Who runs this

ORBITAPE is made and operated by one person, not a company. It is free, carries no advertising and has no in-app purchases. There is nothing to sell and no business model that would make your data useful to anyone.

What ORBITAPE does not do

• No accounts, log-ins, e-mail addresses or passwords.
• No tracking pixels, advertising IDs or third-party trackers.
• No cookies.
• No profile of your listening. Nothing you play is reported anywhere.
• No identifier of any kind — nothing that could link one visit to another, or one report to another.
• Nothing is sold or shared with anyone.

Camera

ORBITAPE can show your front camera inside the player disc. The camera only turns on when you press CAM, and it turns off when you press it again or leave the app.

The image is never uploaded and never stored. It is drawn straight onto the screen and, if you are recording, into your own recording file. It does not reach any server — not mine, not anyone's.

Recordings

Pressing REC records what the app itself is drawing and playing. The recording is produced entirely inside your device's browser and is handed to you through your system's own share or save dialog.

No copy is uploaded anywhere. If you never save it, it disappears when you leave the page.

Reporting a problem

If something breaks, the app can put together a short technical note — version, browser, screen size, the error itself, and which of the two worlds you were in. There is a button for it in the error panel, and a REPORT A PROBLEM row in settings.

Nothing is ever sent automatically. The button opens your own mail app with the text already written, so you can read every line of it, add your own words, delete anything you don't want to send — and press send yourself. If you don't, nothing leaves your device.

The note carries no identifier, no location and no listening history. It says which shelf you were on and whether sound was playing, because a report without that is usually impossible to act on.

What is kept on your device

The app stores a few small values in your browser's local storage. They stay on your device and are readable only by ORBITAPE. One of them — the crash notebook — can leave the device, but only if you switch crash reports on yourself; that is described in its own section below. Nothing else is ever sent anywhere.

That is the whole list, not a sample. The last station you played is deliberately not kept: the app starts somewhere new every time.

You can erase all of it at any time by clearing site data for orbitape.app in your browser settings. Nothing else remains.

Servers ORBITAPE talks to

ORBITAPE streams audio from the internet, so your device connects directly to the services below. Those connections are made by your browser, exactly as if you had opened those sites yourself, and each of them can therefore see your IP address and the usual request details. I do not receive any of that information.

Two services that used to be on this list are gone: ORBITAPE no longer contacts Jamendo or Audius, and the track lists are no longer fetched from GitHub or jsDelivr. They are served from orbitape.app itself.

Each of these has its own privacy policy, which I do not control.

“What is on right now”

While a station is playing, the app asks what track is on. That question used to go from your browser straight to the station's own server. It now goes through orbitape.app instead, which is cached and asked once per station rather than once per listener.

This is a trade, and it is worth stating plainly in both directions:

• Better for you: when the cache answers, the station does not see your IP address for these requests — it sees the cache. If the cache cannot answer (the station is not in the list, it is too slow, or my server is down) the browser falls back to asking the station directly, and then it sees your IP as any web request would. So this is an improvement most of the time, not a guarantee every time.
• Worse in one way: the request now reaches my server, so it is technically possible for me to see which station is being asked about. I do not log it. The cache is keyed by the station's address; who asked is not needed and is not kept.

The audio stream itself is unchanged: it still goes from your browser to the station directly, and it does not pass through me.

Crash reports — off unless you turn them on

When something inside ORBITAPE fails, the app swallows the error so the music does not stop, and writes a line into a local notebook you can read yourself under DIAGNOSTICS in settings. That notebook stays on your device. Nothing is sent from it automatically.

Settings has a switch called SEND DIAGNOSTICS. It is off by default. While it is off, the app makes no request of this kind at all. If you turn it on, then at most once every six hours the app sends this and nothing else:

What is never sent: any identifier, session number or fingerprint; the station or track you were playing; anything you searched for; your favourites; your location; your settings or which skin you chose. There is deliberately nothing in a report that could link it to you or to another report, which also means these reports cannot be un-sent — I would not be able to find yours.

You can turn the switch off again at any time, and clearing site data erases the local notebook along with everything else.

Telling me something in your own words

Most of what actually breaks never raises an error. “The wheel turns but no station opens”, “the alarm did not ring”, “the strip covers the title” — a crash report cannot see any of that. Only a person can. Settings has a REPORT A PROBLEM panel for exactly that.

It is not tied to the SEND DIAGNOSTICS switch, because here the consent is the act itself: you type a sentence and press send. Nothing leaves your device until you do. What is sent is shown in the panel while you write, and it is only this: your message (at most 200 characters), the app version, and the same rough platform label as above. No identifier, no station, no history, no location — and no crash notebook: a message and a crash report are separate things and are never sent together.

Because there is no identifier, a message cannot be traced back to you and I cannot reply to it. If you want an answer, write to the address on the terms page instead.

Server logs

orbitape.app is served by Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes standard request data such as IP addresses in order to deliver the page and protect against abuse. I do not use Cloudflare's analytics and I do not build any profile from it.

Children

ORBITAPE is not directed at children. It asks for no information from anyone, including children, and the one optional report described above contains nothing personal.

Content and licences

ORBITAPE plays only recordings that are in the public domain or released under a Creative Commons licence that permits sharing, and live radio streams from public directories. The licence and the artist are shown on screen while a track plays.

If you own a recording or operate a station and want it removed, write to the address below and I will take it out.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. There is no mailing list to notify, so the date is the honest signal.

Contact