Privacy

The short version. No cookies, no accounts, no analytics or advertising trackers. We measure traffic only in aggregate — an approximate city, state and country, worked out at our content-network edge and then stored on its own, without ever writing down your network address (IP). We do not keep your IP address at all. We do not record your precise or GPS location, and we never tie a location to who you are. We never see your individual quiz answers; we record only a broad result type, like ‘Carnatic, online’. One exception, stated plainly: song pictures on some pages load from YouTube, and YouTube sees the IP address of every visitor who loads them (details below).

What we collect

When you visit, our servers record that the visit happened. Our hosting provider writes raw request logs (page address, referring site, and the coarse location and bot-or-browser word described below, with the network-address and browser fields left blank); we fold them into anonymous counts and delete them automatically, usually within about an hour (and always within 7 days). What we keep is a running count, and this is all of it:

Approximate location — aggregate city, state and country. Our content network works out an approximate city, state and country at the edge, from your network address, and records only that coarse location — the network address (IP) itself is not recorded in our counts. We keep this only in aggregate, to understand where our community is. On the singing check we keep the country only. In the reports we look at, a place only appears once enough distinct visits share it — smaller counts are suppressed from those views. Our counts hold no network address. We do not record your precise or GPS location (no latitude, longitude or postcode), and we never tie a location to your identity.
Which page you viewed, and how you arrived — the page URL, the referring site, and any campaign tags (utm_*) in the address.
Coarse, anonymous in-page events — for example that a quiz was completed, or that a link to a music academy was clicked. These carry only broad labels (for instance a result category like “Carnatic, online”), never your individual answers.
The singing check, at any age. It uses your microphone only on your device: the sound is never recorded, stored or sent to us. We learn only that the check was started, whether the microphone was unavailable or switched off, which steps were done or skipped, and which of the three suggestions it showed. For the singing check we keep your country only, never your city or state.
Whether a visit looks automated. Every request carries a short line of text that says what software made it — a browser such as Chrome or Safari, or a tool such as a search-engine crawler. It usually names the browser and the operating system. It does not name you. At our edge we check that line against a list of known bots and automated tools, turn it into a single word — bot, web, or none if no line was sent — and keep only that word, in the same aggregate counts as everything else. The line itself is not kept in our counts. Visits recorded before we started doing this are marked unknown, and we do not go back and re-label them. We do this for one reason: a large share of the traffic we see is automated, and we want to know how many real people the site actually reaches. The check is a rough guide, not a certainty — a tool can describe itself as a browser, and we would count it as one.

What we do not do

We set no cookies and can’t recognise you from one visit to the next. A couple of optional checklists remember your ticks in your own browser; nothing is sent to us.
No analytics or advertising trackers. No Google Analytics, no advertising pixels, no external analytics service. The one outside service our pages load anything from is YouTube, for song pictures and two video players (see the note below).
No accounts and no sign-in. There is nothing to log into.
No cross-site or cross-session identity. We do not fingerprint you, and we can’t tell that two visits came from the same person. The bot-or-browser check above is the one thing your browser tells us that we look at, and we turn it into a single shared word before keeping it — every ordinary visitor gets the same word, so it can’t be used to pick you out, or to recognise you on a later visit.
Links to academies carry nothing from us. The “Visit site” buttons take you to that academy’s own website, where its own privacy policy applies, not ours. We add no tracking, referral or affiliate parameters to those links, and we ask your browser not to tell the academy which of our pages you came from. On our side we count only that a link to an academy was clicked, as described above.
No selling or sharing. We never sell, rent, or share your data, and there is no advertising here.

Song and video pictures on the Trends page, the home page and the Online platforms page load straight from YouTube, so YouTube sees the IP address and browser details of every visitor whose page loads them. We ask your browser not to tell YouTube which page you came from. This site uses YouTube API Services. See YouTube’s Terms (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms) and Google’s Privacy Policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy). The Traditions page also embeds two YouTube players (youtube-nocookie.com); YouTube may store data in your browser, especially once you press play.

Why we keep any logs at all

We keep these aggregate counts to understand whether the site is actually useful — which pages help families, where visitors come from, and whether the tools work — so we can keep improving it. We use the data only to count and compare in bulk; we never build a profile of you or try to identify you.

How long we keep it

Raw request logs are deleted automatically, usually within about an hour (and always within 7 days). What we keep is an aggregate, IP-free summary — dates, event types, approximate location (city, state and country), and the one-word bot-or-browser flag — counted in bulk, with no way to trace it back to a person. We leave out any count small enough that it could point at a single visit.

Where we process your data

These aggregate logs are stored on cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services) located in the United States. If you visit from the UK, the EU, Canada, Australia, or elsewhere, your request is handled on those U.S. servers.

Children’s privacy

On the singing check, your child sings into the microphone and claps along (or taps the beat on the screen); the sound is used only on your device and is never recorded, stored or sent to us. We only learn that the check ran, whether the microphone was unavailable or switched off, which steps were done or skipped, and which of the three starting points it showed, plus the country the visit came from (for the singing check we drop the city and state). The “Find Your Path” quiz may ask about a child’s age to tailor its suggestion, but we never see your individual answers; we record only a broad result type, like ‘Carnatic, online’. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from or about a child, and no child’s identity ever reaches our servers.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal data we hold about you, or to object to our processing. Because we keep no accounts and no lasting identifier, in practice there is very little tied to you. If you have a question or request, please email us at contact@soundrootsglobal.com and we will help.

For how we stay commercially independent — no academy pays to appear, no affiliate links — see our Affiliate & Disclosure Policy.

By Ashish Singh · About the author