Privacy
The short version
Longwave does not ask who you are and has no way of finding out. There are no accounts, no advertising and no cookies. Nothing you do in the player — what you play, when, or for how long — is sent anywhere. Your volume, your theme and your last channel are remembered by your own browser and never leave your device.
The one thing we do measure is how many people visit, counted in a way that cannot identify anybody. It is described in full below.
Longwave does not ask who you are and has no way of finding out. There are no accounts, no advertising and no cookies. To know whether the player is actually useful, we count — anonymously, with no identifier of any kind — how often the music starts, how long it plays and whether people come back. Exactly what is counted, and how to switch it off, is described below under Listening statistics. Your volume, your theme and your last channel are remembered by your own browser and never leave your device.
What your browser remembers
So the player feels the same the next time you open it, your browser keeps a small note of your own settings:
- the volume you last set, and whether you muted it
- the channel you were last listening to
- whether you chose the dark or light theme
- whether repeat is on
That note is written by the player, read by the player, and sent to nobody. None of it identifies you. You can erase it at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser settings, or avoid it entirely by using a private window — Longwave works normally either way, it simply forgets your settings between visits.
While listening statistics are on, your browser also keeps the short note described under Listening statistics. It holds no identifier, and switching the statistics off deletes it.
Longwave sets no cookies at all, which is why there is no cookie banner on this site. A banner would be theatre: there is nothing to consent to.
What our servers see
The site and its audio are delivered by our hosting provider, Vercel, acting for us. Like every web server, theirs receives the details a request cannot be made without: your IP address, which browser you are using, which page you asked for and when. These are used to deliver the page and to protect the service from abuse, and we rely on our legitimate interest in keeping the site running and secure.
We keep no copy of those records, do not analyse them, do not join them to anything and do not build profiles from them. We have no analytics of what gets played, so we genuinely do not know what you listen to.
We keep no copy of those records, do not analyse them, do not join them to anything and do not build profiles from them. The listening statistics below tell us how much each channel is played in total — never what any one person listens to.
Counting visits
We count visits using Cloudflare Web Analytics, which was chosen because it collects no personal data. It records that a page was opened, roughly where in the world from, which site linked here and which kind of browser was used. It sets no cookies, does not fingerprint your device, does not follow you to other sites and never builds a profile of you. We use it only to know whether anyone is out there, on the same legitimate-interest basis as above.
Listening statistics
To learn whether people actually listen, the player sends a few events to Longwave's own server — no analytics company is involved. The server checks each event, adds one to a daily total (for example “plays of the Focus channel on 8 November that came from Google”) and throws the event away. It does not store your IP address, your browser details or any record of the individual events, so nothing it keeps relates to you. The events are:
- once per visit: the page you arrived on and where you first came from;
- when music first starts on a channel: the channel, whether it is a recording or generated live, the page you arrived on, where you first came from, whether this is your first visit, and how many milliseconds it took to start sounding;
- when playback fails or is interrupted: the channel and a technical cause, such as “stalled” or “the system paused audio”, and whether the device is an iPhone or iPad, an Android device, or something else;
- when the music has been audible for 1, 10, 60 and 240 minutes in a visit: the channel, that number, the page you arrived on and where you first came from;
- once a day at most, when you have listened for ten minutes that day: how many days it has been since your first visit (counted up to 60), where you first came from, and the channel you played most;
- when you set a sleep timer, its length; when you share, whether by the share sheet or by copying the link.
Only time when sound is actually playing is counted — not time the page is open. To work out “days since your first visit” and “where you first came from” without an identifier, your browser keeps one small note: the day of your first visit, where you first came from (a site name such as “google” or “reddit”, a campaign name, or “direct”), the last day you listened for ten minutes, and how many seconds you have listened today. There is no random ID, no fingerprinting, and the note itself is never sent — only the day count and the source name, which every visitor who arrived the same way shares. The note is replaced 13 months after your first visit.
The daily totals are kept for up to 400 days in a database run for us by our hosting provider's storage partner, Upstash, and are seen only by the person who runs Longwave.
Nothing is counted until you say yes on the banner shown on your first visit (or tick the box below), and the browser note is not created before then. We use the figures only to decide what to improve, on the basis of your consent, and never combine them with anything else. You can withdraw that consent below at any time.
Your choice
Listening statistics are off in this browser until you tick the box or say yes on the banner.
The choice is remembered by your browser as a single flag. Clearing this site's data forgets it, and the banner asks again on your next visit.
What Longwave does not do
- No analytics or tracking of any kind.
- No advertising, and no advertising or marketing identifiers.
- No cookies, no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting.
- No session recording, heatmaps or A/B testing.
- No embedded third-party players, fonts or widgets — the audio is our own copy, served from our own address.
- No sale or sharing of personal information, under any definition of those words.
Where in the world
Longwave is run from Spain, and the companies that help deliver it — our host and our analytics providers — are American businesses with networks spread across the world, so a request from you may be answered by a machine outside Europe. They handle European data under the standard contractual protections set out in their own data processing terms, which are published on their sites.
Links to other sites
We link out to the composer's site and to Creative Commons, because attribution requires it. Those sites have their own privacy practices and we have no control over them. Following a link is your choice; nothing is requested from them while you sit on our pages.
Children
Longwave is a music player suitable for a general audience. Because it collects no personal information from anybody, it collects none from children either.
Your rights, and who to ask
Longwave is made and run by Andrii Vynarchuk, in Spain, who is responsible for the decisions this page describes. Questions, requests, or anything you think this page gets wrong: kaimo.ops@gmail.com.
European data protection law gives you the right to see what is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to how it is used, and to receive a copy. Those rights apply here — but in practice there is almost nothing to exercise them against: we hold no account, no name, no email and no listening history, and the settings described above are on your own device rather than ours. Because we cannot tell one visitor from another, we may be unable to connect a request to any particular record, and will say so rather than guess.
If you think we have got this wrong, you can complain to the Spanish data protection authority, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, or to the equivalent authority in the European country where you live. We would rather you told us first, but it is your right either way.
Changes to this page
If what we collect changes, this page changes first and carries a new date. We will not start collecting something and describe it later.
Longwave is free, and nothing is for sale today. If paid features are ever added, payments would be handled by Stripe, card details would go to them and never to us, and this page would be updated to say so before the first payment is taken.
See also the Terms and the credits and licensing page.