What this server records and what it does not. Nothing is recorded against you; audio is destroyed rather than archived.
Privacy
The short version
Listening asks nothing of you: no account, no sign-in, no cookie set by us, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party trackers. Nothing you do while listening is recorded against you, and nothing about you is sold or shared for anyone else’s purposes.
Broadcasting is different, and it is the only part of this site that is. Taking a frequency needs an account, an account has an email address on it, and signing in sets a session cookie — the ordinary kind that keeps you signed in, not the kind that follows you. If you have never taken a frequency, none of that has happened to you.
Four things leave this server, and all four are named below: a recording you commit is checked by machine before it goes on air, a report you file is stored so that somebody can act on it, a broadcaster’s account is held by the service that provides sign-in, and paying for an address is handled by a payment processor.
Nothing about a payment is held here. Card details, billing address and country are given to Stripe on their own page and never reach this service; what comes back is which frequency was bought, what it cost, and that the money arrived.
What follows is the long version, which exists because "we collect nothing" is almost never literally true of anything connected to a network.
What the receiver keeps on your device
The set remembers how you left it, in your browser’s local storage, on your device only. Five values: volume, bass, treble, stereo width, and whether the power was on.
They never leave your device and are never sent to the server. Clearing your browser’s site data for finite.fm removes them, and the set goes back to its factory position.
What the server records
The receiver asks the server for the state of the band every few seconds. Those requests are served from ordinary web-server logs held by the hosting provider: your IP address, the time, the path requested, the response code, and your browser’s user-agent string.
These logs exist to keep the service running and to stop abuse — that is the sole legitimate interest they are kept under (Art. 31 revFADP; Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). They are not analysed for behaviour, not joined to anything else, and not used to build a profile. They are retained for as long as the hosting provider’s default retention, which is short, and are not archived.
The upload path additionally counts recent requests per IP address in memory, so that one client cannot flood it. That counter holds nothing but a count and a timestamp, and is discarded when its window expires or the server restarts.
If you broadcast: the account
Taking a frequency needs an account, because an address has to belong to somebody and stay theirs. Accounts are run for this service by Clerk, named below. What Clerk holds is what you gave it when you signed up — an email address, and whatever the sign-in method you chose involves — together with the sessions you have opened and the usual security metadata that comes with keeping a login safe.
This server does not hold your email address. What it stores against a frequency is the account identifier Clerk issued you and the date you took it: enough to know that the address is yours and to hand you back the tape on it, and not enough to say who you are without asking Clerk.
Signing in sets cookies on this domain so that you stay signed in between pages. They are session cookies for authentication, not measurement, and they are set when you sign in on the deck — never by listening. Because they belong to the whole site, they will travel with the receiver page too once they exist; nothing on the receiver reads them.
Sign out and the session ends. Give up your address and the link between you and that frequency is deleted with the tape. Delete your account and the account is gone — write to the address below if you would rather it were done for you, and say which it is.
Legal basis: performing what you asked for by taking an address (Art. 31 revFADP; Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Clerk is in the United States, so an account involves a transfer there; the transfer rests on the European Commission’s adequacy decision for the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and on standard contractual clauses.
If you report a frequency
The Report plate on the casing files a complaint about one frequency. It records what you tell it: the frequency, the time you say you heard it, what kind of problem it was, and whatever you write in the description. It also records which recording was on that frequency at the time, so that the complaint still means something after the broadcaster has recorded over it.
Your name and your email address are optional and the form says so. Filled in, they are stored with the report and used for one thing: writing back to you about what happened to it. They are not added to any list, because there is no list.
A report is kept while it is being dealt with and for as long afterwards as is needed to show what was decided and why — a complaint deleted the moment it is closed cannot be revisited by the broadcaster it went against. Reports are read by the operator and nobody else, and are never published, never shown to the broadcaster complained about with your details attached, and never counted in public anywhere.
Legal basis: the legitimate interest in keeping unlawful and abusive material off a public band (Art. 31 revFADP; Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR), and your consent for the contact details you chose to give.
What is done to a recording automatically
Every recording committed to a slot is checked before it is audible. It is sent to OpenAI, where it is transcribed and the transcript is classified against the content guidelines; what comes back is a content type, a score, and any rule it appears to break. The result is stored with the slot and a recording that fails is stopped.
This is processing of the recording, not of you: it is sent as an audio file, on its own, with no name, no account and no frequency attached. This server knows which account committed it and deliberately does not pass that on. OpenAI acts as a processor and states that content sent through its API is not used to train its models. A transcript is kept with the slot so that a verdict can be reviewed rather than merely trusted, and it is destroyed with the recording.
If you would rather this did not happen to something, the answer is not to broadcast it. There is no opt-out, because an unchecked frequency on an open band is the thing the check exists to prevent.
Recordings
A recording committed to a slot is published: anyone who tunes to that frequency hears it. Treat everything you put on the band as public and permanent-until-decayed, and do not record other people without their agreement.
A recording is stored as an audio file and a timestamp. It carries no location data and no device identifier; the browser’s recorder is asked for one mono channel and nothing else. After 30 days it has fully decayed, and it is deleted rather than archived — there is no backup copy from which it could be brought back.
The microphone is only ever opened after you press record, and the audio stays in the page until you choose to commit it.
Who else is involved
The service runs on infrastructure operated by others, which necessarily see the traffic passing through them:
- Railway Corp. — application hosting and file storage (European Union (region as configured)).
- Cloudflare, Inc. — content delivery and traffic protection (global edge network).
- OpenAI, L.L.C. — automatic checking of recordings against the content guidelines — each recording is transcribed and the transcript classified (United States).
- Clerk, Inc. — accounts and sign-in for broadcasters — only somebody who takes an address ever reaches it; listening never does (United States).
- Stripe, Inc. — payment for addresses — the card details and billing information are given to Stripe and never reach this service, which is told only that a payment succeeded and for which frequency (United States, with Irish and Luxembourgish entities for European payments).
They act as processors on the operator’s instructions. No data is passed to anybody else, and none of it is used for advertising.
Your rights
You can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, and object to it being held at all. Write to alexander@muedespacher.ch.
If you have only listened, that request is answered with the fact that there is nothing to return: no account was made, nothing was written down against you, and the settings the set remembers never left your device.
If you broadcast, there is an account, and the answer has two halves — what Clerk holds about the account itself, and what this server holds against your frequency, which is an identifier and a date. Both are covered by the same request; ask once and say that you broadcast.
If you are in Switzerland you may also complain to the FDPIC; in the EU, to your national supervisory authority.
Changes
If this text changes, the date at the foot of this plate changes with it. There is no mailing list to notify, because there is no mailing list.
finite.fm is a receiver, and the band, the dial and the sound are all built in the browser. With scripts off there is nothing here to hear.