What BoomBox knows about you.

BoomBox is a place to review albums and see what the people you follow are listening to. Running it means storing the reviews you write and some information about how you use the app. This page says exactly what that is, who else can see it, and how to get rid of it.

It covers the BoomBox iOS app and the boombox.reviews website. Questions go to team@boombox.reviews.

1. What we collect

Things you give us

• Account. You sign in with Apple. Apple sends us an account identifier and an email address, which is a private relay address if you chose to hide it. We never see your Apple password.
• Profile. Username, display name, bio, birthday, an optional link, profile picture, and cover photo. Everything except birthday is optional and everything except birthday is public.
• What you write. Reviews, ratings, lists and list cover images, comments, reactions, favorites, and the albums you mark as listened. When you share a review as a Cassette card, the app uploads the image it draws so your link can show it.
• Waitlist. If you gave us an email address on boombox.reviews, we store that address and nothing else.

Things the app records as you use it

This is the part most apps are vague about, so here it is specifically. To build your feed and rank recommendations, BoomBox records:

• Which cards were shown to you and which you have already seen.
• What you tapped, liked, commented on, skipped, or hid, what you opened in Explore, and which push notifications you opened.
• How long you spent on album and review screens.
• Device model, OS version, app version, time zone, and a push notification token if you enabled notifications.
• Crash reports and diagnostic logs when the app fails, which include your account identifier and username.

Things we work out from the above

We derive a taste profile from your reviews and listening, and use it to compute compatibility scores between you and other users, suggested people to follow, and your stats pages. These are inferences about you, so we are naming them rather than burying them under "analytics". Taste Collisions, which compares your rating with a friend's when you both review the same album, can be switched off in Settings (see section 5).

2. What we do not collect

• No advertising or cross-app tracking. BoomBox has no ad SDK, no advertising identifier, and no App Tracking Transparency prompt, because there is nothing to ask you for.
• No location. BoomBox never requests or stores your location.
• No selling. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under California law.
• No listening history from Apple Music. We use Apple Music to search the catalog and show artwork and tracklists. We do not read your Apple Music library or your play history.

Album information comes from Apple Music and from the open MusicBrainz and Discogs databases, plus links to stores and streaming services. We download MusicBrainz and Discogs as public data files, so neither of them receives anything about you, and a store or streaming link only tells that service you arrived when you choose to open it.

3. Why we use it

• To create and run your account.
• To show your reviews and lists to the people who follow you, and to build your feed.
• To rank recommendations, compute stats, and suggest people to follow.
• To send notifications you asked for.
• To keep the app safe: handling reports, blocks, mutes, and enforcing our Terms.
• To find and fix crashes and bugs.

Where the GDPR applies, our legal bases are performance of a contract (running your account and showing your content), legitimate interests (safety, abuse prevention, fixing crashes, and ranking your feed), and consent (push notifications, and saving share cards to your photo library).

4. Artificial intelligence

BoomBox uses Apple's on-device foundation model to write the short summary of your listening week that appears on your stats page. That generation happens on your iPhone. The text it reads and the summary it produces are not sent to us, to Apple, or to any other company for that purpose, and they are not used to train any model. If the model is unavailable or declines to answer, the app falls back to a summary assembled from plain templates.

When our catalog embeddings feature is switched on, album catalog text (title, artist, year, genres, record label, and Apple's editorial notes) is sent to OpenAI to compute embeddings that help match albums to each other for recommendations. No user content is sent: not your reviews, ratings, username, or anything else from your account.

We do not use your reviews to train models, ours or anyone else's, and ranking your feed and computing compatibility do not use a language model. If that ever changes, we will update this page before shipping the change, not after.

5. Who else can see it

Other people using BoomBox

BoomBox is a social app, so most of what you create is public by design: your username, profile picture, cover photo, bio, link, reviews, ratings, lists, comments, and reactions. Your birthday and your email address are never shown to other users.

When you or someone else shares a review, list, achievement, or profile, the share link opens a public page on boombox.reviews that shows that content to anyone with the link, including people who do not have the app.

Settings gives you these controls:

• Notifications. Which push notifications you get, type by type, and the Taste Collisions switch. Turning Taste Collisions off takes you out of rating comparisons with friends in both directions.
• Blocked & Muted. The people you have blocked or muted, with a way to undo either. You block or mute someone from their profile.
• Support & Legal. Help, a way to contact us, and these documents.
• Delete Account. See section 7.

Companies that process data for us

We use a small number of service providers. They act on our instructions and none of them are permitted to use your data for their own purposes.

• Apple. Sign in with Apple, MusicKit for catalog search and artwork, the Apple Push Notification service, and the App Store.
• Google (Firebase Crashlytics). Crash and error reports. These include your account identifier, your username, device and OS details, and a log of recent in-app actions.
• Amazon Web Services. The image storage bucket that holds profile pictures, cover photos, list covers, and share-card images. Hosted in the United States.
• [TODO: application-server host]. The servers that run BoomBox. Hosted in the United States.
• MongoDB Atlas. The database that holds everything else. Hosted in the United States.
• Cloudflare. Hosting and delivery for boombox.reviews, plus Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without building a profile of you.

Everyone else

We will disclose information if we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse or protect someone from harm. If BoomBox is ever acquired, your information may transfer with it, and we will say so here first.

6. Where it is stored

On servers in the United States. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Canada, using BoomBox means your information is transferred to and stored in the United States. Where the GDPR requires a transfer mechanism, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses with our providers.

7. How long we keep it, and deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time, from inside the app: Settings, then Delete Account. It takes two taps and there is no form to fill in and no email to send.

When you do:

• Your profile, reviews, lists, comments, and reactions stop being visible to anyone on BoomBox immediately, and your active sessions are ended.
• A list you were building with collaborators passes to one of them instead, so their work is not lost. The albums you added to it are removed.
• We keep a recoverable copy for 30 days, so that an accidental deletion, or one made by somebody who got into your account, can be undone.
• After 30 days we permanently erase it, including your profile picture, cover photo, any list cover images you uploaded, and the share-card images the app uploaded for your reviews.
• Two things survive that erasure, in de-identified form only: aggregate counts that no longer point at you, and records we are required to keep to enforce a ban or comply with the law.

Content you wrote may still appear in screenshots and share images other people made before you deleted your account, including images their own share links still show. We cannot reach into those.

While your account is open, we keep behavioral records (what you saw and tapped) for as long as they are useful for ranking, and crash reports for up to 90 days.

8. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, give you a copy of it, correct it, or delete it. You can also object to how we use it, and withdraw consent for notifications or device permissions at any time in iOS Settings.

Email team@boombox.reviews and we will respond within 30 days. We will not charge you, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

• EEA and UK. You have the rights above under the GDPR, plus the right to data portability and the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.
• California. You have the rights above under the CCPA and CPRA. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is no opt-out to offer you.
• Canada. You have the rights above under PIPEDA and, in Quebec, under Law 25.

9. Children

BoomBox is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. We ask for your birthday at signup for this reason. In countries where the minimum age for consent to data processing is higher than 13, you must be at least that age. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email us and we will remove it.

10. Security

We restrict access to production data to the people who need it, store credentials outside the application code, and enforce per-user access rules at the database layer so that one account cannot read another's private fields.

No system is perfectly secure, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If we discover a breach affecting your information, we will notify you and the relevant regulators as required by law.

11. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app before the change takes effect. Continuing to use BoomBox after that means you accept the updated policy.

12. Contact

team@boombox.reviews. A person reads it.