Privacy policy

• You can use Listen Along as a guest. Then the only thing stored about you is the nickname you typed.
• Sign in with Google or Discord and we store your email address, display name and avatar picture — enough to recognise you next time and to let friends find you.
• Chat messages are never written to the database, and voice chat is never recorded. Both exist only while the room is live.
• We do not sell your data, we run no advertising, and there is no third-party analytics or tracking script on this site.
• Audio plays from YouTube in your own browser. We never host, copy or re-stream it — which also means Google sees that playback, as section 5 explains.
• Email listenalonghere@gmail.com and your account, with everything attached to it, gets deleted.

This is the complete list, taken from the database schema itself rather than from a template.

If you sign in with Google or Discord

• Your email address — it is how we recognise the same person across sign-ins. It is never shown to other people in a room.
• Your display name and avatar picture URL, as the provider gives them to us. The name is what other listeners see.
• Which provider you used, so the sign-in button can remember it next time.

We ask Google and Discord for nothing beyond your basic profile and email address. We never receive your password, and we cannot post anything, read your messages or touch anything else in those accounts.

If you play as a guest

• The nickname you typed, and a random guest id. No email, no password, nothing tying the account to you personally.

Either way, once you are in

• How you dressed your avatar — the colour and hat you picked for the 2D world.
• Your friend code, the short code other people use to add you.
• Friend requests you send and receive, with their status (pending, accepted, declined) and when they happened.
• Room invites you send and receive, and which room they were for.
• Rooms you create or join — the room name, its code, whether it is public or private, its settings, your role in it, when you joined, and whether a room owner has banned you and until when.
• Playlists you save — the playlist name and, for each track, its title, artist and YouTube video id.

What a room has played

When a song plays in a room we record the song and the time against the room, not against you. There is no user id on a play record, by design: a room can show its own history, but nothing in the database builds a listening profile of a person.

The song entries themselves hold ordinary catalogue data — title, artist, duration, artwork URL, and the YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music link the track was resolved from.

Some things never reach our servers at all. They sit in your browser local storage, and you can clear them at any time from your browser settings.

• listen-along-auth — your sign-in token, user id and nickname. This is what keeps you signed in; signing out deletes it.
• listen-along:look — your avatar colour and hat, so the world can draw you before the server answers.
• la-motion — whether you switched off the animation on the home page.
• Your audio offset calibration — a few milliseconds of measured delay for your headphones or speakers, used to keep you in sync with the room.

Signing in with Google or Discord also sets a session cookie, which exists only to keep that sign-in valid. We set no advertising or tracking cookies of our own.

• Chat messages. They are relayed to the people in the room and then gone. Nothing writes them to the database, so there is no chat history to read, hand over or lose.
• Voice chat. Proximity voice is a live relay between the people in a room. It is never recorded, transcribed or stored.
• Where you walked. Avatar positions in the 2D world live in memory for as long as the room does, and no longer.
• Payment details. There is nothing to pay for, so there is nothing to collect.
• Your location, your contacts, or anything else from your device, beyond the microphone audio you actively relay by joining voice chat.

Listen Along is a small project standing on other people's infrastructure. These are the services involved, and what each one sees.

• YouTube (Google). Every track plays through YouTube's own player, in your browser, directly from YouTube. Google therefore sees that playback much as it would if you opened the video yourself, and Google's privacy policy applies to it. We never host or re-stream audio.
• Google and Discord sign-in, only if you choose to use them. They tell us your email, name and avatar; we tell them nothing about you.
• Spotify, Apple Music and the YouTube Data API. When you paste a link, our server asks these services what the track is. We send the link, not your identity.
• LiveKit carries proximity voice. It is keyed to a temporary session id for the room, not to your account.
• Vercel hosts the site and keeps ordinary server request logs, which include IP addresses, as any web server does.
• Supabase (PostgreSQL) stores the data described above, and Upstash (Redis) briefly caches resolved track information so the same link is not looked up twice.

There is no analytics product, no advertising network and no data broker in that list, and we neither sell nor rent your data to anyone.

• Your account stays until you ask us to delete it.
• Rooms with no activity for 30 days are deleted automatically by a nightly job, and their memberships, pending invites and play history go with them.
• Cached track lookups expire on their own within days.
• Server logs are kept for as long as our hosting provider keeps them, which is a matter of days, not years.

Email listenalonghere@gmail.com from the address you signed in with — or tell us your friend code or nickname if you played as a guest — and say what you want:

• A copy of what we hold about you. We will send it back as a plain file.
• A correction, though your display name and avatar are yours to change in the app at any time.
• Deletion. This removes your account, your friendships and friend requests, your room memberships, your invites and your playlists. Rooms you created are deleted or handed to someone else in them first. A room's play records may remain, since they belong to the room and were never attached to you.

We answer within 30 days, usually much sooner. Listen Along is one person's side project, so expect a human reply rather than a ticketing system. If you are in the UK, the EEA, or anywhere else with data protection law of this kind, these are your access, rectification, erasure and portability rights — one email covers them.

Listen Along is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly keep data about them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If the change is one a reasonable person would want to know about — new data collected, a new service involved — we will say so in the app rather than quietly editing the page. Carrying on using Listen Along after a change means you accept the updated policy.