User:PavanChander/W/MusicBrainz Privacy Policy

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What to do about the other sites still needs to be figured out. --navap 04:06, 25 May 2010 (UTC)


In a nutshell:

  1. You may browse the contents of the MusicBrainz database without having to create an account or provide any personal information.
  2. When creating an account the minimum we require is a username, password, and email address; the entry of any other personal information is completely optional.
  3. Any personal information you choose to provide will not be sold or shared with anyone else.
MusicBrainz believes strongly in the privacy of its users!


MusicBrainz account

For some activities on MusicBrainz such as contributing data, editing the database, communicating with other users, and more, you need a MusicBrainz account. In creating an account we require that you provide a unique username, a verified email address, and a password. You may optionally also tell us the URL of your homepage, and/or a few words about yourself.

Account information

Your username and (where applicable) homepage, biography, subscriptions, ratings, date of account creation, and date of email verification are all accessible to the public via your account page.

Email address

Your email address is held in confidence, we do not sell or share it with anyone, nor do we spam our users. If you choose to use the internal messaging system to contact another user your email address will be masked, however, you do have the option of revealing it. We use your email address to send a daily notification of edits pertaining to any of your subscribed items. Changing the email address stored with your account will require you to verify the new address.

Collection

Any items in your collection are kept confidential and not available for others to access.

Folksonomy tags

Any tags you provide will be visible to the public by being displayed on the tagged artist/release/track/label's page. A list of all your tags is visible on your account page for other MusicBrainz users to see, unless you choose to keep your tags private.

Ratings

Any ratings you provide are aggregated by the server to calculate an average community rating for each rated entity. A list of all your rated items, and the ratings you gave, is visible on your account page for other MusicBrainz users to see, unless you have chosen to keep your ratings hidden. Aside from being included in the aggregate community rating, your ratings are not visible by the public.

Subscriptions

Your username will be listed on any subscribed artist/label/editor's page, and a list of your subscriptions is available on your account page for the public to see, unless you choose to keep your subscriptions private.

Edits and edit notes

Any edits or contributions you make to the MusicBrainz database, including fingerprint submissions from MusicBrainz Picard, are associated with your username. The details of these changes, and any notes you add to them, are visible on the website to other MusicBrainz users but not to the public, however, all the details and any edit notes you add are available in the database dumps.

Database dumps

We sanitize the database dumps to not include emails, passwords or privileges. We never make the raw tags, or raw ratings available - we only include the aggregate tags and ratings. Your subscriptions and the contents of your MusicBrainz Collection are not available in the dumps.

Mailing lists

MusicBrainz operates many publicly accessible mailing lists. When subscribing to a mailing list we require that you provide an email address and password, you may also optionally provide a name.

Personal information

Your email address is held in confidence, we do not sell or share it with anyone, nor do we spam our users. If you choose to post a message to the list your name and email address will be revealed to the list subscribers and stored in the archives (albeit in a form intended to provide some anti-spam protection).

Public archives

Our mailing lists have multiple publicly accessible archives. Any posts you make on a list are accessible from these archives and will contain your name and email address (albeit in a form intended to provide some anti-spam protection). An official archive is available here.

Other MusicBrainz websites

IRC channel

An official log of the discussions that take place on the MusicBrainz IRC channels is made available to the public here.

Wiki

Editing on the wiki does not require an account, however, if you choose to edit as an anonymous user the IP address you used will be publicly and permanently credited as the author of the edit. Creating an account and using it will prevent your IP address from being revealed to the public. In keeping with general wiki practice, any edits you make or data you contribute will generally be retained forever, even when an article is deleted the previous content of that article may be accessible to administrators.

Forums

[TODO]

Bug tracker

[TODO]

General usage information

Cookies

We use cookies to remember your user preferences and credential information (where applicable).

Server logs

In a practice similar to other web sites we keep logs of all web requests made against our servers. Aggregate information about web and FTP traffic is made available to the public via our site usage pages.

Exceptions

Reasonable exceptions may apply to the above policy, for example to comply with applicable laws. Additionally, the MusicBrainz server administrators (about three people in all) have the ability to inspect any information on the system they want to, but to be honest they're probably not interested enough to look.