Privacy
Kanada Radio does not track you. Not in the weaselly sense where a page says that and then loads six analytics scripts. In the sense that there is no Google Analytics on this site, no advertising pixels, no cross-site tracking, no profile of you anywhere, and nothing about you for sale.
You can listen to everything here without an account, and we will never know who you are.
The short version
- No account needed to listen. Signing in is optional and only exists to give you favourites, votes and one-click sharing.
- No third-party analytics. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no Segment, no heatmaps, no session recording.
- No tracking cookies. The three cookies we set are functional and first-party. None of them follows you anywhere.
- We never store your IP address.
- We do not sell, rent or share data about you. There is no data-sharing arrangement with anyone, at any price.
What we went to the trouble of not doing
This is the part worth being specific about, because the easy version of this site would have looked very different.
Kanada Radio is paid for by sponsorship, and a sponsor reasonably wants to know how many people show up. The normal answer is to paste in Google Analytics, which takes about four minutes and answers the question completely. It would also have handed every one of our visitors to Google, set cookies on your machine, and required one of those consent pop-ups.
So we wrote our own instead. It runs on our own server and it works like this:
- To count you once a day rather than five times, we take your IP address and browser, mix them with a secret, and keep only a one-way fingerprint. The address itself is thrown away and never written down.
- The secret changes at midnight. That means today’s records cannot be joined to yesterday’s — not by us, not by anyone who ever got hold of the database. We can see that four hundred people came on Tuesday. We cannot see whether any of them ever came back.
- We keep the referring site, never the full referring address, because a full URL routinely carries someone’s search terms.
- We record which pages are viewed and which buttons are pressed, and a tick every 30 seconds while the tab is in front of you so we know roughly how long a visit lasts. None of it is attached to a person.
The result is that we can tell a sponsor how many people came and how long they stayed, and we cannot tell them anything whatsoever about who any of them were. We need the first. We have no use for the second and no business holding it.
Cookies, in full
Four, all first-party, all functional. There is nothing to consent to.
| Cookie | What it is for |
|---|---|
kanada_skin | Which of the six skins you picked, so the site looks right next time. |
kanada_session | Set only if you sign in with Bluesky. Keeps you signed in. Removed when you sign out. |
kanada_hidden | Which bits of page furniture you have hidden — the What The Helly button, the waveform banner — so they stay hidden. Set only if you hide something. |
kanada_admin | Only ever set on the operator’s own machine. Never on yours. |
Things kept in your browser, not on our server
These never leave your device and we cannot read them: your visualizer style, which announcements you have dismissed, and whether you have pressed play in this tab, so the music keeps going when you move between pages.
If you choose to sign in
Signing in with Bluesky is entirely optional. If you do, we store your public Bluesky identifier, handle, display name and avatar, plus the access token that lets us act on your behalf when you press like or share. We use it for nothing else. Your votes, favourites and saved stations are stored against that identifier.
One more thing gets attached to that identifier while you are signed in: how many seconds each track actually plays for. Signed-out listening is never counted this way — the site-wide listening-hours stat is still built entirely from anonymous plays, same as always. The only reason a signed-in account’s total exists at all is the “top listeners” highlight on the home page, which credits real people by name. If you sign in and would rather not appear there, ask and we will exclude your account, or delete it entirely as below.
We never see or handle your Bluesky password. Sign-in goes through Bluesky’s own authorisation flow, which is the entire point of it.
If you contact us
The sponsorship and suggestion forms store what you type: your name, email, company, budget and message. We keep it so we can reply and so an enquiry cannot vanish into a spam folder. It is not added to any mailing list, because there is no mailing list.
Other people’s servers
We are honest about the edges of what we control, because a privacy page that pretends there are none is not worth reading.
- YouTube. Every video plays in YouTube’s own embedded player. We use their privacy-enhanced domain, which does not set advertising cookies before you press play, but once a video is playing you are also interacting with Google and their terms apply. We cannot change that and we cannot see inside it.
- Bluesky. Profile pictures load from Bluesky’s servers, and links to posts and profiles go to bsky.app.
- Sponsor artwork may be served from the sponsor’s own host.
There is nothing else. No tag manager, no A/B testing service, no chat widget, no font CDN.
How long we keep things
Anonymous counting data is aggregate and, by the design above, becomes impossible to connect to a person the day after it is recorded. Enquiries are kept until they are dealt with. If you sign in and want your account and everything attached to it deleted, ask and we will delete it.
Children
Kanada Radio is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. Since we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone, this is an easy commitment to keep.
If this ever changes
This page is written against what the code actually does, and it changes in the same breath as the code. If we ever add something that genuinely tracks you, this page will say so plainly and the claims above will come off the site. We would rather lose the feature than quietly keep the sentence.
Contact
Questions about any of this, or a request to delete something, go to [email protected].