Privacy

honk & whistle — what we do and don't collect.

The short version

Audio never leaves your device. We have no cookies, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts, no advertising, and no behavioural tracking. We don't ask for your name or email and we don't have any way to know who you are.

When you finish a day's three rounds we send a small JSON payload to our own server: your three scores, the puzzle date, and a few coarse signals (described below) that help us tell whether anyone is coming back, where players are roughly located, and where shared links are landing. Less than Google's Analytics; more than nothing.

What happens in your browser

The page loads JavaScript, a pretrained audio model (YAMNet, about 16 MB), and a small set of CC0 / public-domain reference sound clips from the same server that hosts the page. These are one-way file downloads — same as loading any image on a website. After that, everything happens on your device.

When you tap Record, your browser asks for microphone permission. The microphone is open for the 3-second recording window only and is closed immediately after. The recording itself is processed locally to compute your score; it is never uploaded.

What we store on your device

localStorage: we save your daily progress (date, scores, completion state) under a single key in your browser's local storage so you can come back to a partially-played day. Clearing your browser data clears this. No remote sync.

Service worker cache: after your first visit, the app shell, the audio model, and the reference sound clips are cached in your browser so subsequent visits load fast and work offline. This is also local-only.

Anonymous play data

When you complete a day's three rounds, we send a small payload to our own server. The full schema:

{
  "date": "2026-05-06",
  "scores": [7.4, 6.1, 5.8],
  "version": "v0.5",
  "shareId": "202605067461580930",
  "referredBy": "202605051122334455",
  "utm": { "source": "twitter", "medium": "social" }
}

What each field is for:

• date + scores: tells us whether the game is well-calibrated (e.g. "the Bell sound consistently scores below 4 — the scoring is unfair to it").
• shareId: an 18-digit code derived from the puzzle date, your three scores, and the local time you finished. It's the same value embedded in the URL when you tap Share, so it survives a copy/paste with no extra information attached. It's distinct enough that it can identify a single play, but tells us nothing about you.
• referredBy: if you arrived via a friend's share link (a URL with ?s=…), we record that ?s= code so we can tell whether shared links lead to plays. It identifies their play, not their person.
• utm: if a link you click includes the standard utm_source / utm_medium / utm_campaign / utm_content / utm_term URL parameters (the same ones every news site uses), we record them so we know whether a tweet, a blog post, etc. brought you in.

What our server records on top of that:

• A visitor hash: when your request arrives, we take your IP address and User-Agent string, mix them with a long-lived secret on our side, and store only the resulting hash (not the raw values). The same browser on the same network produces the same hash, which lets us count returning players softly. The raw IP and User-Agent are never written to disk and never logged. We can't reverse the hash to recover them, and the hash on its own can't be linked to anything outside our event store.
• A coarse country (and sometimes region/city) when the request reaches us via our CDN — derived from your IP at the network edge, not from anything you tell us, and stored at country-or-city granularity, not as coordinates.
• A received-at timestamp.

What is never sent or stored: your audio recording, your name, your email, your raw IP address, your raw User-Agent, your device or browser fingerprint, your microphone identifier, advertising IDs, or anything that could identify you to a third party. The audio you record stays in the browser and never leaves the device — that promise has not changed.

Want to opt out? Open the About section on the main page and toggle "Send anonymous scores" off. Your choice is stored on your device and respected on every future visit. With the toggle off, none of the above is sent — the request never goes out at all.

What we don't do

• No accounts, sign-ups, or logins.
• No advertising or marketing.
• No behavioural tracking — we don't measure clicks, time on page, scroll depth, mouse movement, or anything like that.
• No cookies of any kind.
• No third-party scripts at runtime — the app loads only from our own servers and we send no data to Google, Meta, or any other analytics provider.
• No raw IP addresses or User-Agent strings stored on our servers — only the salted hash described above.

Sharing

When you tap Share, we generate a URL containing the puzzle date, your three scores, and the local time you finished, encoded as a single 18-digit code (e.g. ?s=202605067461580930). What you do with that URL is up to you and the platforms you share it through. We do not see the share itself; we only learn it happened if a recipient clicks the link, plays through, and their result lands as referredBy on the new play (described above).

Game data we hold

Score events are stored under our control in private encrypted storage. We do not sell, license, or share this data with anyone. It is used only to inform improvements to the game (for example: "the Bell sound consistently scores below 4 — the scoring is unfair to it"). Aggregated, non-identifying summaries may appear in blog posts or product updates.

Children

The game is suitable for all ages and collects no personal data, so there are no special considerations for children's privacy beyond the above.

Contact

Questions or concerns: studio@sonictrio.com.

Last updated: 7 May 2026.