Privacy policy

Short, because there is not much to say.

What we collect

Nothing that identifies you. Musicianle has no accounts, no sign-in, and no user records. We do not ask for your name, your email address, or anything else about you.

Your progress on the daily board is held in your browser while you play and is not sent anywhere except the guesses themselves, which the server needs in order to tell you what they unlocked.

We do keep a count of those guesses so we can see which boards are too hard, and we attach an anonymous visitor number to them so we can tell whether people come back. That number is described in full below.

Server logs

Our web server keeps ordinary access logs: the page requested, the time, the response status, and the requesting IP address. This is what every web server does, and it is used to keep the site running and to spot abuse. These logs are not combined with anything else and are not used to build a profile of you.

Pictures on a finished board

When you finish a board it shows a photograph of the musician and the album covers for the records on it. Those pictures are not stored here. Your browser loads them straight from the projects that host them: artist photographs from Wikimedia Commons, and album covers from the Cover Art Archive, which is run by the Internet Archive.

Because your browser fetches them directly, those two sites can see your IP address, in the same way any site you visit can. We send no identifier with the request and we tell your browser not to pass on the referring address. Nothing about your game, your guesses or your streak reaches either of them.

This happens only once a board is over. Nothing is loaded from them while you are still playing.

Advertising

This site is free and is funded by advertising. Advertising is the part of the site that involves third-party data collection, so it is worth being specific. The pictures described above are a different thing: they are fetched from elsewhere, but nothing is gathered about you through them.

We use Google AdSense. Google and its partners may use cookies or similar technologies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this or other websites. You can read how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and you can opt out of personalised advertising in Google Ad Settings.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you will be asked for consent before any advertising cookie is set, and you can change or withdraw that choice at any time.

Analytics

We do not run Google Analytics, and no analytics company receives anything about you from us. We count a few things ourselves instead, on our own server, and nothing we count is shared with anyone.

When you open a board we give your browser a random number, for example 8a41c6b846da1b69a0da68de057a523a. It is generated at random and is not calculated from your address, your device, or anything else about you. We store it alongside the board you opened and the guesses you made.

It lets us answer four questions, and only these four: how many different people played, how many played on a given day, whether anyone came back a week later, and which page they first arrived on. That third one matters more than it sounds, because it is how we tell whether this is a game people enjoy or just a link that got shared once.

The page you arrived on, and where you came from. On your first visit only, we also record two things: the page on this site you landed on, for example /heardle, and the name of the site that sent you, for example google.com. Nothing is recorded on any later visit.

We record the name of the site only, never the full address, and that distinction is the whole point. A full address often carries what somebody typed into a search box, or a code identifying them personally, in the part after the question mark. The site name answers our question completely and cannot carry any of that, so we refuse the full address rather than shortening it. If what your browser sends us is not a plain site name, we throw it away and record nothing.

This is what tells us whether a page we wrote is bringing people who stay. Without it, somebody who found us through a search and somebody who followed a friend's link look identical to us.

What it is not. The page you arrived on and the site that sent you are not a second way of recognising you: a page name and a site name are shared by everybody who arrives the same way, and we keep no address, no browser fingerprint and no precise arrival time alongside them. It is not tied to a name, an email, or an account, because there are none. It cannot be read by any other website, and no other website can tell that you visited this one. It is not sold or shared. It is not used to choose which advertisements you see. Clearing your cookies deletes it and you become a new, unrelated number.

The mobile apps

The iPhone and Android apps are not yet published, and nothing described in this section is running today. It is written down in advance so it is not a surprise later.

When they ship they will show a single advertisement on the board, and you will be able to pay once to remove it. Ads come from Google AdMob, which sets its own identifiers and is covered by Google's own policy rather than this one.

The ads are not personalised. We do not ask for your advertising identifier and we do not build a profile to target you with. Google still uses an identifier to count how often you have seen the same ad and to detect fraud, which is why the Android app asks for that permission. If you are in the UK or the EEA you will be shown Google's consent form before any advertisement loads, and if you decline, no ad is requested at all.

The purchase. Paying to remove ads happens entirely inside Apple's or Google's payment system. We never see your card, your name or your address, and we do not keep a record that you paid. Whether you have paid is a question we ask the store each time you open the app, which is also why the purchase applies to your store account rather than to a Musicianle account. There is no Musicianle account.

The consequence, so it is not a surprise: a purchase made on an iPhone does not remove ads on an Android device or on this website. There is nothing linking them, because linking them would mean identifying you across devices, which is the thing the rest of this page promises we do not do.

How to not be counted

Two ways, and both work:

• Turn on Do Not Track in your browser. Many sites ignore this setting. We do not: with it on, we give you no number and record nothing at all, including the page you arrived on and the site that sent you.
• Use this opt-out link. It replaces the number with a marker that we never count.

The opt-out is itself remembered in a cookie, so clearing your cookies undoes it. There is no way around that. Forgetting you entirely and remembering that you asked to be forgotten are the same act.

Cookies

Musicianle sets one cookie of its own, mid, holding the random number described above. It lasts a year and cannot be read by JavaScript running on the page, which means an advertisement cannot get at it. Any other cookie you receive on this site comes from advertising, as described above.

Children

Musicianle is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Music data

The release information in the game comes from MusicBrainz, and the genres come from Wikidata. Both are published under CC0. It is factual metadata about recordings and has nothing to do with you.

Your rights

The only thing we hold that relates to you at all is the random number described above and the boards it played. We cannot look you up by name or email, because we hold neither, so we cannot connect that number to you even if you ask us to.

You can erase it yourself at any time by clearing this site's cookies in your browser, which permanently breaks the link between you and anything already recorded. To stop being counted from now on, use the opt-out link. For data held by advertising partners, use the Google links above.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version replaces this page. Material changes will be noted here.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request to have something removed, can be sent to info@njligames.com.

This policy describes what the site actually does today. It is written to be accurate rather than to cover every eventuality, and it is not legal advice. If you operate this site commercially in a regulated market, have it reviewed.