One Second Song · Effective August 12, 2026
There are no accounts and no ads. We do not sell your data, share it with advertisers, or link it to who you are. We keep enough data to run the leaderboard and count how the game gets used. The website does not use Google Analytics. The iPhone app does not use Google Analytics or another third-party analytics SDK.
Anonymous usage counts. The iPhone app reports which parts of the game you use — opening the app, starting and finishing games, using hints, sharing, saving a playlist — along with your app version, your App Store country, and roughly how long ago you installed. The web game reports visits, game starts and finishes, guesses, hint views, shares, and App Store taps. These arrive as counters, not as a history of your session. To count unique daily players, each client also sends its random identifier to a probabilistic counter. That counter stores no members, so the identifier cannot be read back out of it. The web game also keeps the last Daily date you started in browser storage. If you start the next Daily, it adds one to an aggregate consecutive-day return counter; the date itself stays in your browser. We publish the resulting totals at onesecondsong.com/stats.
Campaign measurement. If you arrive from our Google Search campaign, the web game keeps the coarse campaign name and its capture time in browser storage for up to 30 days. It does not store the Google click ID or send it to our server. The coarse campaign name travels with the same first-party usage report described above, allowing aggregate counts of campaign browsers, Daily starts and completions, next-Daily returns, and App Store taps. The marker cannot identify the search query or ad click that produced an individual result.
The Daily leaderboard. Enter a name or choose an icon for the daily board and we store that profile, your result for that day, and a random device or browser identifier. Leave the name blank and your row appears unnamed. Web and iPhone players appear on the same board.
Friend challenges and group games. When you join a challenge or play a group game, we store the random identifier, display name and icon, membership, and results needed to show the shared standings.
Custom pack names. Build your own pack and the name you type is stored, up to 60 characters, and may appear in the public totals.
Hints. To write hints, the app sends the title, artist, and release year of the songs in your game to our server, which asks an AI model for three spoiler-free hints. These requests carry no user or device identifier. We cache the generated hints by song so we do not regenerate them.
The first time it runs, the iPhone app generates a random identifier and stores it in your device keychain. The web game generates a separate random identifier and keeps it in browser storage. It is not your Apple Account, your device serial number, or an advertising identifier. It lets the shared leaderboards recognise your own row and lets challenges tell players apart. Clearing browser storage creates a new web identifier.
Usage counters expire 400 days after they are written. Leaderboard and group data stays while the feature needs it. We back this data up once a day to private storage and delete backups older than 30 days. The browser campaign marker expires after 30 days.
Song search and audio previews come from Apple Music and are subject to Apple's Privacy Policy.
Usage counting began with iPhone version 2.10 in 2026. The web game began reporting the usage and shared-game data described above when it launched on August 7, 2026. Restricted Google Analytics measurement ran from August 8 to August 12, 2026, when it was replaced by the first-party campaign measurement described above.
Questions: hello@onesecondsong.com