About/Privacy Policy

Summary

1. You do not have to provide any personal data to be able to browse the contents of the MusicBrainz database.
2. You do not have to provide any personally-identifying information if you choose not to.
3. We will never reveal your email address on MusicBrainz controlled web sites.

Having said that, in order to get maximum value out of MusicBrainz you may want to create an account and log in. Doing so grants you the ability to: edit the database, contribute your own data, communicate with other users, and keep track of recently released music from artists in your MusicBrainz collection. If you choose to create an account then the minimum we ask is that you: choose a unique username and password, use a web browser that accepts "session" cookies, and provide a verified email address.

If you do not create an account (or are not logged in) you will not have access to the above listed features, however, you will still have full access to browse and examine the database.

Applicable to all users

Cookies

We use two cookies that contain sensitive information:

1. remember_login: If you choose the "Log in permanently" option when logging in to MusicBrainz; the cookie will be used to remember your login details.
2. musicbrainz_server_session: If you are logged into MusicBrainz, your current session ID is stored in this cookie.

We may store boolean dynamic preference information in other cookies, but these do not contain any sensitive information.

Web and FTP access logs

In a practice similar to other web sites we keep logs of all web requests made against our servers. These logs include: your IP address, your browser's "User-Agent" string, and which page you requested. Aggregate information about web and FTP traffic is made available to the public via our site usage pages.

Third-party content

The MusicBrainz web pages load some third-party content. Some, but possibly not all sites are listed below:

1. Cover art images: These are provided by the various cover art sites that have given MusicBrainz permission to do so. This means that the relevant site will know (if they want to) your IP address, User-Agent string, etc., and which MusicBrainz web page you were visiting (the one which included the cover art image).
2. Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics in our web pages to get a picture of who visits MusicBrainz. From these analytics we can set targets for supported browser versions, screen sizes and other useful information that we take into consideration when developing or improving features on our site. If you object to the use of Google Analytics, please consider blocking it in your browser.
3. AcoustID: Our fingerprints tab loads fingerprint information from acoustid.org.
4. reCAPTCHA: Our account creation page loads third party content in order to prevent spammers from creating accounts.

The above information assumes that you are using "normal" web browser settings, whereby images are always loaded and HTTP referrer information is always sent.

It is impractical to constantly modify this privacy policy when MusicBrainz changes which third party content it utilizes. We will aim to use common sense, respect to our community and community review when adding more content from third party sites. We will also periodically review our policy to ensure that it remains current.

Applicable to account holders

Account creation

When creating an account with MusicBrainz you need to pick a unique username and choose a password, the username you pick is the only name associated with your account and will be what other MusicBrainz users know you as. You may optionally also tell us other information about yourself that will be displayed to other MusicBrainz users and the public.

Additionally, in order to edit the database you will need to provide a confirmed email address. This email address will be held in confidence, the only method of revealing your email address to another user is if you choose to send a message to another MusicBrainz user and enable the option to "reveal my email address". Changing the email address stored with your account will require you to verify the new address.

Edits and notes

If you make any changes to the MusicBrainz database, such as adding any data (including fingerprint submissions), the details of those changes will be visible to other logged-in MusicBrainz users and the change will be associated with your username.

Subscriptions

As a logged-in user you can subscribe to one or more artists, labels, collections or other editors. The act of subscribing causes any edits made to (or by in the case of another editor) those entities to be emailed to you. By default, other users can see your list of subscriptions, however, you can opt out of this by editing the appropriate preference.

This does not provide "perfect" privacy though, in some cases it will be possible to infer information about the contents of your subscription list even though you have disallowed others from viewing that list directly. This imperfection arises because various parts of the system behave differently depending on whether or not an entity has any subscribers; also, the number of users subscribed to each artist is available via the artist pages. In the most extreme (possibly contrived) example, imagine that all users have their subscriptions set to "public", except for exactly one user whose list is "private". In that case, any discrepancy for a given artist between the shown list of subscribers and the total number of subscribers must be down to that one user. Thus, you can infer what artists are on that user's list.

Mailing lists

MusicBrainz has a number of mailing lists which you can subscribe to by providing your email address.

This email address will not be revealed to anyone, unless you post a message to a list, in which case your email address will be revealed to all subscribers of the list(s) to which you posted on. Additionally, every mailing list has multiple public archives, and any posts made will contain the email address of the poster (albeit in a form intended to provide some anti-spam protection).

Third party sites

Our Code Review site is hosted with a trusted third party, but it is not under the control of MusicBrainz. Participating in code review on this site may expose your email address.

The localization service we use for creating localized versions of the MusicBrainz site embeds embeds email addresses into translation files that will be checked into our git repositories. If you participate in translating at Transifex, your email address will be visible in our git repositories.

Exceptions

Please note: Reasonable exceptions may apply to the above policy, for example to comply with applicable laws. The MusicBrainz server administrators (about five people in all) can of course see any information on the system they want to, but to be honest we're probably not interested enough to look.