Privacy

No account

Anychord asks for no sign-up, no email address and no password, on the web or in the apps. There is no user record to hold a history, so nothing you search for or open is attached to a person.

Songs and analyses

When a song is analyzed, the result is kept on our server: the video id or file name, the title, the chords with their timings, and a waveform. It is a cache — the next person who asks for that song gets the same answer instead of paying for the work again — and each analysis has a public address of its own on the site. It holds nothing about who asked for it.

An audio file you upload is read for its chords and deleted from the server the moment the analysis finishes or fails. It is not kept, not shared and not used for anything else; the copy that plays back to you is the one in your own browser.

Server logs

Like any web server, ours records the request: the address it came from (IP), the time, the page asked for and the browser’s user-agent string. Those logs are there for security and for finding faults, and they rotate away on their own. The address is also counted for a minute at a time so that one person cannot fill the analysis queue; that counter keeps a timestamp and nothing else, and it is thrown away when the service restarts.

The tuner

The tuner listens through the microphone. The sound is turned into a pitch reading on your own device, window by window, and each window overwrites the one before it. Nothing is recorded, nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere. The microphone opens when you tap the button and closes when you leave the page.

Ads

Ads are what pays for the analysis, so both the site and the app carry them: Google AdSense on the web, Google AdMob in the Android and iPhone apps. Google serves those ads and may use cookies or your device’s advertising ID to choose one and to measure it. What Google does with that is covered by its own terms — How Google uses cookies in advertising.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland the app asks first, through Google’s consent form, and nothing personalized is used until you answer; you can change that answer later in the app, or on the phone under Settings → Google → Ads. On the web, advertising and analytics storage stays switched off for readers in those countries until a consent dialog is answered.

On iPhone, after that form, the app shows Apple’s own question about tracking, and the advertising ID is used only if you allow it; you can change that at any time under Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. With Premium there are no ads at all, and Google’s ad software is not even started.

Measurement

To see how many people use the site we run Google Analytics 4 and Umami. Umami sets no cookies and stores nothing on your machine — it counts page views and a handful of anonymous events of ours: that a song was analysed, that playback started, that the key was moved. Nothing you type is ever part of one. Google Analytics does set cookies, under the consent rule above. Neither is used to build a profile of you, and nothing from either is sold or handed on.

The YouTube player

A song plays in YouTube’s embedded player, loaded from youtube-nocookie.com — the variant that sets no tracking cookies until you press play. From the moment it plays it is Google’s player in Google’s frame, and Google’s privacy policy applies to it.

On your phone

The apps keep a few things on the device itself: which songs you opened recently, how many free songs you have left and when the next one arrives, your language choice, and whether Premium is active. They live in the app’s own storage, are never uploaded, and are gone when you uninstall the app.

The app does not read your contacts, your files, your location or your accounts. The only permissions it asks for are internet access and — for the tuner, and only when you start it — the microphone. On iPhone it also asks, once, whether ads may use the advertising ID — see Ads above.

Premium

Premium — no ads and no song limit — is bought through Google Play or the App Store. The payment, your store account and your card stay with Google or Apple; the app learns that Premium is active and shows our server the store’s proof of the purchase, so it can be checked. What the server keeps is a fingerprint of that purchase, which product it is and when it runs out — nothing that says who you are. You manage or cancel a subscription in the store’s own subscription settings.

So that only the real apps can use our servers, the app asks Google Play or Apple to confirm it is a genuine copy on a genuine device, and our server keeps the key or id that check produced. It identifies an installation of the app, not a person. We also count how many installations use the apps each day; what is kept is the count, not which ones.

Children

Anychord is not aimed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the date above changes with it. Questions about it, or a request to have an analysis removed: maidr52@gmail.com.