1. Who is responsible
Audible Atlas (“we”, “us”), a business based in Ontario, Canada, operates audibleatlas.com and is responsible for the personal information described here. Our Privacy Officer can be reached at contact@audibleatlas.com. This policy is written to meet Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, where they apply, the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulations and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
2. What we collect
Account information
Your email address, your password (stored only as a hash by our authentication provider), your username, an optional display name, your profile visibility setting, the sounds you favourite, the soundboards you create and their visibility, and any reports you send about a sound.
Content you upload
The audio files you upload with their title, description, tags, colour and visibility, and the country your upload was made from (derived from your network by our hosting provider, used for trending lists).
Usage events
When anyone plays, views, downloads or shares a sound, we record the event against a pseudonymous visitor key: a salted hash of the IP address and browser that changes every day, together with a country code. We do not store raw IP addresses or browser user agents in our database. The same daily hash is used to cap how often one address can count towards a sound’s statistics. Usage events are deleted after 30 days. Favourites are linked to your account for as long as it exists.
Country
Your approximate country, derived from your network by our hosting provider, or the country you choose in the footer.
Technical logs
Our hosting and infrastructure providers keep standard request logs (IP address, browser user agent, requested URL, timestamps) for a short period for security, debugging and abuse prevention.
Messages
Anything you send us by email, including copyright notices and privacy requests.
4. Why we use your information
- To provide the Service you asked for: accounts, uploads, favourites, soundboards, playback and downloads (performance of a contract).
- To keep the Service secure, prevent abuse, enforce limits and compute trending lists (our legitimate interests, balanced against yours).
- To send transactional emails such as confirmations, sign-in links and password resets.
- To comply with legal obligations, including handling copyright notices and requests from authorities.
- With your consent, where the law requires it. You may withdraw consent at any time by contacting us or deleting your account.
6. Where your information is stored
We are based in Ontario, Canada. Our service providers store and process data in the United States. Information held there may be accessible to authorities under the laws of that country. We use providers that commit contractually to protect the data they process for us.
7. How long we keep it
- Account information, favourites, soundboards and uploads: until you delete them or your account.
- Usage events: 30 days.
- Removed uploads: the audio file is deleted by a daily job (within about a day). A record of the sound without the audio is kept for provenance, abuse prevention and legal obligations.
- Backups: a limited period after deletion.
- Emails and notices: as long as needed to handle them and to meet record-keeping obligations.
8. Public and private content
Public profiles, sounds and soundboards are visible to everyone, including search engines. Private sounds and soundboards are shown only to you: they are hidden from pages, search, lists and sitemaps. The audio file of a private sound is stored at an unguessable public URL that changes when you make the sound private; anyone who already has that file URL can download the file until it changes or the sound is removed.
9. Your rights and choices
You can edit your profile, sounds and soundboards, and delete your account, from Settings. Deleting your account removes your profile, favourites, soundboards and reports immediately; your upload files are deleted within about a day.
By emailing contact@audibleatlas.com you may also ask to access or correct the personal information we hold about you, receive a copy of it, withdraw consent, or object to or restrict our processing where the law allows. We may ask you to verify your identity and will reply within 30 days.
- Canada: you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
- EEA and UK: you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and may complain to your supervisory authority.
- California: you have the rights to know, delete and correct, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We do not sell or share personal information.
10. Children
The Service is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. If we learn that we have, we delete the account.
11. Security
We use HTTPS everywhere, HttpOnly session cookies, hashed passwords, row-level access controls in our database and least-privilege keys for our services. No method is perfect; if a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Privacy Commissioner as PIPEDA requires.
12. Email
We send only transactional email: account confirmation, sign-in links, password resets and email-change confirmations. We do not send marketing email without your express consent, in line with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation.
13. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
We do not track you across other sites and do not sell your data, so there is nothing for these signals to switch off; they are honoured by design.
14. Changes and contact
We may update this policy; the date at the top shows the current version and material changes will be announced on the Service. Questions and requests: contact@audibleatlas.com. See also our Terms of Service and Copyright & DMCA Policy.