Privacy Policy

Effective Date: July 21, 2026

1. Scope and Who We Are

This Privacy Policy explains how The Vertibase (“The Vertibase,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) collects, uses, discloses, retains, and protects personal information when you visit or use thevertibase.com, create or manage an account, submit or edit content, upload media, communicate with us, or otherwise interact with our websites, applications, features, and related services (collectively, the “Service”).

The Vertibase is a collaborative entertainment database focused on vertical series, microdramas, actors, creators, production companies, platforms, and related entertainment information. Some parts of the Service are public by design. Information you submit as a contribution may be displayed publicly and may remain part of the database after you close your account, as explained below.

This Policy does not apply to websites, applications, or services operated by third parties, even when they are linked from the Service. It also does not govern information processed solely on behalf of business customers under a separate written agreement, if any.

This Policy serves as our notice at collection under the California Consumer Privacy Act. We provide a link to it at or before the point where we collect personal information, including on our account registration, contribution, and contact forms, and in the footer of every page of the Service.

Data Controller / Business: Vertical Romance, ATTN: The Vertibase, 40 E. Verdugo Ave. #128, Burbank, CA 91502, USA. Privacy contact: privacy@thevertibase.com.

2. Personal Information We Collect

The categories of personal information we collect depend on how you use the Service. We may collect the following categories.

2.1 Account and Identity Information

• Name, display name, username, email address, password or authentication credentials, and account identifiers.
• Age or date-of-birth information if collected to confirm eligibility or age-related permissions.
• Profile photo, biography, location, website, social handles, professional role, and other information you choose to add to your user profile.
• Records showing whether you accepted current versions of our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or other platform rules.

2.2 Community Contributions and User Activity

• Edits, corrections, new page submissions, biographies, credits, filmographies, production details, links, tags, genres, metadata, descriptions, and other suggested information.
• Images, posters, headshots, production stills, artwork, screenshots, captions, alt text, source information, and rights or licensing information submitted with media.
• Ratings, reviews, comments, lists, favorites, watchlists, follows, votes, flags, reports, and other interactions.
• Revision history, contribution timestamps, attribution, approval status, moderation outcomes, reasons for rejection or removal, and records of reversions.
• Information included in copyright, publicity-rights, privacy, impersonation, correction, or takedown requests.

2.3 Communications and Support Information

• Messages, support requests, feedback, survey responses, contest entries, and communications sent to us.
• Information provided when reporting content, appealing a moderation decision, or responding to a rights complaint.
• Email engagement information, such as whether a message was delivered, opened, or clicked, where permitted.

2.4 Device, Usage, and Log Information

• IP address, browser type, device type, operating system, language, approximate location derived from IP address, and device or advertising identifiers.
• Pages viewed, searches, clicks, referring URLs, session duration, timestamps, navigation paths, feature use, and interactions with content or advertisements.
• Authentication logs, failed login attempts, security events, crash reports, diagnostic information, and fraud or abuse signals.
• Cookie identifiers, local storage identifiers, pixels, SDK data, and similar technical information.

2.5 Information from Other Sources

• Information from social-login or authentication providers if you choose to connect an account.
• Publicly available professional, entertainment, or production information used to operate and improve the database.
• Information from rights holders, representatives, production companies, actors, creators, moderators, and users who submit corrections or complaints.
• Information from analytics, advertising, anti-fraud, security, hosting, and technical service providers.

2.6 Sensitive Personal Information

We collect account log-in credentials, which are treated as sensitive personal information under some privacy laws, and we use them solely to authenticate you and secure your account. We do not use them to infer characteristics about you. Apart from those credentials, the Service is not designed to collect government identification numbers, financial account numbers, precise geolocation, health information, biometric identifiers, or other highly sensitive personal information. Please do not include sensitive personal information in public contributions, reviews, biographies, comments, uploads, or support messages unless we specifically request it for a lawful purpose. If we receive sensitive information, we may delete, restrict, or process it as reasonably necessary to address the submission, protect users, comply with law, or establish or defend legal claims.

3. Public Contributions and Collaborative Editing

The Vertibase is a community-maintained database. This means certain information you provide is intended to become public, searchable, and reusable within the Service.

3.1 Information That May Be Public

Your username or display name, profile information you designate as public, edits, submissions, ratings, reviews, lists, comments, uploaded media, attribution, contribution dates, and portions of revision history may be visible to other users and the public. Search engines and third-party services may index or archive public pages.

3.2 Revision and Moderation History

We may record and retain historical versions of edits and submissions, including contributor identifiers, timestamps, source notes, moderation decisions, reports, reversions, and related technical data. This information helps us evaluate accuracy, restore content, resolve disputes, prevent vandalism, enforce platform rules, and preserve the integrity of the database.

3.3 Do Not Submit Information You Do Not Want Public

Do not include private contact information, home addresses, private messages, confidential business information, sensitive personal information, or personal information about minors in a public contribution unless publication is lawful, appropriate, and authorized. We may remove or restrict such information, but we cannot guarantee that copies have not been captured by search engines, archives, other users, or third parties before removal.

3.4 Attribution After Account Changes

If you change your username, your prior contributions may be associated with the updated username, an internal contributor identifier, or an anonymized label. If you delete your account, published contributions and revision records may remain, but we may remove or anonymize direct account identifiers where reasonably practicable and legally appropriate.

3.5 Information About People Who Are Not Users

The Vertibase maintains database pages about actors, creators, production companies, and other industry participants, many of whom do not hold accounts with us. Information on those pages is drawn from public sources, official promotional materials, rights holders and their representatives, and contributions from other users. Much of this information is publicly available information as defined under applicable privacy law and is therefore outside the scope of some of those laws. Where privacy law does apply, individuals who are the subject of a page have the same rights described in Sections 10, 11, and 12 of this Policy, whether or not they hold an account. A person who is the subject of a page, or an authorized representative, may request access, correction, or removal by contacting privacy@thevertibase.com or by using the rights-complaint process described in Section 17 of our Terms of Service. We may request documentation of identity and authority, and we may balance a request against accuracy, newsworthiness, public interest, contractual obligations, and applicable law.

4. How We Collect Information

We collect personal information:

• Directly from you when you register, edit pages, upload content, rate or review titles, create lists, contact us, or exercise privacy rights.
• Automatically when you use the Service through cookies, server logs, analytics technologies, pixels, local storage, and similar tools.
• From other users, representatives, rights holders, publicly available sources, service providers, and business partners.
• By deriving or inferring information, such as preferences, likely interests, contribution quality signals, fraud risk, or approximate location, from other information we collect.

5. How We Use Personal Information

We may use personal information for the following purposes:

• To provide, operate, maintain, personalize, and improve the Service.
• To create and manage accounts, authenticate users, and maintain account preferences.
• To publish, review, organize, attribute, moderate, verify, merge, reject, restore, or remove community contributions.
• To maintain revision histories, contributor records, source notes, and database integrity.
• To display user-created lists, ratings, reviews, follows, favorites, and other public or account-based features.
• To communicate with you about service messages, security alerts, updates, support requests, moderation decisions, rights complaints, and policy changes.
• To send newsletters, promotions, or other marketing communications where permitted and subject to your choices.
• To understand usage, evaluate feature performance, perform research, analyze trends, and develop new products or functionality.
• To personalize content, recommendations, search results, and advertising.
• To develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate, and improve artificial-intelligence and machine-learning systems used for search, discovery, recommendation, entity resolution, deduplication, content moderation, data-quality assurance, fraud and abuse prevention, trend analysis, and analytics; and to generate aggregated, de-identified, statistical, and derived outputs, including outputs we may make available to third parties.
• To protect the Service, users, rights holders, and the public; detect spam, fraud, infringement, impersonation, harassment, abuse, automated access, and security incidents.
• To enforce our Terms, community rules, rights-management policies, and other agreements.
• To comply with legal obligations, respond to lawful requests, establish or defend legal claims, and protect legal rights.
• To complete a merger, financing, acquisition, restructuring, bankruptcy, sale of assets, or similar corporate transaction.
• For other purposes disclosed at the time information is collected or with your consent.

5.1 Automated Processing and Machine Learning

We use automated systems, including machine-learning models, to operate and improve the Service. These systems help us match records to the correct title or person, detect duplicate or manipulated entries, screen submissions for policy violations, rank and recommend content, and identify trends across the database. Information you submit as a contribution, including biographical details, credits, reviews, ratings, and images, may be used for these purposes as described in Section 7.9 of our Terms of Service. We may use service providers to perform this processing on our behalf under contractual restrictions. Aggregated, de-identified, and derived outputs produced through this processing are not personal information and may be used and disclosed without limitation, including on a commercial basis. Where we make decisions about accounts or contributions using automated processing, Sections 10.4 and 10.6 of our Terms of Service describe our approach to review and appeals.

6. Cookies, Analytics, Advertising, and Similar Technologies

6.1 Technologies We Use

We and our service providers may use cookies, pixels, web beacons, local storage, scripts, SDKs, and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember preferences, secure accounts, measure traffic, understand use of the Service, improve performance, prevent fraud, and support advertising.

6.2 Types of Cookies

• Strictly necessary technologies used for authentication, security, network management, and core functionality.
• Functional technologies used to remember preferences and provide enhanced features.
• Analytics technologies used to understand traffic, feature use, errors, and performance.
• Advertising technologies used to deliver, measure, limit, or personalize advertisements and to understand campaign effectiveness.

Some of these technologies are provided by third parties that receive information about your interactions with the Service directly, including page views, clicks, scrolling, form entries other than passwords, and session activity. Where we use analytics, heat-mapping, session-recording, or chat technologies, those providers act as our service providers under contractual restrictions and are not permitted to use the information for their own purposes. You can manage non-essential technologies as described in Section 6.4, and where required we obtain your consent before they are enabled.

6.3 Advertising and Cross-Context Behavioral Advertising

We do not currently serve third-party advertising on the Service and we do not currently engage in cross-context behavioral advertising. At present we use Google Analytics to understand traffic and feature use, and we may add other analytics, performance, and security technologies over time. We intend to introduce advertising in the future. If and when we do, advertising partners may collect or receive identifiers, device information, browsing activity, approximate location, and interaction data to deliver and measure advertisements. Depending on applicable law, those disclosures may be considered a sale, sharing, or use for targeted advertising, even when no money is exchanged for personal information. Before we enable advertising of that kind, we will update this Policy, provide a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link, and honor recognized opt-out preference signals as described in Section 6.4.

6.4 Your Controls

You may be able to manage non-essential cookies through our cookie settings tool, browser controls, device settings, advertising-industry opt-out tools, or legally recognized opt-out preference signals. Blocking cookies may affect Service functionality. Where required, we will honor a valid Global Privacy Control or other legally recognized opt-out preference signal as a request to opt out of covered sale or sharing for the browser or device sending the signal.

6.5 Do Not Track

Some browsers offer a “Do Not Track” setting. Because there is not a uniform industry standard for responding to Do Not Track signals, the Service may not respond to them. This does not affect our obligation to honor Global Privacy Control or another signal where required by applicable law.

7. How We Disclose Personal Information

We may disclose personal information to the following categories of recipients:

• The public and other users, when information is submitted for public display or when you use public features.
• Service providers that support hosting, cloud infrastructure, content delivery, authentication, email, customer support, analytics, security, fraud prevention, moderation, storage, backups, advertising, and other operations.
• Advertising and analytics partners, subject to applicable law and your choices.
• Professional advisers, including lawyers, auditors, insurers, accountants, and consultants.
• Rights holders, representatives, complainants, or affected persons when reasonably necessary to investigate or resolve copyright, publicity, privacy, impersonation, defamation, correction, or other disputes.
• Law enforcement, regulators, courts, government agencies, or other parties when required by law or reasonably necessary to protect rights, safety, security, or the integrity of the Service.
• A buyer, investor, lender, successor, or other transaction participant in connection with an actual or proposed corporate transaction.
• Other parties at your direction, with your consent, or as otherwise disclosed when information is collected.

We do not exchange personal information for money. However, certain analytics or advertising practices may be treated as “sale,” “sharing,” or targeted advertising under some privacy laws. See Sections 6, 10, 11, and 12 for available choices.

8. Data Retention

We retain personal information for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, including to provide the Service, preserve database integrity, maintain accurate contribution and moderation histories, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce agreements, prevent fraud and abuse, and establish or defend legal claims.

Retention depends on the category of information, the nature of our relationship with you, whether the information is public, legal and operational requirements, the sensitivity of the information, technical constraints, and whether deletion would impair the integrity or security of the Service.

When information is no longer needed, we may delete it, anonymize it, aggregate it, de-identify it, or isolate it from active use. Information may remain for a limited period in backups, disaster-recovery systems, security logs, or archives before being overwritten or deleted in the ordinary course.

The following table describes how long we retain each category of personal information. Where a longer period is required by law, a legal hold, or an unresolved dispute, we retain the information for that longer period.

9. Account Deletion and What Remains

9.1 Information We Generally Delete or Deactivate

When you request account deletion, we generally deactivate account access and delete or anonymize personal account information that is no longer needed, such as your login credentials, private account settings, and non-public profile information, subject to legal, security, fraud-prevention, backup, and operational exceptions.

9.2 Information We May Retain

We may retain the following after account deletion:

• Published edits, factual submissions, reviews, ratings, lists, comments, uploaded media, and other contributions that have been incorporated into the Service.
• Revision histories, timestamps, source notes, attribution records, and internal contributor identifiers needed to maintain database provenance and editorial integrity.
• Moderation records, rejected submissions, reports, appeals, warnings, enforcement actions, and abuse-prevention records.
• Copyright, publicity-rights, privacy, impersonation, correction, and other rights-management records.
• Security logs, fraud signals, records of consent, and evidence needed to enforce agreements or establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
• Transaction, tax, or payment records, if applicable and legally required.
• Information in backups and disaster-recovery systems until overwritten or deleted through routine processes.

9.3 Attribution of Retained Contributions

Where reasonably practicable, we may disassociate retained contributions from your email address and other direct account identifiers. Contributions may remain associated with your former public username, a changed username, an anonymized contributor label, or an internal identifier. We may retain the minimum linkage necessary to prevent abuse, resolve disputes, and maintain an accurate edit history.

9.4 Removal Requests Are Evaluated Separately

Deleting an account does not automatically remove every public contribution or every reference to you from the database. Requests to remove inaccurate, infringing, private, defamatory, impersonating, or publicity-rights-sensitive content are evaluated under our correction, copyright, publicity-rights, privacy, and takedown procedures.

10. Your Privacy Choices and Rights

10.1 Account and Profile Choices

You may update certain account or profile information through account settings. You may request account deletion through account settings or by contacting privacy@thevertibase.com.

10.2 Marketing Communications

You may unsubscribe from promotional emails using the link in the message or by contacting us. We may still send non-promotional service communications, such as security, legal, account, moderation, or transactional notices.

10.3 Cookie and Advertising Choices

You may manage cookies and targeted advertising through the controls described in Section 6. Where required, we will provide an accessible mechanism to opt out of sale, sharing, or targeted advertising.

10.4 Privacy Requests

Depending on your location and applicable law, you may have rights to request access to, correction of, deletion of, or a copy of personal information; to opt out of certain sales, sharing, targeted advertising, or profiling; to limit certain uses of sensitive personal information; and to appeal a denied request.

To submit a request, email privacy@thevertibase.com or use our online privacy request form. Please describe your request and provide enough information for us to identify the relevant account or records. We may verify your identity before completing a request and may deny or limit requests where permitted by law, including where information must be retained for security, legal compliance, free-expression, public-interest, or other exempt purposes.

10.5 Authorized Agents

Where permitted, an authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf. We may require evidence of the agent’s authority and may ask you to verify your identity or confirm the request directly.

10.6 Appeals and Non-Discrimination

Where applicable law provides an appeal right, you may appeal a denied request by replying to our decision or contacting privacy@thevertibase.com. We will not unlawfully discriminate against you for exercising privacy rights.

11. California Privacy Notice

This section supplements the rest of the Policy for California residents. It applies only to the extent The Vertibase is subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended (“CCPA”), for the relevant processing activity.

11.1 Categories of Personal Information

During the preceding 12 months, we may have collected the following CCPA categories: identifiers; customer-record information; characteristics of protected classifications if voluntarily submitted in public biographies or profiles; commercial information; internet or electronic network activity; approximate geolocation; audio, electronic, visual, or similar information; professional or employment-related information; education information if voluntarily submitted; and inferences drawn from other information. We may also receive sensitive personal information if a user includes it in a submission, but the Service is not designed to collect sensitive personal information for purposes of inferring characteristics.

11.2 Sources and Purposes

We collect these categories from you, your devices, other users, representatives, rights holders, service providers, business partners, and public sources. We use them for the business and commercial purposes described in Section 5.

11.3 Categories Disclosed

We may disclose the categories listed above to service providers, contractors, analytics and advertising partners, the public, professional advisers, rights-management participants, government authorities, and transaction counterparties, as described in Section 7.

11.4 Sale and Sharing

We do not exchange personal information for money. Our use of advertising and analytics technologies may constitute a “selling” or “sharing” of personal information under the CCPA. In that case, California residents may opt out through our cookie settings or a recognized opt-out preference signal such as Global Privacy Control.

We do not currently sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA. If we introduce advertising or analytics practices that do, we will publish a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link in the footer of thevertibase.com and in our cookie settings tool before those practices begin. You will not need an account to use it, and we will not require you to verify your identity to honor an opt-out signal. We honor a valid Global Privacy Control signal today.

11.5 California Rights

• The right to know the categories and specific pieces of personal information collected, used, disclosed, sold, or shared, subject to legal limits.
• The right to request deletion of personal information, subject to exceptions.
• The right to request correction of inaccurate personal information.
• The right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information.
• The right to limit certain uses and disclosures of sensitive personal information, where applicable.
• The right not to receive discriminatory treatment for exercising CCPA rights.

11.6 Retention Criteria

We retain each category of personal information only for as long as reasonably necessary and proportionate to achieve the disclosed purposes, taking into account the criteria described in Sections 8 and 9.

11.7 California “Shine the Light”

California Civil Code Section 1798.83 may permit certain California residents to request information regarding disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. Requests may be sent to privacy@thevertibase.com.

11.8 Notice of Financial Incentive

We operate ambassador, contributor, and referral programs that offer participants compensation, revenue shares, promotional placement, program units, or other benefits in connection with content they create and information they provide. Because these programs may be considered financial incentive programs under the CCPA, we provide the following notice. The material terms of each program, including what is offered and what is expected in return, are set out in the applicable program agreement. Participation is entirely voluntary, participants may withdraw at any time by contacting privacy@thevertibase.com, and we do not condition access to the Service on participation. We have made a good-faith determination that the value of the personal information involved is reasonably related to the value of the benefit offered, calculated by reference to the cost of comparable content and promotional services obtained through arm’s-length arrangements. Participants in these programs must disclose material connections in their content as required by our Terms of Service and by Federal Trade Commission rules.

12. U.S. State Privacy Rights

Residents of certain U.S. states may have additional privacy rights, depending on whether the relevant law applies to The Vertibase. These may include rights to access, correct, delete, obtain a portable copy, opt out of targeted advertising, opt out of sale, opt out of certain profiling, and appeal denied requests. We will process verified requests in accordance with applicable law.

We may use a single privacy-request process for multiple states while applying jurisdiction-specific requirements. State-law terms such as “sale,” “targeted advertising,” and “personal data” may differ from their ordinary meanings.

13. International Users

The Vertibase is operated from the United States. If you access the Service from another country, your information may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in the United States or other countries where our service providers operate. Those countries may have privacy laws that differ from the laws where you live.

The Service is directed to users in the United States and we do not currently target the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. Where those data-protection regimes nevertheless apply to processing we carry out, our legal bases are the performance of a contract with you, our legitimate interests in operating and securing a public reference database, compliance with legal obligations, and your consent where we rely on it. For restricted international transfers we rely on the European Commission Standard Contractual Clauses, the United Kingdom International Data Transfer Addendum, or another lawful transfer mechanism, and you may request a copy of the relevant safeguards by contacting privacy@thevertibase.com. Individuals in those regions may also have rights to object to processing, to restrict processing, to data portability, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

14. Children’s Privacy

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account or submit a contribution. The Service is not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a person under 16, we will take reasonable steps to delete it and to close any associated account.

For registered users who are 16 or 17, we apply age-appropriate protections and do not knowingly use their personal information for targeted advertising or profiling. Under the CCPA we will not sell or share the personal information of a consumer we know to be under 16 without opt-in consent. Under California Business and Professions Code Section 22581, a registered user who is under 18 and who resides in California may request removal of content or information that the user posted on the Service. To make a request, contact privacy@thevertibase.com from the email address associated with the account, or use the removal option in account settings. Removal means the content will no longer be publicly visible on the Service. It does not require complete or comprehensive deletion, and it does not apply to content posted by anyone other than the requesting user, content that we are required to retain by law, or copies that third parties may have already made.

15. Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational measures designed to protect personal information. These measures may include access controls, encryption in transit, password hashing, logging, backups, monitoring, and vendor-management practices. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials and for promptly notifying us of suspected unauthorized account access.

16. Third-Party Services and Links

The Service may link to or integrate with third-party websites, streaming services, social networks, authentication providers, embedded media, advertising providers, and other services. Those third parties may collect information directly from you and operate under their own privacy policies. We are not responsible for their privacy practices.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy to reflect changes in the Service, our practices, technology, vendors, or law. We will post the updated Policy and revise the “Last Updated” date. If changes are material, we may provide additional notice, such as an email, account notice, or prominent website notice, as required by law. Where consent is legally required, we will seek it.

18. Contact Us

Questions or privacy requests may be sent to:

Vertical Romance
ATTN: Privacy
40 E. Verdugo Ave. #128
Burbank, CA 91502, USA
Privacy requests: privacy@thevertibase.com
Account support: support@thevertibase.com
Security reports: security@thevertibase.com
Copyright and DMCA notices: dmca@thevertibase.com
Publicity, privacy, and impersonation complaints: legal@thevertibase.com