Privacy Policy

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Jackal identifies music playing around you and keeps a record of it. This policy describes what the app actually does with your data, in plain terms.

Microphone and audio

Jackal captures short audio samples — around 8 to 18 seconds — to identify music. This happens when you tap to search, and continuously in the background if you have turned background listening on.

If your device is offline when a sample is captured, it is stored on your device until it can be sent, then removed.

Background listening is off until you turn it on, and you can turn it off at any time in Settings.

A microphone that listens to a room hears whatever is in it, so a sample can pick up speech or other background sound alongside the music. Jackal is not built to record anyone: samples are matched and discarded, never stored, and never listened to by us. The app shows you when it is listening — on the home screen while a search is running, and in the widget while background listening is on.

Location

If you grant location access, Jackal records where each song was heard: the coordinates, and the name of the venue and city, never the street address. This is what makes the map work. You can decline location access, or turn off “Location stamping” in Settings, and the rest of the app still works.

Jackal also saves one home location per account, taken from your position the first time you sign in with location allowed. It is used only to find concerts and festivals near you, and you can change it from Settings at any time.

What we store

• Your email address and display name, and a password hash if you use a password. If you sign in with Apple or Google, the identifier that provider gives us for you
• Your recognitions: song, artist, album, artwork, genre, time, and place, plus the raw match result our recognition providers returned for it
• Your playlists, favourites, festival days and set times you import or add, and which set you told Jackal you were watching
• Your home location and your device timezone
• Your follows, followers, blocks, any reports you file (with the reason you give), and direct messages you send
• How many songs you named each day, for the free plan's daily limit
• Your subscription status from Apple, and a push notification token if you allow notifications
• If you connect Spotify, the access tokens that connection uses
• Product analytics and crash reports — described below

Calendar

If you use festival schedule import and grant calendar access, Jackal reads the events on the days you're attending and shows you the list before anything is saved. For the events you keep, the artist, stage and times are saved to your festival schedule on our servers, where only you can see them. The original event text is not uploaded, and nothing is read outside those days.

Analytics and crash reports

Jackal uses PostHog to understand how the app is used and to find out when it breaks. This is not anonymous, and it is fairer to say so plainly: when you sign in, your user ID is sent to PostHog, so what follows is tied to your account. Your email address and display name are not sent, and neither are the songs you identify.

You can turn this off in Settings under “Share usage data”. Off means nothing further is sent, including crash reports.

• Product events — screens you open, recognitions started and whether they succeeded, settings you change, purchases, and similar activity
• Crash and error reports, including the stack trace, so a crash can be diagnosed and fixed

Jackal does not record your screen.

When you search your history, we record that a search happened — never what you typed.

Who else sees your data

• ACRCloud and AudD — receive audio samples to identify music
• Spotify, Deezer, Apple, and MusicBrainz — receive song and artist names to look up artwork, genres and previews
• Ticketmaster — receives your home location and the artists you listen to most, to find concerts and festivals near you
• Google — receives festival place names to put them on the map (geocoding), and handles Sign in with Google if you use it
• Apple — handles subscription purchases and Sign in with Apple; we never see your payment details. Apple also delivers push notifications, which can include the first line of a message sent to you
• Spotify — if you connect your account, we hold the tokens that connection uses and your Spotify display name
• PostHog — product analytics and crash reports, tied to your account. See “Analytics and crash reports” above
• Our hosting providers (Railway for the server, Neon for the database, Netlify for this website), which store or carry the data described above

On this website, the contact and waitlist forms are delivered by Web3Forms, and the typeface is loaded from Google Fonts, which sees your IP address like any web request.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Other people

Anyone can follow you without your approval. Your followers see the songs you name and when, but not where you heard them. Direct messages are visible to you and the person you send them to. You can block anyone, which hides you from each other and removes any follow between you, and you can report any user from their profile or from a conversation.

Shared playlists. When you share a playlist, anyone with its link can see it on the web, whether or not they use Jackal. The page shows the playlist's name, your display name, and each song's title, artist, album and artwork. It never shows when or where you heard a song. Shared pages are marked so search engines don't list them. You can stop sharing at any time in the app: the link stops working straight away, and sharing again creates a new link.

How long we keep it

Audio samples are not kept. A sample lives in memory on our server only for as long as the match takes, is never written to disk, and is gone once the providers answer. What survives is the result — the song — not the recording. The recognition providers named above handle the samples they receive under their own terms.

Everything else listed above is kept for as long as your account exists. There is no automatic expiry and nothing is quietly aged out: your history stays until you delete a recognition or delete your account.

Keeping it safe

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit, and your data lives with managed hosting and database providers. Access is limited to what is needed to run the service.

If your data is ever exposed in a breach, we will tell you — by email and in the app — as promptly as the law requires and as soon as we understand what happened.

Deleting your data

You can delete your account from Settings, or by emailing support@usejackal.com. Deletion is permanent and removes everything listed under “What we store” from our database at once. Three things outlive it: analytics and crash events already sent to PostHog, which age out under PostHog's retention; server logs, which are kept for a short period for debugging; and Apple's own record of any purchase, which we don't control.

Children

Jackal is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, we will update the date above and note the change in the app.

Contact

Questions: support@usejackal.com.