Your taste, your data

• Your account: name and email from Google sign-in, and your time zone.
• Your taste data: ratings, diary entries, reviews, likes, watchlists and plays, from the services you connect, the files you import, and what you rate here.
• What we work out from it: your Taste DNA, insights, eras, and your reactions to recommendations.
• For connected services: a username, or an access token stored encrypted.

Export files are read in your browser. Only what B-Side needs is sent: titles, years, dates, ratings, reviews and play lengths. The files themselves aren’t uploaded, and IP addresses, devices and locations in exports such as Spotify’s never leave your computer. Uploaded records are deleted once they’ve been processed.

Films and albums are analysed by an AI model (Anthropic’s Claude, or Google’s Gemini) from public information about each work (its description, tags, credits and Wikipedia article), never from anyone’s ratings or history. For many films the scores are instead predicted from the MovieLens Tag Genome (see credits below), using what the AI found for the films it has researched.

When you use Ask, your question and the parts of your profile needed to answer it (for example your Taste DNA, or titles you rated highly) are sent to that AI model to word the answer. Nothing else about you is. If you ask it to save, hide or rate something, it does that for you, and you can undo it. Your Ask conversation is kept so it’s there next time, until you choose Start over.

The same model writes the other AI pieces: your daily pairing, the portrait of your taste, names for your eras, pitches, themed lists and duel verdicts. B-Side picks the works and does the maths; the model gets only those results and puts them into words. What it writes is stored with your account and deleted with your data.

• Disconnect any service on Connect and its stored token is deleted (TMDB access is revoked on their side too).
• Delete all your taste data, or your whole account, in Settings.
• Your profile is private. If you choose to share your Taste DNA, anyone with the link sees your first name, your clearest traits and three favourite films and albums. Nothing else, and search engines are asked not to list it. Make a new link or stop sharing on Taste and the old link stops working at once. Anyone signed in who has your link can also run a taste duel against it: they see a match score, the traits your link already shows, and a film and album suggested for you both. Nothing else about you.

• B-Side is for your own, personal use. Use it to understand your taste. Don’t use it to scrape, resell or bulk-download anyone’s data.
• Only connect accounts and import files that are yours.
• Insights, trait scores and recommendations are worked out automatically, partly by AI. They can be wrong, so don’t take them as the last word.
• B-Side is a free project offered as it is. Features can change, and the service can be unavailable at times.
• Each connected service’s own terms still apply to what you do there.
• If these terms change, the date below changes with them.

• TMDB: Film and TV details and posters. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

• MusicBrainz: Album details, genres and tags (CC0). Covers from the Cover Art Archive.

• Spotify: Your plays and saved albums when you connect it, and album artwork shown unaltered. Each album page links back to Spotify.

• MovieLens Tag Genome: Film trait scores are partly predicted from the Tag Genome in the MovieLens 25M dataset by GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota (F. Maxwell Harper and Joseph A. Konstan, 2015; Jesse Vig, Shilad Sen and John Riedl, 2012), used for non-commercial purposes. The dataset itself isn’t republished here, and GroupLens doesn’t endorse B-Side.

• Wikipedia: Read for background when analysing a work (CC BY-SA). The text isn’t republished here. Album pages show the critics’ scores from an album’s “Professional ratings” box, linked back to it.

• Letterboxd: Your public diary feed when you connect it, or the export you import.

• IMDb: Only the ratings export you choose to import.

• Last.fm: Your public scrobbles when you connect it, plus listener tags and listener counts for albums.

• Discogs: The genres and styles albums are filed under. Data provided by Discogs.

• ReccoBeats: Audio features for albums (energy, mood, tempo), which help score albums that haven’t been researched yet.

• Melondy: Anthony Fantano’s album scores, shown on album pages and the Fantano card.

• ListenBrainz: Your public listens when you connect it.

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  Rate Your Music: The ratings export you choose to import, and its “Top albums of all time” chart (positions, average ratings and genres), copied by hand and linked back on the RYM card.

• Anthropic: Claude, for analysing works and wording Ask answers.

• Google: Sign-in. Gemini can stand in for Claude, depending on how this site is set up.

• Simple Icons: Most service logos (CC0).

Service names and logos belong to their owners. B-Side isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.