CHRT PRIVACY POLICY

This Privacy Policy explains how CHRT Music LLC, a New Mexico limited liability company ("CHRT," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, and shares information when you use chrtmusic.com and related services (the "Service").

1. INFORMATION WE COLLECT

a. Account information. When you create an account, we collect your email address, chosen handle, and authentication credentials (managed securely by our authentication provider; we never store your password in plain text).

b. Submission information. If you submit a track, we collect the audio file, cover artwork or video, title, genre, the AI tool used, and the declarations you make at submission (age, originality, rights ownership, and acknowledgment of platform rules).

c. Listening and usage data. We record verified plays, which include a hashed (one-way, non-reversible) representation of your IP address — we do not store your raw IP address — along with the track played, timestamp, and, if you are signed in, your account ID. We use this to calculate rankings, detect fraudulent activity, and prevent abuse.

d. Device and log information. We may collect browser type, general geographic region (derived from IP, not stored as a raw IP), and diagnostic information for security and reliability purposes.

e. Cookies and similar technologies. We use cookies and local storage to keep you signed in and remember preferences. We do not use third-party advertising trackers.

f. Subscription and billing information. If you subscribe to CHRT Pro, your payment card details are collected and processed directly by our payment processor, Paddle (see Section 3(b)), which acts as merchant of record and seller of record for the transaction — not merely on our instructions — and is independently responsible for that payment data under its own privacy policy. CHRT never receives, processes, or stores your full card number or other payment credentials. We receive from our payment processor only the information necessary to grant and manage your CHRT Pro access: your subscription status, plan, billing period, and transaction history.

2. HOW WE USE INFORMATION

We use the information described above to: operate and improve the Service; calculate chart rankings and certifications; detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and rate-limit violations; review, moderate, and act on reported content and otherwise maintain safety and enforce our Content Standards; communicate with you about your account or submissions; comply with legal obligations, including reporting illegal content (such as child sexual abuse material) to authorities as required by law; and enforce our Terms of Service and Contest Rules.

3. HOW WE SHARE INFORMATION

We do not sell your personal information. We share information only with:

a. Service providers who help us operate the Service under contractual confidentiality obligations, including our hosting and web-analytics provider (Vercel), database and authentication provider (Supabase), email delivery provider (Resend), bot-protection provider (Cloudflare), audio fingerprinting/copyright-screening provider (ACRCloud), rate-limiting infrastructure provider (Upstash), and error-monitoring provider (Sentry), which may receive diagnostic information about errors and performance, including request metadata, when something goes wrong.

b. A payment processor (Paddle), if you subscribe to CHRT Pro. Unlike the service providers in (a), our payment processor acts as merchant of record and seller of record for your CHRT Pro subscription, not merely as a confidential service provider acting on our instructions. It collects your payment details directly, determines and collects applicable transaction taxes, and independently controls that payment data under its own privacy policy and terms, in addition to this Policy and the Terms of Service governing your use of CHRT itself.

c. Other users, to the extent you choose to make information public (e.g., your handle, public submissions, and public playlists are visible to other users by design).

d. Law enforcement or other parties when required by law, legal process, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of CHRT, our users, or others.

e. A successor entity in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, subject to this Policy or a materially similar one.

4. DATA RETENTION

We retain account and submission information for as long as your account is active and as needed to operate the Service, including maintaining a permanent historical record of past Season results and champions, which survives account deletion to preserve the integrity of the competition's historical record. If you subscribe to CHRT Pro, we retain subscription and transaction history (Section 1(f)) for as long as needed to manage your subscription, respond to billing disputes, and satisfy tax, accounting, and other legal recordkeeping obligations, which commonly extend beyond account deletion. You may request deletion of your account and associated personal information at any time (see Section 7).

5. YOUR RIGHTS

a. California residents (CCPA/CPRA). You have the right to know what personal information we collect, request deletion of your personal information, and opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share personal information as defined under the CCPA. To exercise these rights, contact privacy@chrtmusic.com or use the account deletion/export tools described in Section 7.

b. Other jurisdictions. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights to access, correct, port, or delete your personal information, or to object to or restrict certain processing. Contact us to exercise these rights, and we will respond consistent with applicable law.

c. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any privacy right.

6. CHILDREN'S PRIVACY

The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Submitting a track specifically requires you to be at least 18 years old. If we learn we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it.

7. ACCOUNT DELETION AND DATA EXPORT

You can request a copy of your personal data (account information, submissions, and listening history associated with your account) or request deletion of your account through your account settings, or by emailing privacy@chrtmusic.com. We will verify your identity before fulfilling export or deletion requests. Some information (such as anonymized or aggregated play counts already reflected in historical Season results, and records we are required to retain for legal, security, or fraud-prevention purposes) may be retained even after account deletion, consistent with Section 4.

8. SECURITY

We use industry-standard safeguards to protect your information, including encrypted storage, hashed IP addresses for play verification, row-level database access controls, and signed, single-use tokens for verifying listening activity. No system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

9. INTERNATIONAL USERS

The Service is operated from the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have different data protection laws than your jurisdiction. If you subscribe to CHRT Pro, your payment processor may also process your billing information in other countries where it or its own service providers operate, subject to the payment processor's own privacy policy and any safeguards it maintains for cross-border transfers.

10. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be notified through the Service or by email. The "Last updated" date above reflects the most recent revision.

11. CONTACT

Questions about this Privacy Policy, or requests to exercise your privacy rights, can be sent to privacy@chrtmusic.com.