Privacy Policy

Last updated: 13 November 2026

This Privacy Notice for Podtracker (“we”, “us”, or “our”) describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share (“process”) your personal information when you use our services (“Services”), including when you:

• Visit our website at https://www.podtracker.studio/, or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Notice
• Use Podtracker. A social platform for podcast users, where they can follow their favourite shows, rate and review episodes, and follow other accounts.

Questions or concerns? Reading this Privacy Notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. We are responsible for making decisions about how your personal information is processed. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have any questions or concerns, please contact us at podtracker13@gmail.com.

Summary of key points

This summary provides key points from our Privacy Notice, but you can find out more details about any of these topics in the full sections below.

What personal information do we process? When you visit, use, or navigate our Services, we may process personal information depending on how you interact with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use.

Do we process any sensitive personal information? Some of the information may be considered “special” or “sensitive” in certain jurisdictions, for example your racial or ethnic origins, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. We do not process sensitive personal information.

Do we collect any information from third parties? We collect podcast and episode information — titles, descriptions, artwork, publication dates — from Apple and from podcasts' own public RSS feeds. That is information about shows, not about you. We do not obtain any personal information about you from anyone else.

How do we process your information? We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes with your consent. We process your information only when we have a valid legal reason to do so.

In what situations and with which types of parties do we share personal information? We may share information in specific situations and with specific categories of third parties.

How do we keep your information safe? We have adequate organisational and technical processes and procedures in place to protect your personal information. However, no electronic transmission over the internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information.

What are your rights? Depending on where you are located geographically, the applicable privacy law may mean you have certain rights regarding your personal information.

How do you exercise your rights? Email us at podtracker13@gmail.com and say what you want. We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

Table of contents

1. What information do we collect?
2. How do we process your information?
3. What legal bases do we rely on to process your personal information?
4. When and with whom do we share your personal information?
5. Do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?
6. Is your information transferred internationally?
7. How long do we keep your information?
8. How do we keep your information safe?
9. What are your privacy rights?
10. Controls for Do-Not-Track features
11. Do United States residents have specific privacy rights?
12. What's public on Podtracker
13. Do we make updates to this notice?
14. How can you contact us about this notice?
15. How can you review, update, or delete the data we collect from you?

1. What information do we collect?

Personal information you disclose to us

In Short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise when you contact us.

Personal Information Provided by You. The personal information that we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use. The personal information we collect may include the following:

• email addresses
• usernames
• passwords
• contact or authentication data
• display name
• profile picture
• bio
• external link
• ratings, reviews, lists, follows, and diary entries
• usage data

Sensitive Information. We do not process sensitive information.

Payment Data. If you choose to donate, your payment is handled entirely by Stripe on Stripe's own checkout pages. Your card number and security code are entered there and never reach Podtracker's servers — we do not collect, see, or store them, and we keep no record of individual donations. Stripe's privacy notice is at https://stripe.com/privacy.

All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.

Information automatically collected

In Short: Some information — such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or browser and device characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit our Services.

We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name or contact information) but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use our Services, and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.

Like many businesses, we also collect information through cookies and similar technologies.

The information we collect includes:

• Log and Usage Data. Log and usage data is service-related, diagnostic, usage, and performance information our servers automatically collect when you access or use our Services and which we record in log files. Depending on how you interact with us, this log data may include your IP address, device information, browser type, and settings and information about your activity in the Services (such as the date/time stamps associated with your usage, pages and files viewed, searches, and other actions you take such as which features you use), device event information (such as system activity, error reports (sometimes called “crash dumps”), and hardware settings).
• Device Data. We collect device data such as information about your computer, phone, tablet, or other device you use to access the Services. Depending on the device used, this device data may include information such as your IP address (or proxy server), device and application identification numbers, location, browser type, hardware model, Internet service provider and/or mobile carrier, operating system, and system configuration information.
• Location Data. We collect coarse location data — the country your request appears to come from, worked out from your IP address by our analytics provider. We do not use GPS, and we never ask your browser or device for your precise location. Because this is derived from your IP address rather than a device setting, there is no location permission for you to turn off; a VPN will change what we see.

2. How do we process your information?

In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We process the personal information for the following purposes listed below. We may also process your information for other purposes only with your prior explicit consent.

We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, depending on how you interact with our Services, including:

• To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. We may process your information so you can create and log in to your account, as well as keep your account in working order.
• To show your contributions to other people. Podtracker is a public site. We publish your username, display name, profile picture, bio, any link you add, and the ratings, reviews, lists and diary entries you create, so that other people can read them. We also use your ratings to work out a show's or episode's average rating, which is shown to everyone. This is the main thing we do with what you write, and it is why the site exists.
• To keep the site working and safe. We use log and usage data to run the site, fix faults, and prevent abuse such as spam, fake reviews or attempts to manipulate a rating.
• To contact you about your account. We send email to confirm your address and to reset your password. We do not send marketing email.
• To save or protect an individual's vital interest. We may process your information when necessary to save or protect an individual's vital interest, such as to prevent harm.

3. What legal bases do we rely on to process your information?

In Short: We only process your personal information when we believe it is necessary and we have a valid legal reason (i.e., legal basis) to do so under applicable law, like with your consent, to comply with laws, to provide you with services to enter into or fulfil our contractual obligations, to protect your rights, or to fulfil our legitimate business interests.

If you are located in the EU or UK, this section applies to you.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR require us to explain the valid legal bases we rely on in order to process your personal information. As such, we may rely on the following legal bases to process your personal information:

• Performance of a contract. When you create an account you are asking us to provide the Services, and these Terms are the agreement between us. We process your email address, username and the ratings, reviews, lists and diary entries you create because we cannot run your account or show you the site without them.
• Consent. We may process your information if you have given us permission (i.e., consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
• Legal Obligations. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as to cooperate with a law enforcement body or regulatory agency, exercise or defend our legal rights, or disclose your information as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
• Vital Interests. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of a third party, such as situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person.

4. When and with whom do we share your personal information?

In Short: We may share information in specific situations described in this section and/or with the following categories of third parties.

Vendors, Consultants, and Other Third-Party Service Providers. We may share your data with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents (“third parties”) who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. We use each of these companies on their standard published terms, which include their own data processing commitments. We have not negotiated separate agreements with any of them, and we do not control how they run their own services — their privacy notices are linked below so you can read what each of them commits to.

The categories of third parties we may share personal information with are as follows:

• Website Hosting Service Providers
• Cloud Computing Services
• Data Storage Service Providers
• User Account Registration & Authentication Services
• Data Analytics Services
• Payment Processors
• Email delivery service

In practice those categories are four companies. We think it is more useful to name them than to leave you with the list above:

No one else receives your personal information. If that ever changes, this table changes with it.

We also may need to share your personal information in the following situations:

• Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.

5. Do we use cookies and other tracking technologies?

In Short: We use one cookie, to keep you signed in. Nothing else.

We use one cookie to keep you signed in, which helps us maintain the security of your account and the site, and lets a page know who you are without asking you to log in again.

We do not run advertising on Podtracker, and we do not allow advertising networks to place trackers on the site. In full, what we set and why:

• A login cookie, set by our authentication provider when you sign in. It is what keeps you signed in between pages. Blocking it means you cannot log in.
• Vercel Analytics, which counts page views and measures performance. It does not use cookies and does not build a profile of you across other websites. We strip the query string from every /auth/ URL before it is recorded, so one-time login links from your email are never sent to it.

That is the whole list. There are no advertising, retargeting, or cross-site tracking technologies on Podtracker. If we ever add anything beyond the two above, this section changes first.

6. Is your information transferred internationally?

In Short: We may transfer, store, and process your information in countries other than your own.

Our servers are located in the United States. Regardless of your location, please be aware that your information may be transferred to, stored by, and processed by us in our facilities and in the facilities of the third parties with whom we may share your personal information (see When and with whom do we share your personal information? above), including facilities in the United States and other countries.

If you are a resident in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), or Switzerland, then these countries may not necessarily have data protection laws or other similar laws as comprehensive as those in your country. However, we will take all necessary measures to protect your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Notice and applicable law.

About transfers out of the EEA and UK. Podtracker is one person in Michigan. There is no company, no group of companies, and we have not separately signed Standard Contractual Clauses with anyone. What we rely on is the four companies listed above: each is a US provider whose own standard terms address international transfers, including the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses where they apply. Their privacy notices are linked in that table, and they describe those arrangements in more detail than we are in a position to.

7. How long do we keep your information?

In Short: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless otherwise required by law.

The general rule: we keep your personal information for as long as you have an account. Delete your account and your profile, ratings, reviews, lists and diary entries are removed from the site immediately.

There are two exceptions, and we would rather state them than leave them implied:

• Backups. Our database provider takes automatic backups on its own schedule. A copy of deleted information can survive in those backups for a short period until they are overwritten in the normal course. We do not use backups to restore deleted accounts.
• Legal and safety reasons. We may keep a limited record where we need it to prevent fraud or abuse, to deal with a dispute, or because the law requires it — for example, records relating to a donation, which we may need for tax purposes.

When we no longer need your personal information for either of those reasons, we delete it or anonymise it. Where that is not immediately possible, we isolate it from any further use until it can be deleted.

8. How do we keep your information safe?

In Short: We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organisational and technical security measures.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.

9. What are your privacy rights?

In Short: Depending on your state of residence in the US or in some regions, such as the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK) and Switzerland, you have rights that allow you greater access to and control over your personal information. You may review, change, or terminate your account at any time, depending on your country, province, or state of residence.

In some regions (like the EEA, UK and Switzerland), you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right (i) to request access and obtain a copy of your personal information, (ii) to request rectification or erasure; (iii) to restrict the processing of your personal information; (iv) if applicable, to data portability; and (v) not to be subject to automated decision-making. If a decision that produces legal or similarly significant effects is made solely by automated means, we will inform you, explain the main factors, and offer a simple way to request human review. In certain circumstances, you may also have the right to object to the processing of your personal information. You can make such a request by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section How can you contact us about this notice? below.

We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

If you are located in the UK and are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, you can make a complaint directly to us. This is in addition to the rights you have under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018.

How to contact us:

• Email: podtracker13@gmail.com

What happens after you complain:

• We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days of receiving it.
• We will investigate without unjustifiable or excessive delay.
• We will keep you informed of progress and explain the outcome.

If you are not happy with our final response, you can refer your complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK supervisory authority.

• Website: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint
• Helpline: 0303 123 1113
• Post: Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF

If you are located in the EEA or UK and you believe we are unlawfully processing your personal information, you also have the right to complain to your Member State data protection authority or UK data protection authority.

If you are located in Switzerland, you may contact the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section How can you contact us about this notice? below or updating your preferences.

However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

Account Information

If you would at any time like to review, change or delete the information in your account, you can:

• Log in to your account settings and update your user account.
• Delete your account from Settings → Authentication → Delete account. We ask for your password and your username first, because this cannot be undone.

Upon your request to terminate your account, we will delete your account and information from our active databases immediately. However, we may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our legal terms and/or comply with applicable legal requirements. Backups are overwritten on their own schedule, so a copy can survive there for a short time after it has gone from the site.

Cookies and similar technologies: Most Web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove cookies and to reject cookies. If you choose to remove cookies or reject cookies, this could affect certain features or services of our Services.

If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, you may email us at podtracker13@gmail.com.

10. Controls for Do-Not-Track features

Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognising and implementing DNT signals has been finalised. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Notice.

California law requires us to let you know how we respond to web browser DNT signals. Because there currently is not an industry or legal standard for recognising or honouring DNT signals, we do not respond to them at this time.

11. Do United States residents have specific privacy rights?

In Short: If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia, you may have the right to request access to and receive details about the personal information we maintain about you and how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, get a copy of, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. More information is provided below.

Categories of Personal Information We Collect

The table below shows the categories of personal information we have collected in the past twelve (12) months. The table includes illustrative examples of each category and does not reflect the personal information we collect from you. For a comprehensive inventory of all personal information we process, please refer to the section What information do we collect?

We may also collect other personal information outside of these categories through instances where you interact with us in person, online, or by phone or mail in the context of:

• Receiving help through our customer support channels;
• Participation in customer surveys or contests; and
• Facilitation in the delivery of our Services and to respond to your inquiries.

We will use and retain the collected personal information as needed to provide the Services or for:

• Category A — As long as the user has an account with us
• Category F — As long as the user has an account with us
• Category G — As long as the user has an account with us

Sources of Personal Information

Learn more about the sources of personal information we collect in What information do we collect?

How We Use and Share Personal Information

Learn more about how we use your personal information in the section How do we process your information?

Will your information be shared with anyone else?

We may disclose your personal information with our service providers pursuant to a written contract between us and each service provider. Learn more about how we disclose personal information in the section When and with whom do we share your personal information?

We may use your personal information for our own business purposes, such as for undertaking internal research for technological development and demonstration. This is not considered to be “selling” of your personal information.

We have not sold or shared any personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months. We have disclosed the following categories of personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months:

• Category A. Identifiers
• Category F. Internet or other similar network activity
• Category G. Geolocation data

The categories of third parties to whom we disclosed personal information for a business or commercial purpose can be found under When and with whom do we share your personal information?

Your Rights

You have rights under certain US state data protection laws. However, these rights are not absolute, and in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law. These rights include:

• Right to know whether or not we are processing your personal data
• Right to access your personal data
• Right to correct inaccuracies in your personal data
• Right to request the deletion of your personal data
• Right to obtain a copy of the personal data you previously shared with us
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights
• Right to opt out of the processing of your personal data if it is used for targeted advertising (or sharing as defined under California's privacy law), the sale of personal data, or profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects (“profiling”)

Depending upon the state where you live, you may also have the following rights:

• Right to access the categories of personal data being processed (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Minnesota)
• Right to obtain a list of the categories of third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in California, Delaware, and Maryland)
• Right to obtain a list of specific third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Minnesota and Oregon)
• Right to obtain a list of third parties to which we have sold personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Connecticut)
• Right to review, understand, question, and depending on where you live, correct how personal data has been profiled (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Connecticut and Minnesota)
• Right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in California)
• Right to opt out of the collection of sensitive data and personal data collected through the operation of a voice or facial recognition feature (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Florida)

How to Exercise Your Rights

To exercise these rights, email us at podtracker13@gmail.com, or use the contact details at the bottom of this document. There is no form to fill in — tell us what you want and we will deal with it.

Under certain US state data protection laws, you can designate an authorised agent to make a request on your behalf. We may deny a request from an authorised agent that does not submit proof that they have been validly authorised to act on your behalf in accordance with applicable laws.

Request Verification

Upon receiving your request, we will need to verify your identity to determine you are the same person about whom we have the information in our system. We will only use personal information provided in your request to verify your identity or authority to make the request. However, if we cannot verify your identity from the information already maintained by us, we may request that you provide additional information for the purposes of verifying your identity and for security or fraud-prevention purposes.

If you submit the request through an authorised agent, we may need to collect additional information to verify your identity before processing your request and the agent will need to provide a written and signed permission from you to submit such request on your behalf.

Appeals

Under certain US state data protection laws, if we decline to take action regarding your request, you may appeal our decision by emailing us at podtracker13@gmail.com. We will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken in response to the appeal, including a written explanation of the reasons for the decisions. If your appeal is denied, you may submit a complaint to your state attorney general.

California “Shine The Light” Law

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, also known as the “Shine The Light” law, permits our users who are California residents to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, information about categories of personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared personal information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit your request in writing to us by using the contact details provided in the section How can you contact us about this notice?

12. What's public on Podtracker

Podtracker is a public site. Your username, display name, profile picture, bio, any link you add to your profile, and the ratings, reviews, lists and diary entries you create are visible to anyone who visits — including people without an account — and may be indexed by search engines.

Your email address is never shown publicly.

If you delete your account, we remove this content from Podtracker. We cannot remove copies that search engines or other services may already have cached or stored.

How old you have to be

You must be at least 13 to have a Podtracker account. We ask you to confirm it when you sign up.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe someone under 13 has created an account, email podtracker13@gmail.com and we will delete the account and everything in it.

13. Do we make updates to this notice?

In Short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated “Last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

14. How can you contact us about this notice?

If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may email us at podtracker13@gmail.com or contact us by post at:

Podtracker
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
United States

15. How can you review, update, or delete the data we collect from you?

Based on the applicable laws of your country or state of residence in the US, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, details about how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. To request to review, update, or delete your personal information, email us at podtracker13@gmail.com.