Privacy Policy

Sealed — 10 June MMXXVI

The Pact, in Brief

What the Engine knows of the listener stays with the listener. There are no accounts, no telemetry, no analytics, no advertisements, no third-party SDKs, no advertising identifiers, no fingerprinting. The Engine runs upon the listener's device and reports to nothing beyond it — save for two listener-invoked rites, described below in full, each conveying only the data the listener has commanded, and neither carrying any record of the listener themselves.

The Engine does keep a record of the listener's listening — the dates, the durations, the returns — for the sake of the Auguries, the shelves it composes from the listener's own habit. That record is the listener's alone, and it does not depart the device.

What the Engine Reads

The Engine reads the audio files within the listener's reliquary, drawn from the directories the listener has granted it access to. It conducts its census across what it finds — titles, artists, albums, durations, formats, sample rates, bit depths — and inscribes the truth of measure and the truth of identity into a library kept locally upon the device. None of it travels onward.

• The library: kept locally; never transmitted.
• The listening spine: kept locally; the arithmetic that composes the Auguries is drawn from it. Never transmitted.
• DAC communion: handled by Android's USB subsystem. Vendor and product identifiers, sample rates, and similar descriptor fields are recorded only on the listener's device, and travel onward only through the listener-invoked Witnessing rite described below.

What the Engine Writes

The Engine reads. The Engine does not write. It does not delete files. It does not edit tags. It does not modify audio data. The reliquary is the listener's jurisdiction, in all of its choices and its accidents.

The Witnessing

If, by their own hand, the listener invokes the Witnessing rite from a connected DAC's diagnostics surface, the application transmits to the Forge — and to nothing else — the following, and no more:

• the USB descriptor's model string (e.g. Snowsky Tiny A);
• the USB Vendor and Product identifiers;
• a one-time ceremonial UUID identifying the act of witnessing — no listener, no device, is named;
• the alt-setting descriptors the DAC itself publishes: interface, sample format, sample rates, bit depth, channel count, USB Audio Class version, and the like.

The Forge does not record the listener's IP address, does not record the listener's User-Agent, and mints no identifier that could bind multiple witnesses to a single listener. Two listeners offering the same DAC produce indistinguishable transmissions. The witnessed descriptor enters, anonymously, the public Concordance at voxmachina.audio/dossiers/.

The rite is silent by default; only a deliberate tap invokes it.

The Outward Cadence

The listener may, by their own hand, dispatch the cadence of their listening to Last.fm or to ListenBrainz, configured under Settings → Scrobbling with credentials the listener supplies. The Engine dispatches only because the listener has so commanded. The fields conveyed are:

• track title and artist;
• album, album artist, and track number — when present in the track's tags;
• duration;
• the timestamp at which playback began;
• the MusicBrainz recording identifier — when present in the track's tags;
• the listener's own credentials for the configured service, used to associate the listen with that listener's own account.

Vox Machina receives none of this. All data handling by Last.fm and ListenBrainz is governed by their respective privacy policies. The Outward Cadence is silent by default. The listener may revoke it at any moment from the same surface; once revoked, no further dispatch occurs.

What the Engine Asks of Android

• Storage / Media access: to read the reliquary.
• USB device access: to commune directly with the connected DAC.
• Foreground service: to keep the rite of playback active in the background.
• Internet: employed only for the Witnessing rite and for the Outward Cadence — each invoked by the listener alone — or when the listener taps an outbound link to the Forge or to its channels.

Of Children

The Engine is not directed to children under 13. It does not knowingly collect information from any listener — child or otherwise — because it does not collect information at all.

Of Revision

Should this pact be amended, the effective date above shall change. Material revisions are also named in the Engine's release notes upon the Play Store.

To Reach the Forge

For questions concerning this pact, address the Forge: privacy@voxmachina.audio.