia.org directly, under the Archive's terms or Wikimedia's. Trailers come from YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain. On larger screens, a movie or show page plays its trailer muted in the background after a few seconds; otherwise a trailer loads only when you click it. Artwork and film details from TMDB are fetched by Nitrate's server, not your browser.
Advertising
Nitrate is free because it shows ads, served by HilltopAds. These are pop ads: a click on the page can open an advertiser's page in a new tab or window. Closing it costs you nothing and does not affect the film you were watching.
HilltopAds sets its own cookies in your browser to cap how often you see the same ad and to record that a click came from here — the __cnt and __tlo entries in the table above. It also receives your IP address, browser and operating system, the page you were on, and your screen size, because your browser contacts it directly. Its own privacy policy governs what it does with that.
Turning Advertising off in your cookie settings deletes those cookies and switches off the personalisation signals sent to Google. Be clear about what it does not do: it does not remove the ads themselves, and the ad script still loads. If you want no ad network contacted at all, an ad blocker or browser pop-up blocking is the thing that achieves it.
Your choice
You can change or withdraw consent at any time. Withdrawing deletes the analytics and advertising cookies already set on this site.