Privacy, in plain English

Your streams: for each one, when it started, how long you listened, the track, artist and album, the device name, the country, how it started and ended, and whether shuffle, offline or private mode was on. This is what your dashboard is built from.

Your account: your email address (to send sign-in links), passkeys if you add them, and your settings. If you sign in with Google we receive your name and email from Google; the tokens are stored encrypted.

A short audit log of sign-ins, sharing and visibility changes, so you can see who could see what and when. It never includes IP addresses.

Spotify's export includes the IP address you connected from for every single stream. depth.fm drops that field while it reads the file, before anything is written to the database. The same goes for your Spotify username and anything else in the export that isn't needed for a chart.

The file you upload is stored encrypted and deleted 24 hours after it's been processed (or 24 hours after a failed attempt). Sign-in rate limits use a hash of your IP address that expires within a day; the address itself is never stored.

Only you, by default. It stays that way unless you do one of these:

• create a share link (anyone with the link can see what you chose to share, until you revoke it);
• make your profile public (it appears at depth.fm/u/your-name and in search engines);
• turn on anonymous contribution, which adds your listening, without your name, to public artist and track pages.

You can hide any artist, track or album from what others see, or from your own dashboard too. Hidden items are removed before totals, ranks and percentages are worked out, so they can't be worked out from the numbers.

Share cards (the pictures you can save for a story or post) are drawn from that same public view, so a hidden item never appears on one. You can leave your name or the numbers off a card. If you have a public or link-only profile, the card address is also open to anyone who knows your username, just like the profile itself. The artist pictures on a card are fetched by our server, never by the visitor's browser.

• Uploaded files: 24 hours after processing.
• Your streams and dashboard: until you delete them or your account.
• Guest dashboards (uploads without an account): 7 days.
• Reminder emails you asked for: the address is kept until the reminder is sent, then only the fact it was sent.
• Backups: nightly database backups are kept for 14 days, so deleted data is fully gone from backups within 14 days.

Each upload keeps a short description of its layout: the file names inside it, their sizes and the column names at the top of each table. Never the rows themselves. If an export from a music service can't be read, the site owner uses this to see what the service changed and fix the importer. It's deleted with the upload.

If you upload Spotify's Account Data zip, depth.fm also reads four files from it: your library (liked songs, saved albums, followed artists), your playlists, your Wrapped and Spotify's “Marquee” list. It keeps a summary of each (counts and names), only you can see it, and it is deleted with the upload or your account. The files with your email, birthdate, payment details or search history are never opened.

Artist photos and album covers are looked up by name (or by the public Spotify track id) from Spotify, Deezer and Apple, once per artist or album for everyone. Nothing about you is sent, and the pictures are served from depth.fm itself, so your browser never contacts those services.

One cookie keeps you signed in, and a share link with a password sets one cookie so you don't have to type it again. Your light or dark theme choice is saved in your browser, not sent to us.

depth.fm is free because of ads. We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are useful, and Google AdSense to show a few ads on public pages and the dashboard. In the UK, the EEA and Switzerland, Google's consent message asks you first, and neither sets cookies or uses your data for personalised ads until you agree. Elsewhere they run by default, and you can change your choice at any time with Cookie choices at the bottom of every page.

What Google receives: the page address (never your listening data, which isn't in any address), your browser and device type, and a shortened IP address that Google uses for rough location. Analytics never gets your email or account id. Share links and embeds carry a secret in their address, so no Google script runs on them at all. You can read how Google uses this data at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

To see which pages help and where people get stuck, depth.fm counts visits itself: the page, the site you came from, campaign tags in the link, your country (from Cloudflare), browser, device type, screen size, language, how long the page was visible, how far you scrolled, how fast it loaded, and errors from our own scripts.

No cookies, no fingerprinting, no IP addresses and no link to your account. Visits on the same day are grouped with a code that changes every day, so you can't be followed from one day to the next. The numbers are kept for 13 months and only the site owner sees them. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is counted. You can also switch it off here:

Payments are handled by Stripe on its own checkout page; depth.fm never sees your card details. Stripe tells depth.fm that a payment was made, and depth.fm keeps only the amount, the currency, Stripe's reference for the payment and which account it belongs to, so it can mark the account as a supporter. Stripe keeps its own records of the payment under its privacy policy. Deleting your account removes the link between the payment and you.

From Settings you can download everything depth.fm holds about you as a file, and delete your account. Deletion removes your streams, dashboards, uploads, share links and cached pages within minutes, and from backups within 14 days.

You also have the right to ask what we hold, to correct it, and to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) or your local data protection authority.

depth.fm is an independent project run from the United Kingdom. It isn't affiliated with Spotify or any other music service. The site, the database and the files you upload all live on our own servers in the UK. Traffic passes through Cloudflare, which protects the site from attacks, and sign-in emails are sent by Resend. Neither of them receives your listening history.