SOUND: Privacy Policy

Plain-language draft · aligned with Mission Articles, Article XIII · revised October 7, 2026

DRAFT, not yet reviewed by counsel. The parts about the SOUND service describe a service that hasn’t launched, and counsel will review them before it does. The section headed This website describes what the site does today. Article XIII of the Mission Articles requires this policy to be public and plain-language, and to change only with 30 days’ notice.

SOUND collects only the data needed to run the platform. Your data is not a product. We do not sell it, license it, or share it for anyone’s advertising, ever. This policy explains, in plain language, what we collect, why, and the control you have.

What we collect

  • Account details. Your email and login credentials, to authenticate your account.
  • Payment information. Handled by our payment processor, Stripe. SOUND never stores your card number. While you have an account, and for the thirty days before it’s deleted, we keep the references Stripe gives us: your customer and subscription ids, and your card’s fingerprint, which is Stripe’s id for a card, not the number. We use the fingerprint for one thing: a card gets one free trial within twelve months across the accounts we hold.
  • Listening data. Which tracks you play and for how long. We need this to calculate and pay royalties accurately and to deliver the music to you.
  • Playlists. The playlists you make. Each one is private unless you make it public, and you can change that at any time. An artist’s playlists start out public, and the artist can make any of them private.
  • Tips. The tips you send, linked to your account.
  • Devices. An id for each device you use, and the streaming and download quality you chose for it.
  • If you’re an artist. Your name, bio, location, photo and links; whether we’ve verified you; any note we show beside your name when it mixes alphabets or looks like another artist’s; and the secret for your two-step sign-in.
  • Mailing list. If you email us to join the pre-launch list, or send the Join SOUND form on this website, you’re on it, and we keep your email address and whether you told us you are an artist or a listener, so we can let you know when SOUND opens. That is the only thing we use it for.

Those are the kinds of data the SOUND service collects. What this website collects is set out under This website below. We do not collect data for behavioral profiling, advertising, or any purpose beyond operating the platform.

How we use it

  • Authenticate your account and keep it secure.
  • Process your subscription payment.
  • Calculate and distribute royalties to the artists you listened to (the user-centric model), and publish the monthly accounting.
  • Deliver music and operate and improve the service.
  • Let you know when SOUND opens, if you’re on the pre-launch mailing list.

What we will never do

  • Sell, license, share, or transfer your personal data to any third party for commercial purposes.
  • Use your data (or share it) for advertising or ad targeting. SOUND carries no ads (Article X).
  • Build behavioral profiles of you for any purpose beyond operating the platform.

Your rights and controls

  • Export. Request a complete copy of your personal data at any time.
  • Delete. Request deletion of your data, and we complete it within 30 days. We delete your playlists, the quality you chose and the devices you chose it on, and your card’s fingerprint, and we unlink your account from your tips. We also remove the cards saved at our payment processor and delete your customer profile there; the processor keeps its own record of past payments. What stays includes the billing records and the plays our published monthly reports were calculated from, which can’t be changed once published, and any plays we set aside as fake, which we keep so a flag can be audited or appealed. None of it is used for recommendations, and none of it carries your name, but each billing record keeps our payment processor’s reference for the charge, so we can still refund that charge or answer a dispute on it. If the law requires us to keep something you asked us to delete, for example under a court order or a legal duty to preserve evidence, we keep only that, only for as long as the requirement lasts, and use it for nothing else.
  • Access and correct. See and fix the account information we hold.
  • Unsubscribe. Leave the mailing list whenever you want. Tell us and we delete your address; every message we send carries a way out.

Service providers

We will use a small number of providers to run the SOUND service, such as a payment processor and cloud and content-delivery infrastructure. They will receive only the data they need to do that work, will be bound by data-processing agreements that prohibit any secondary use, and may not sell or repurpose it.

This website

This website runs on Squarespace under its terms of service with us, and Squarespace collects visit statistics for us. The Join SOUND form at the foot of every page asks for your name, email, a subject and a message. Squarespace emails each entry to us, and we keep it in our email and log it in a spreadsheet, both on Google Workspace. We send one automatic reply to the address you gave. The form uses Google’s reCAPTCHA, which comes with Squarespace’s form. Google calls it “a powerful bot blocker that protects websites from spam, abuse, and fraud” and says its data is used “only for reCAPTCHA’s operation and security, not for personalized advertising by Google.” The site’s fonts come from Google Fonts, so your browser sends requests to Google on each visit. The Manifesto page links to a video on YouTube. Nothing from YouTube loads until you follow the link, and YouTube’s pages follow YouTube’s own privacy policy. reCAPTCHA and Google Fonts run under Google’s own terms, and we have no agreement with Google about them. We add no Google Analytics and no advertising trackers. Our newsletter lives on Substack. This site links to it, and nothing from Substack loads until you follow the link; Substack’s pages follow Substack’s own privacy policy.

Cookies and tracking

In the SOUND app and player, we use only the cookies essential to sign you in and run the service. No advertising cookies, no cross-site trackers, no data brokers. This website runs on Squarespace, which sets a security cookie and two analytics cookies for its visit statistics (ss_cvr, kept up to two years, and ss_cvt, 30 minutes), which identify unique visitors and their sessions. Measured on September 29, 2026, loading every page of this site (not submitting the form or using the cart), those three were the only cookies this site itself set. Google’s reCAPTCHA sets its own cookie, _GRECAPTCHA, when it runs, which Google calls “a necessary cookie ... for the purpose of providing its risk analysis.”

Legal compliance

We follow the privacy laws that apply where you live.

Changes to this policy

We will give at least 30 days’ notice before any material change takes effect, and we will ask for fresh consent where a change introduces a new category of data collection or use. The current policy is always posted publicly.

Contact

Questions or requests: privacy@itsthesound.com. Once SOUND is running, you’ll also be able to use the confidential reporting channel described in Article XII of the Mission Articles.