Privacy

Rotation is a daily music chart you read. There are no accounts, no logins and no profiles. We do not track you across the internet, we do not sell data about you, and we do not run advertising networks. You can read every word of Rotation without telling us anything. If you subscribe to the weekly pressing, we hold your email address.

Rotation is operated by Apropos Studio, LLC, which is the data controller for anything described below.

Visiting the site. We use privacy-preserving, cookie-free analytics to count how many people read each edition and whether they come back. It records aggregate figures such as page views, referring site and country. It does not use cookies, does not fingerprint your device, and does not build a profile of you or follow you to other sites. There is no cookie banner because there are no cookies to consent to.

Pressing play. When a record starts or a session finishes, we count it: which page it played from, which record, and the day. That is the entire event. It carries no account, no cookie, no IP address and no device details, because the counter has no columns for them: we count plays, never people. These counts tell us whether the listening side of Rotation is working, and nothing else.

Counting returning devices. Your browser holds a random id in its local storage, so we can count how many devices come back and which parts of Rotation get used: a page viewed, a record played, a save to the queue or the crate, an analyzer run, a subscribe attempt. The id is random, not derived from anything about you or your device, and it is never anything about you: no name, no email, no IP address, no browser details, and it is never joined to your email address or to anything else here. Clear your site data and it is gone; we then count you as a new device, because you are one to us. The play counter described above is unchanged and still carries no id at all. You can see your own id, in full, at rotation.today/device: it is everything we know about this browser.

Flagging an analyzer reading. The key & BPM analyzer runs on your device and your audio never uploads. If you choose to flag a result as wrong, we receive the flag itself: the reading, the note you typed, and a short fingerprint derived from the file’s name, size and modified date so repeat flags for the same file group together. It carries no account, no cookie and no audio. To keep this endpoint from being flooded, our server reads your IP address to make that one decision and does not store it.

Subscribing to the weekly pressing. Give us your email address and we send you the weekly pressing, plus the occasional note about something we have built. Our email provider holds the address. Rotation’s database never sees it, not even while your confirmation is pending, because the pending state travels inside the link we email you rather than in a table here. We never join it to what you read, what you play or what you save, and there is nothing to join it to: the counter has no columns for people and your crate never leaves your browser. Every email has an unsubscribe link. Using it deletes the address.

Server logs. Our hosting provider keeps short-lived request logs, including IP addresses, for security and abuse prevention. We do not use them for analytics and we do not join them to anything else.

We do not collect data about you from the music platforms we measure. Rotation reads published chart rankings, which are aggregate lists of songs. It does not read, request, receive or store any individual user’s account data, listening history, viewing history, videos, followers or engagement from Spotify, Apple Music, Shazam, YouTube, TikTok, Deezer or any other platform. There is nothing in our ledger that identifies a person.

Song pages may embed official players from music platforms so you can hear what you are reading about. Those players are served by the platform, not by us. If you press play, that platform may set its own cookies and receive your IP address and player interactions under its own privacy policy, which we do not control. Saving a record to your crate fetches its 30-second preview from Deezer, so Deezer sees your IP address and the song you saved, likewise under its own policy. If you never press play and never save to the crate, you are subject to this policy alone.

Rotation uses YouTube API Services to find and check the official video for each charted record, and plays it through YouTube’s IFrame player. We ask YouTube two things: which videos might be a given recording, and then, for each candidate, its exact length, its channel, its title and whether it may be embedded. That second question is the whole job. We will only play a video whose length matches the record, so that you hear the record rather than a sped-up re-upload of it.

All of that is public information about videos. We use an API key, not a sign-in: Rotation never asks you to connect a YouTube or Google account, and it receives no account data, viewing history or subscriptions belonging to anyone. No player exists on the page until you press play, as described above.

In using Rotation you are also bound by the YouTube Terms of Service. What Google receives once a video is playing is covered by the Google Privacy Policy.

We use a small number of third parties to run the product: a hosting provider to serve the site, a database provider to store the chart ledger, an email provider to send the weekly pressing, and an analytics provider as described above. They process data only to provide those services to us.

Chart data, which is about songs rather than people, is kept indefinitely: the archive is the point of the product. Play counts and analyzer flags describe records and readings, not people. Device counts carry only the random id described above, which stops meaning anything the moment you clear your site data. Analytics data is aggregate and contains nothing personal to delete. We keep your email address until you unsubscribe.

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, by writing to the address below. Since we are unlikely to hold any personal data about you beyond an email address, this is usually a short conversation.

Rotation is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of this page. Material changes will be noted in the daily edition rather than made quietly.

Write to hello@rotation.today.