Privacy

If you do not sign in

Nothing about your ranking is stored at all, on our servers or in your browser. Your song list and votes live only in memory for as long as the browser tab stays open — closing or refreshing it loses them, and we never had a copy. Save and resume is a signed-in feature by design (see below), and the build page says so before you start a ranking without one.

If you sign in with Google

We store, in a Neon Postgres database:

• Your Google account's name, email address, avatar image URL and Google account ID, plus the username you choose, if you choose one. The email address is used to recognise your account, never to contact you and never to show to anyone else.
• For each ranking you save: its name, the list of songs, the record of which song won each matchup, and whether you have made it public. Rounds, standings and the final ranking are not stored — they are recalculated from your votes each time.
• Anyone you choose to follow, so your Browse page can put their public rankings first.

We do not receive your Google password, and we do not ask Google for access to anything beyond basic profile information. Sessions are held in a signed cookie rather than a database table.

What other people can see

Every ranking you save is private by default, including every ranking saved before sharing existed. A ranking only becomes visible to anyone else when you choose “Make public” yourself, and you can take it private again at any time. Nothing you do anywhere else on the site publishes a ranking as a side effect.

When a ranking is public, anyone — including people who are not signed in — can see its name, its song list, how it came out, and your display name. They can copy the song list to rank themselves, and compare their result with yours. They cannot change your ranking in any way.

You also appear in the people directory once you have published at least one ranking, showing your display name and your username if you have chosen one. People find you by searching either. Your email address is never shown to anyone, in any form, and never leaves our server. Someone who already knows your address in full can use it to find you — that is there so a friend who has your email can find you before you have picked a username — but a partial address deliberately matches nothing, so the directory cannot be used to discover addresses that aren't already known.

Following someone is one-way: it only decides whose public rankings appear first on your Browse page, and it gives neither of you access to anything the other has not made public. Who you follow, and who follows you, are both shown on your profile — so following someone is a public act, even though it grants nothing.

Two things put a notice on your notifications page: someone following you, and someone using one of your public lists to start their own ranking. Both are already visible on your profile, so this only saves you looking. Each is announced at most once per person, and we never email you — there is no mailing list and no way to be sent anything.

What gets sent to other companies

• Apple (iTunes Search API). The song titles and artists you search for or paste in are sent to Apple to look up artwork and preview clips. Apple handles that data under its own privacy policy.
• Vercel. The site is hosted on Vercel and uses Vercel Analytics, which records anonymous page-view data. See Vercel's analytics privacy documentation.

What we do not do

We do not sell your data, we do not run advertising, and we do not use third-party tracking or advertising cookies. We do not email you — there is no mailing list.

Deleting your data

Deleting a single ranking moves it to Recently deleted on your history page. It disappears from Browse, from your profile and from anyone's comparisons straight away, but we keep the row so you can restore it — a ranking can be hundreds or thousands of decisions, and one misclick should not be able to end that. “Delete forever”, in that same list, is the irreversible one, and asks you to confirm.

To remove everything, go to History and choose Delete my account. That removes your account row, every ranking you have saved (public ones included, which disappear from Browse immediately) and everyone you follow, in one go and for good, including anything sitting in Recently deleted — we keep no backup copy to restore from, so please be sure. If someone has copied a public list of yours, their own ranking is their own and stays with them; it carries none of your votes. If you have never signed in, there is nothing to delete: clearing your browser data is enough.

Questions

SongRank is open source, so you can check any of this against the code. Raise anything you are unsure about through Report a problem.