Privacy & disclosures

Cuefinda runs no third-party analytics and no advertising scripts, and embeds no third-party players or trackers. Our fonts are served from this site rather than from Google. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to sign in to and no profile to build. Searching the catalogue happens on our own server and is not logged against you.

One thing does reach other servers, and it is worth being exact about. The album covers and the photographs of composers and artists are not stored here — they load directly from the archives that host them: Wikimedia Commons, the Cover Art Archive, Apple, and Discogs. When your browser displays one of those images it requests it from that host, which, like any website, receives your IP address and browser details in doing so. We send those hosts nothing else, and we have no arrangement with any of them to track you. Each handles what it receives under its own privacy policy.

We do count one thing ourselves. Every link that leaves this site goes to a service that holds the music — Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon — and when one is followed we add one to a counter for that link. That is the entire record: a number beside a link. No identifier of you is sent with it, no time is recorded, and nothing says which links were followed together or by the same visitor. It tells us that a particular link was used 41 times; it cannot tell us anything about the people who used it, and a total cannot be taken apart again into individuals.

The cookie described below is deliberately not read when this happens. Joining it to these counts would turn an anonymous handle into a history of what somebody listened to, which is a different thing entirely from counting links, and not something this site does.

One cookie is set, and only once you vote — for a track, a release, a film or series, or a composer or artist. It holds a random handle: no name, no email, nothing derived from you or your device.

Against that handle, and only that handle, our server keeps a list of what it has voted for. That list is the whole reason the handle exists: it is how a vote can be taken back by the person who cast it and by nobody else, and how your hearts still show as yours on a later visit. It holds item identifiers and nothing more — no times, no pages you read, no links you followed — and it is never joined to the link counts above, to our host’s logs, or to anything else. We cannot tell whose it is, because nothing about you was ever attached to it.

Your browser keeps its own copy of that list in local storage, so a heart fills in the moment you click rather than after a round trip. Clearing your site data removes both the cookie and that local copy. The list on our server then remains only as an anonymous record that can no longer be connected to you — the handle that pointed to it is gone.

Cuefinda is hosted by Netlify, which keeps standard server logs — IP address, timestamp, requested page, browser user-agent — for the ordinary purposes of serving the site securely and diagnosing faults. We do not use those logs to build a profile of you, and we do not combine them with anything else.

If you report a correction, the form sends what you write — the kind of problem, the page it concerns, your description, and an email address if you choose to give one — to us through Netlify, which stores the submission on our behalf. We use it only to investigate and fix the correction, and the email address only to reply about it. It is not added to any list and not shared.

The search box sends what you type to our own server so it can return matching titles and names. Those queries are used to answer the request and nothing else: they are not stored against you, not profiled, and not shared.

This page is about data concerning you. For the data in the catalogue — where each fact was sourced and what each source is trusted for — see where the data comes from, and for the photographs of composers and artists, the image credits, which name every photographer and the licence their work is used under.

Cuefinda hosts and streams no audio. Following a link takes you to Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, or Discogs, each of which collects data under its own privacy policy — which we do not control and are not responsible for. It is worth reading whichever one you use.

The same applies if you choose to support the site. Tips are taken by Buy Me a Coffee, not by us: we never see or handle your payment details, and anything you give that service is governed by its own terms and privacy policy.