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melo

Privacy policy

Last updated 5 October 2026

In short

  • No accounts, no ads, no tracking cookies, and Melo never sells or shares your data.
  • Your saved sounds, history and settings stay in your own browser.
  • Upvotes are stored only as an anonymous, one-way scrambled code.
  • Page-view stats are cookieless and anonymous.
  • When you play a sound, it streams from its original source, whose own privacy policy applies.

Who runs Melo

Melo (melo.today) is built and run by Bhavarth Bhati, an AI-first builder based in India. Any question or request about your data goes to hello@melo.today.

For India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the EU/UK GDPR, Melo’s operator is the “data fiduciary” / “controller”: the one who decides how the little data Melo handles is used.

What stays in your browser

Melo has no accounts. To make the site work, it keeps a few things in your browser’s local storage. They never leave your device unless noted:

  • Sounds you save, and sounds you’ve recently played.
  • Player settings (volume, mute) and Ambient mode settings (world, motion).
  • Whether you’ve seen the welcome postcard and tour, and whether its sounds are on.
  • A random ID created by your browser, used for upvotes (see below). It contains nothing about you.

You can delete all of this at any time by clearing this site’s data in your browser settings. Melo sets no cookies of its own.

Upvotes

When you upvote, your browser sends the sound’s ID and its random ID to Melo’s vote service (api.melo.today, hosted on Cloudflare). The random ID is stored only as a salted one-way hash, so it can’t be turned back into the original ID and isn’t linked to your name, email or account (there isn’t one). To stop abuse, your IP address is also turned into a short-lived hash for rate limiting; these hashes are deleted within about 20 minutes. Melo can’t tell who cast a vote.

Analytics

Melo uses Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights to count page views and measure loading speed. They work without cookies and report only aggregated statistics (pages, referrers, countries, device types and performance). Melo never sees who you are.

Hosting and server logs

The website is hosted by Vercel and the vote service by Cloudflare. Like any website, their servers process your IP address and browser details to deliver pages and protect against attacks, under their own privacy policies. Melo doesn’t use these logs to identify anyone.

Sounds, players and artwork from other services

Melo doesn’t host audio. Sound covers load from their sources when you browse, and sounds stream from them when you press play, so your browser connects directly to that service, which can see your IP address:

  • Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive and Freesound: audio files and images.
  • YouTube (in privacy-enhanced mode), SoundCloud and Bandcamp: their official players load only when you press play, and may set their own cookies from then on.

Their own privacy policies apply to what they collect.

When you email Melo

If you write to hello@melo.today, Melo receives your email address and message, and uses them only to reply and to act on your request (for example a correction or removal). Mail is received through Namecheap email forwarding into a Google Gmail inbox and replies are sent through Brevo. Messages are kept only as long as needed to handle them and to keep a record of removal requests.

What Melo never does

  • Sell, rent or share your personal data.
  • Show ads, or use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
  • Build a profile of you, or ask for your name or any account details.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have rights over your personal data, including to access it, correct it, have it erased, withdraw consent and raise a grievance. Because Melo holds almost no personal data, most requests are about emails you’ve sent; write to hello@melo.today and you’ll get a reply within 30 days. Data kept in your browser is yours to delete at any time.

If you’re not satisfied with the response, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India, or, in the EU/UK, to your local data protection authority.

Children

Melo is a general-audience site that doesn’t ask anyone for personal data. It doesn’t knowingly collect personal data from children; if you’re under 18, please ask a parent or guardian before contacting Melo by email.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new date. Significant changes will also be noted on the About page.