Privacy policy

AniVids is an anime catalog. We collect as little as we can: no real name, and an email address only to run your account. This page explains what we do keep.

Last updated October 23, 2026.

Who we are

AniVids ("we", "us") is an anime catalog and discovery site at anivids.net. We do not store or host any video. To contact us, use the report form on the Legal notice page and choose "Something else".

What we collect

• Account (only if you create one): the email address you sign up with (kept encrypted, together with a one-way hash used to stop two accounts sharing an address), a username, and your password stored only as a salted, peppered, one-way hash. We never see or store your password itself. We also store a one-way hash of your recovery code and the time the account was created. The email address is used for three things only: signing in, the six-digit code that confirms it is yours when you sign up, and the code that resets your password. We do not send newsletters or advertising and we do not share it with anyone. Accounts that were created with only a username keep working, and an email can be added or removed at any time on the Account Settings page. If email sign-up is temporarily unavailable, you can create an account with just a username instead.
• Your profile and lists (only if you sign in): the avatar you pick, your watchlist (title, poster, format, score, episode count, status and the episode you reached), any lists you create (their names and titles) and your thumbs up or down on episodes.
• Sign-in session: a random token, stored only as a one-way hash, that expires after 30 days or when you sign out.
• Abuse prevention: your IP address is turned into a one-way hash and used only to rate-limit sign-in and report attempts. The hash is deleted after 24 hours and the raw address is not stored by us.
• Visit statistics: which pages are viewed, device type, country and how quickly pages load, collected by privacy-focused analytics that do not use cookies.
• Anonymous daily counters, such as how many pages were viewed. They contain no user ID, no cookie ID and no IP address, and are deleted after about 120 days.
• Reports: if you send a report or takedown request, we store the message, the page it concerns and any contact detail you choose to give. It is forwarded to the site operator and kept for as long as needed to handle the request.

Cookies and on-device storage

We set at most two cookies, and only after you sign in: "__Host-sid" (your sign-in session, HttpOnly, 30 days) and "av_in" (a marker that you are signed in, so the site can skip a lookup for visitors who are not). Neither is used for advertising or tracking across sites.

Your browser also keeps some settings on your own device that are never sent to us: a copy of your watchlist, recent searches, where you stopped watching, player preferences, whether you confirmed you are 18 or older, and the dates of your first and latest visit (used only to count, anonymously, how many visitors come back). You can clear these at any time in your browser settings.

Third parties

Cloudflare hosts and secures the site and delivers it from servers around the world, so your requests (including your IP address) pass through Cloudflare under its own privacy policy. If you add an email address, the codes we send to it are delivered through Cloudflare Email Service, which therefore handles that address and the message.

Some artwork and catalog information come from third-party services. When an image is loaded straight from one of them, that service can see your IP address and browser details.

Where video is available, it plays in a frame from a third-party player that we do not own or operate. That player can load its own scripts, set its own cookies and show its own advertising, under its own policies. We cannot control it.

Advertising: some actions, such as pressing play, can open an advertiser's page in a new tab through an advertising partner. We do not give the partner your username, watchlist or any other account data, and adult titles never trigger one. Once that page opens, the partner sees your IP address and browser details like any website you visit and may use cookies of its own under its own policy. If we show other kinds of ads in future, we will update this page before they go live.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not use it for profiling.

How we use it

• To run your account and show your lists on your devices.
• To keep the site secure and stop abuse.
• To understand, in aggregate, which parts of the site are used so we can improve it.
• To review and act on reports and takedown requests.

How long we keep it

Account data is kept until you delete your account. You can do that yourself on the My Account page; it permanently removes your username, password hash, recovery code hash, email address (if you added one), avatar, watchlist, lists, episode reactions and sessions. Sessions expire after 30 days, IP hashes after 24 hours and anonymous counters after about 120 days.

Your choices and rights

You can use almost the whole site without an account. You can delete your account at any time, change your password, and clear on-device data in your browser. If you are in the EU, UK, California or elsewhere with privacy laws that give you rights to access, correct, delete or object to the use of your personal data, you may use them: since accounts hold only your email address (if you gave one), a username and your lists, deleting your account removes everything we hold about it, and for anything else contact us with the form on the Legal notice page.

If you have not added an email address, we cannot reset a password for you. If you lose both your password and your recovery code, the account cannot be recovered. If you did add one, you can reset your password with a code sent to it.

Security

Traffic is encrypted over HTTPS, passwords are hashed with a slow, salted algorithm plus a secret server-side pepper, sign-in tokens are stored hashed, and sign-in and report attempts are rate-limited. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a unique password and keep your recovery code safe.

Children and adult content

AniVids is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. Some titles are for adults only; they are hidden by default and appear only after you confirm on your device that you are 18 or older.

Changes

We may update this policy. The date at the top shows when it last changed, and if we make a material change, such as new kinds of advertising, we will update it before the change takes effect.