Privacy notice
This is what the site and the app do with information, written by the person who wrote the code. If anything here turns out to be wrong, mail hello@acousticorbit.com and it will be fixed, in the code or on this page.
The site
- No cookies, no analytics, no trackers. The page sets nothing in your browser and loads no third-party scripts. It is served by Cloudflare, which keeps the ordinary short-lived connection logs any web host keeps, under Cloudflare's privacy policy.
- "Tell me when it ships." If you leave your mail address, we keep the address, the time and your browser's language, and we send one mail when the download is live and nothing else, ever. A copy of each new address is mailed to us so we see it arrive. To slow abuse, a hash of your connection address is kept for sixty seconds. Ask and the address is deleted.
Buying
Payment is taken by Paddle, our merchant of record. Paddle collects your payment details, billing country and mail address under Paddle's privacy policy; card numbers never reach us. Paddle tells us what was bought, when, from which country, and the mail address to send the key to. From the first sale, our licence service, run for us on Cloudflare, keeps that with your key for as long as the licence exists, plus what tax and accounting law requires. Keys are not on sale yet.
The app
The app runs on your Mac and does its work there. It talks to the network for these things and no others:
- Your licence. When you enter a key, the app sends three things: the key, your Mac's model name (for example "Mac16,7", never a serial number) and a random install number the app made. About once a week when online it confirms the key with the identifier the service assigned at activation. Nothing else about your Mac. The build you can download today, 0.2, makes that call to Lemon Squeezy's licence API at api.lemonsqueezy.com if you enter a key; no keys exist yet. The build that goes on sale makes it to our own licence service on Cloudflare, and this page changes before that build ships.
- Updates. The app fetches a small manifest from acousticorbit.com to learn whether a newer version exists. The request carries the app's version, nothing about you.
- Lyrics. When a track plays, the app asks lrclib.net once for that track's synced lyrics, sending the title, artist and album, with a user agent naming the app. Today this lookup cannot be switched off; if that matters to you, tell us and a switch moves up the list.
- Artwork and titles. When the sound comes from a YouTube, SoundCloud or Spotify page in a browser, the app asks that site's public oEmbed endpoint for the title and artwork, sending the page's address. Artwork images are then fetched from the service's own image servers (YouTube's i.ytimg.com, Spotify's image servers for the Spotify app). When a track ships no artwork, the app fetches the service's own site icon from the service's site and keeps a copy on your Mac. Those sites see those requests under their own policies.
- Cookies on those lookups. From version 0.3 the lyrics, title, artwork and icon lookups go out with no cookies and no cache, so a service cannot set a visitor id on one lookup and read it back on the next; beyond the request itself they carry nothing about you. The 0.2 build you can download today uses the Mac's ordinary web session for them, so a service may set a cookie that later lookups send back. That is the one item on this page we are changing rather than describing.
- Your own network. Finding speakers, talking to a Raspberry Pi or Android node, and the phone remote all happen on your Wi-Fi only, protected by a token the Mac shows you as a QR code. The app announces itself on your network as "Acoustic Orbit" so a remote can find it. None of this leaves your home.
The Mac's microphone is used to time your speakers and keep them in time. What it hears is analysed in memory for that purpose and is never recorded, stored or sent anywhere. macOS asks you once before the app may use it.
A phone used for calibration records up to a minute of the room with its own microphone, after Android asks you for permission, and sends that clip to your Mac over your own Wi-Fi, where it is analysed in memory and not kept. The phone keeps nothing either.
Crash reports are written to a file on your Mac if the app ever crashes. On the next launch the app asks whether to send it; pressing Send opens a mail in your own mail app, addressed to us, with the report attached: the app version, the macOS version, the last lines of the app's own log and a stack trace, or, for a crash that macOS itself reports to the app later, Apple's diagnostic file, which also names the Mac model and region format. If you do not press Send, nothing goes anywhere.
What we do not do
We do not run analytics inside the app, we do not sell or share information with anyone except as needed to take payment and deliver keys, and we do not advertise.
Your rights
Write to hello@acousticorbit.com to see, correct or delete anything we hold about you, including taking your address off the list or removing your purchase record where the law lets us. Whatever your local law gives you beyond this, Indian, European or other, ask and we will do it.
Changes
If the app starts talking to a new place, this page changes before that version ships, and the date at the top moves.