What we know when you listen.

When you listen, we record

One record for each listening session, written when you stop listening. This applies to every Sapphire stream, whichever app, website or speaker you use.

Station and stream

Which station you listened to, and whether in FLAC or MP3.

When and how long

When you started and stopped listening, and how much audio we sent. Sessions shorter than five seconds are not recorded.

Your player

The name your app or browser gives itself (its user agent), cut to 256 characters. We keep only the kind of player it is, such as “web browser, mobile” or “smart speaker”, and its name.

Your network, not your address

Your IP address is shortened before it is saved: the last part is removed (for IPv4 we keep 203.0.113.0 of 203.0.113.77; for IPv6 the first 48 bits), so it points to a network shared by many people, never to you. We use it once to look up your country and then delete it.

What we work out from it

Country

Looked up from the shortened network when your session is collected.

A daily listener code

A one-way code made from the shortened network and your player’s name, mixed with a random value that changes every day and is deleted after three days. It lets us estimate how many different people listened on a day without knowing who they are. It cannot be linked across days, and it cannot be turned back into your network.

From these we produce listening reports: total hours listened, average time spent listening, how many people listen in an average quarter-hour, when people tune in and out, which countries and kinds of player they use, and estimated audiences per song for music royalty reporting. The royalty figures are estimates and are labelled as such.

How long we keep it

On the streaming server

Normally for less than a minute, until our operations system collects it; never more than 30 days.

Listening sessions

13 months, then deleted.

Daily totals

Kept. These are counts only (hours listened, sessions, listeners per station, country and player type) and hold nothing about any one person.

What we never do

• –Store your full IP address with your listening, or write it to our logs.
• –Record our own monitoring connections as listeners.
• –Use listening data for advertising, sell it, or share it with anyone else.
• –Follow you across other websites, or across days.
• –Set cookies or anything else on your device to measure listening.

On this website

The site remembers the station you last chose in a first-party cookie, and your volume and mute setting in your browser’s local storage, so the player opens the way you left it. Neither is sent anywhere else, and you can clear them at any time in your browser.

The site and the streams are delivered through Cloudflare, which handles your connection and so sees your full IP address while it does. We use it only for that connection, for example to stop one address overwhelming a stream, and do not keep it.

Your rights

We rely on our legitimate interest in understanding and running our stations and in reporting music use accurately. Because we cannot tell who you are from what we keep, we usually cannot find “your” sessions, but you can still ask us anything about this notice, object to it, or ask us to delete something you think is yours. Write to [email protected]. If you are in the UK you can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

Credits

Country lookup uses IP Geolocation by DB-IP, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Player types come from the Open Podcast Analytics Working Group user-agent list (MIT licence).