Privacy, Cookies and Contact
Akousia counts visits with Google Analytics, and only after you say yes in the cookie banner. There is no advertising, no account to make and nothing is sold. Below is exactly what is measured, what stays in your browser, and how to change your mind.
What do we measure?
If you accept statistics, Google Analytics 4 records which pages you open, how you move from one to the next, which country and city you visit from, and what kind of device and browser you use. We look at it to see which explanations people read to the end and where they get stuck, so we know what to rewrite.
Before you choose, nothing is sent to Google at all. The Google script only loads after you accept, and if you reject it never loads.
Google Analytics does not store your IP address. It uses it for a moment to work out the country and city, and then drops it. Google Signals and ad personalization are switched off, the data is not connected to any advertising account. The retention for user-level and event-level data is set to 14 months; that setting does not apply to aggregated standard reports.
Google processes this data for us as a processor, under its own data processing terms. Some of it can be handled in the United States, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
Which cookies are set?
- akousia_consent (necessary, 12 months) remembers what you chose in the banner, so it does not ask again on every page.
- _ga (statistics, 2 years) lets Google Analytics tell one visitor from another.
- _ga_JGR6MJ3B8S (statistics, 2 years) keeps track of a single visit.
The two Google cookies only appear after you accept. After 12 months the banner asks again.
How do you change your mind?
Press "Cookie settings" at the bottom of any page and the banner opens again. Switch statistics off and save, and the two Google cookies are removed from your browser straight away.
Every page, exercise and sound works the same with statistics on or off.
What stays in your browser?
A few things are kept in your own browser, in what is called local storage. That is a small notepad that belongs to your browser. The site uses it to remember what you did here, and it is never sent to our server.
- Which lessons you opened, so the twenty lessons can show you where you stopped.
- How you left an exercise set up, so you do not pick the same pool and level every time.
- Your streak in the reading trainer, so it can tell you when you beat it.
- The layout you picked for the Virtual Piano, so it opens the way you left it.
These need no permission: they only do what you asked the page to do, and none of them identifies you or travels anywhere. Clearing your browser data wipes them, and the site simply starts fresh.
The fonts are served from this domain, and there is no embedded video and no social button, so opening a page does not tell anyone else that you did.
What happens when you sign up for the newsletter?
If you sign up at the bottom of a page, your email address goes straight to Brevo, the service that keeps our mailing list. Brevo is based in France and handles the address for us under its data processing terms. We use it only to send the Akousia newsletter. We also note whether you signed up on the English or the Dutch site, so the newsletter reaches you in that language.
Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and one click takes you off the list. To have your address deleted entirely, mail [email protected].
The "Support Akousia" buttons open Ko-fi's tip form right on the page. Ko-fi is a separate service with its own privacy policy, and it only loads when you press that button. Until then nothing is sent to Ko-fi and it sets no cookies.
Server logs
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like every web server, it records the requests it receives, including your IP address, in order to deliver the page and to block attacks. That processing is Cloudflare's, it is what makes a website work at all, and we do not build profiles from it or connect it to anything else.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, and object to it being processed. The statistics in Google Analytics are not linked to your name or email, so there is usually nothing we can find on request. Switching statistics off stops any further collection straight away. If you are on the newsletter, we can look up your email address in Brevo and correct or delete it.
You can also file a complaint with the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Audio and rights
The piano on this site plays recordings of a Yamaha C5 grand piano: the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY 3.0). Every other sound, from the drums to the pure tones on the sound pages, is synthesized in your browser at the moment you press play. There are no streams and no transcriptions of protected work. The style grooves in the Drumlab describe how a style is put together, not how any particular record sounds.
The treble clef comes from Bravura, a music font published under the SIL Open Font License.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or a mistake you spotted on a page? We would rather hear it than not.
Responsible
Akousia, the Netherlands. This page was last updated on the date shown below.