The short version

BeatBuddies keeps as little as it can. There are no adverts, no tracking pixels, no analytics that follow you around, and nothing is sold to anybody. Music you upload is deleted when your party ends.

What is kept, and for how long

If you make an account

Your email address, your name if you give one, the country you choose when you sign up, a profile photo if you add one, and a scrambled version of your password that cannot be turned back into the password. If you sign in with Google we receive your email address and name from Google and store the same things — we never see your Google password. This is kept until you ask us to delete it. We also keep one “last seen” time for your account, overwritten every time you use the app, so we can tell an account somebody still uses from one nobody has opened in a year. It is a single time, not a history — there is no record of what you did or when you did it, and nothing is kept once the account is deleted.

While a party is running

• The name you give the phone. Whatever you type, so other people in the party can tell the phones apart. Call it anything.
• A random id for the phone, generated in your browser. It is not linked to you, your device, or anything else.
• Timing measurements — round trip and offset — which is how the music stays in sync.
• Music you upload, stored on the server only so the other phones in your party can fetch it.

All of this disappears when the party ends. A party ends three hours after it starts, or one hour after the last person leaves, whichever comes first. Nothing about a finished party is kept.

If you listen as a guest

To hold the ten minute guest preview to ten minutes we keep, for a few hours, a random ticket stored in a cookie and a one-way scramble of your network address and browser version. The scramble cannot be turned back into either. It exists so that closing the app does not hand out a fresh ten minutes, and for nothing else — it is never linked to a person, an account, or anything you do in a party.

Your country, when you are not signed in

To show the plans and prices for where you are, the pricing pages work out which country you are browsing from: from your internet (IP) address, or if that cannot tell, from the time zone your device reports. Only the country is used. To find it, your IP address is sent to a lookup service (GeoJS, or country.is if GeoJS does not answer), and the answer is remembered on our server for up to twelve hours, with nothing else about you. If you use a VPN, you see the plans for the VPN’s country. Once you have an account, the country you chose is used instead.

Server logs

Ordinary web server logs, which include IP addresses, are kept briefly to spot abuse and fix faults. They are not used to build a profile of anybody.

What is never collected

No advertising identifiers. No precise location — only the country, as described above. No contacts. No microphone. No browsing history. No analytics SDK. The camera is used only when you tap to scan a QR code, the picture never leaves your phone, and nothing from it is stored.

Who else is involved

Audius. When you search for a track, the search and the audio come from Audius, an independent music service. Your phone contacts them directly, so they see your IP address in the same way any website you visit does. We do not send them anything about you.

Google. Only if you choose to sign in with Google, and only to confirm who you are.

Cloudflare. The sign-up and sign-in pages use Cloudflare Turnstile to keep out automated abuse. It checks the browser rather than the person and does not track you across sites.

GeoJS and country.is. Only to look up which country an IP address is in, as described above. They receive the address and nothing else.

Payments. In the Android app, subscriptions are handled by Google Play. On this website, payments are handled by Razorpay. We never see or store your card details.

Hostinger hosts the server.

Nothing is sold, rented or shared with anyone else, ever.

Your country, and ours

Privacy laws are different from country to country, and so are the plans, prices and ways to pay that we offer. You can find the plans and prices for your country on our pricing page.

Children

BeatBuddies is not aimed at children under 13 and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has made an account, email us and it will be removed.

Your choices

• See what is held about you. Email and ask.
• Delete your account. Email from the address you signed up with, with the subject Delete my account. It is done within 7 days and confirmed by reply.
• Delete a party's uploads early. Remove the tracks, or just leave — everything goes on its own.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and anyone with an account is told by email.

Contact

Questions, requests, or anything that looks wrong: support@beatbuddies.online.