Privacy Policy

Last updated: March 14, 2026

Virtual Vinyl is a personal project by Madison Yocum. It's a vinyl-aesthetic music player — search for any song or playlist and experience it through a virtual turntable with album art, a spinning record, and tactile controls. This policy explains exactly how your data is handled.

What the app does

Virtual Vinyl lets you search for tracks and playlists on Spotify and play them back through an in-browser turntable interface. Playback is handled entirely by Spotify's own embedded player (the Spotify Embed IFrame API), which runs in your browser and authenticates directly with Spotify. The Virtual Vinyl server never sees your Spotify login, password, or access token.

What data the server collects

The Virtual Vinyl server collects no personal data. Specifically:

• Search queries — when you search for a song, the query string is forwarded to the Spotify Web API on your behalf using app-level credentials (OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow). Your query is not logged or stored.
• Audio analysis — track IDs are used to fetch audio segment data from Spotify, which powers the groove visualization on the vinyl. No personal data is involved.
• No user accounts — there is no sign-up, login, or user account system on the Virtual Vinyl server.
• No sessions or cookies — the server is stateless. No session data, cookies, or identifiers are set or stored.
• No server-side analytics — the Virtual Vinyl server does not log or store usage data.

Analytics (Google Analytics 4)

Virtual Vinyl uses Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to understand how people use the app. The following data is collected automatically by GA4 when you visit:

• Browser — browser type and version (e.g. Chrome 122, Safari 17)
• Device & OS — device category (mobile, tablet, desktop), operating system, and screen resolution
• Location — approximate geographic location derived from your IP address (city/country level). Your full IP address is not stored by Google.
• Session data — pages visited, time on page, and how you arrived at the site
• App events — when you open the player, search for a song, or play a track (track name and artist are included)
• Language — your browser's preferred language setting

This data is processed by Google and governed by Google's Privacy Policy. You can opt out of GA4 tracking using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Spotify's role

Playback is powered by the Spotify Embed IFrame API, which loads Spotify's own player in your browser. When you interact with playback, that interaction happens between your browser and Spotify directly — Virtual Vinyl's server is not involved. Spotify's handling of your data is governed by Spotify's Privacy Policy. A Spotify account with an active subscription is required for playback.

Hosting

The app is hosted on Railway. Railway may retain standard server logs (IP addresses, request timestamps) as part of their infrastructure. See Railway's Privacy Policy for details.

Contact

Questions? Reach out at madisonyocum.com.