SoundCloud is a music listening website that allows you to listen to music for free. You can also sign up to get more benefits by paying for their subscription plans.
Personal data collected
When you register with SoundCloud, you need to provide your email address (unless you sign up via Facebook and don’t give SoundCloud access to it), age, password, payment information and billing address (if you decide to pay for their subscription service), and your real name. You can set up a profile, which allows you to share your username, city, country, profile picture, profile header image, avatar, information on whether you are a musician, label, or some other category, information about other websites and your social media profiles (including links to them), and gender. All of this information shared on your profile will be publicly available.
They also collect information about your email communications to them, information from any surveys you take (if you provide it), and anything you post (by uploading sounds, posting comments, and contributing to community discussions). SoundCloud also collects data automatically from you when you use their platform, or through the use of cookies and other web analytics. This information includes pages that you visit, links you click on, streaming, offline listening, or downloading tracks, connecting your Facebook account, sharing a sound with another user, following or unfollowing another user, joining or leaving a group, posting a comment, performing a search, the time, frequency, and duration of your visits, and if you opened an email, clicked on it, or forwarded it to someone.
Other information that is automatically collected, regardless of whether or not you sign up or are logged in, includes your device data, such as IP address, browser type, operating system, hardware model, cookie information, device settings, mobile device and advertising identifiers, apps installed, language, battery level, time zone, device information, crashes, referring URL, details about how you use their platform, links to third-party websites, access times, and optionally your location information.
If you decide to sign up to SoundCloud with your Facebook account, they collect the following information from you, such as Facebook user ID, name, email address, gender, locale, time zone, birthday, and profile picture. You can adjust your privacy and data settings within Facebook to allow or disallow certain information being shared. If you decide to purchase a subscription, your name, payment verification, and billing address will be collected.
Personal data usage
SoundCloud uses data to:
- Recognize and associate your activity to you.
- Provide personalized content and advertising across all of your devices.
- Measure quality and responses to ads.
- Provide customer and technical support.
- Display more relevant ads.
- Operate and maintain your account.
- Identify you as the creator of the sounds you upload, comments that you post, and other contributions you make to their Platform.
- Provide creators stats and insights of their listeners’ behaviors.
- Conduct surveys and research.
- Test new features in development.
- Improve their services.
- Process your account subscription, renewals, and collect payment.
- Send you emails about service updates and notifications about your account.
- Respond to any questions or comments you have.
- Enable age restrictions.
- Prevent fraud and scams.
- Comply with legal requirements.
Cookies and similar tech
SoundCloud uses cookies, pixel tags, SDKs, local storage, mobile device identifiers, and other similar technologies, which allows them to track your usage of their website and allows their business partners to track your movements as well.
SoundCloud account
Children under the age of 16 (EEA) or 13 (USA) are not permitted to sign up for an account or share their personal information with SoundCloud. If a child has done this contact them to have the child’s information removed.
Data shared with SoundCloud
How to protect your privacy
You can protect your privacy on SoundCloud by:
- Disabling location services on your device.
- Changing your SoundCloud settings to not allow them to share information with Facebook.
- Controlling cookies on SoundCloud.
- Disabling cookies in your browser.
- Managing your SoundCloud settings for your marketing preferences, analytics, and more.
- Adjusting your settings in your Account tab to delete your account.
- Opting out of analytics and advertising cookies by going to Network Advertising Initiative or Digital Advertising Alliance. In Europe, it is at Your Online Choices.