Privacy Policy

Last updated: 13 September 2026

Silent Vinyls is a place where listeners rate and review records. This page explains exactly what we hold about you, why we hold it, and how to get rid of it. If anything here is unclear, write to us and we will answer.

Who is responsible

Silent Vinyls operates this site and decides how the data described below is used. You can reach us through the contact page.

What we collect

• Your account. An email address and a password. The password is never stored as you typed it — we keep only a bcrypt hash, which cannot be reversed back into your password.
• Your profile. Username, display name, avatar image, short bio and favourites — whatever you choose to fill in. All of it is public.
• What you publish. Ratings, reviews, comments, likes, reactions and the artists you follow. These are public by design: the whole point of the site is that other people can read them.
• Sign-in sessions. When you log in we record the IP address and browser user-agent of that session, so that you and we can tell a legitimate login from a stolen one.
• Messages you send us. The name, email address and message text you submit through the contact form.
• Aggregate traffic statistics. We use a self-hosted Umami instance on our own server. It records page views, referrers and approximate country. It sets no cookies, assigns no persistent identifier and does not follow you to other sites.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for your real name, your date of birth, your phone number, your address or any payment details. We do not buy data about you from anyone, and we do not sell yours.

Why we are allowed to hold it

• To run your account — without an email address and a password hash there is no way to let you back in.
• Because you asked us to publish it — your reviews and ratings are on the site because you chose to post them.
• Our legitimate interest in keeping the site working — session records and rate limits exist to stop abuse and spam.
• Your consent — where advertising requires it, as described below.

Cookies and local storage

We keep your login session in your browser's local storage, not in a tracking cookie. It stays on your device, is sent only to our own API at api.silentvinyls.com, and is cleared when you log out.

Our analytics sets no cookies at all. Third-party advertising, when it is running, may set its own — see the next section.

Advertising

Silent Vinyls is free, and we intend to cover its costs with advertising. When advertising is switched on, a third-party ad provider — Google AdSense — serves those ads and may use cookies or similar identifiers to measure them and, with your consent, to personalise them. Google acts as an independent controller of that data; how Google uses it is described in Google's own policy, and you can adjust it at My Ad Center.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland you will be asked to consent before any personalised advertising identifier is set, and you can change or withdraw that answer at any time from the same prompt.

Signed-in members do not see ads at all. If you have an account and you are logged in, no advertising code is loaded on the page.

Who else sees your data

Anything you publish is visible to everyone. Beyond that we share data only with the services that make the site run: our hosting and edge provider (Cloudflare), our email provider for account emails such as confirmation and password resets, and — when advertising is live — the ad provider named above. We do not sell personal data.

Album artwork and artist images come from Apple and Deezer catalogue APIs and are loaded from their servers, which means those servers see the IP address your browser connects from, as with any image on the web.

How long we keep it

• Account and profile data: until you delete your account.
• Reviews, ratings and comments: until you delete them, or your account.
• Session records: until the session expires or you log out.
• Contact messages: until we have dealt with them and no longer need them.
• Aggregate traffic statistics: these carry no identifier that points back to you.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — including your whole account and everything you have posted. Write to us through the contact page and we will act on it. You can also edit your profile and remove your own reviews yourself at any time.

If you think we have handled your data badly, you are entitled to complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

Silent Vinyls is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has registered, tell us and we will remove the account.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top of the page and, for anything significant, say so on the site.