Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains what TheMetalNet (the “Service”) collects, why, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the choices you have. You can browse without an account; signing in adds features that require a persistent identity.

The data controller is Solaris Endeavors Ltd, a company registered in Israel (“Solaris”, “we”, “us”). You can reach us at contact@solaris-e.com or through the support page. We aim to respond to formal privacy or legal requests within 30 days.

We do not sell or rent personal information, we do not “share” it as the CPRA defines that term, we do not use it to serve advertising, and we do not track you across other websites.

• Browsing is open to everyone, at any age. No account, no name, no email.
• Accounts are 16+. Creating an account, rating, suggesting corrections, and contributing are intended for users 16 or older.
• We host no music. Audio and video stream from YouTube and Bandcamp, and only once you press play. Album cover thumbnails are cached and served by us so your browser never has to contact the archives they came from; band photographs load from Wikimedia.
• We measure how the Service is used. First party product events on our own servers, plus third party analytics and error monitoring described in Analytics and monitoring.
• No ad tracking, no data sales. Nothing we collect is used for advertising or sold to anyone.
• You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from your settings. See Your rights and choices.

This Policy covers the TheMetalNet website and our communications with you. Third party services we use or link out to — YouTube and Bandcamp, our payment provider, Wikipedia, streaming services, artist and label sites, and others — have their own privacy policies, and this Policy does not govern them.

Where consent is the basis for something — non essential cookies and analytics — we ask for it separately and up front, and you can withdraw it at any time without losing access to the rest of the Service.

Most of the experience works as a guest, at any age. We still record coarse usage signals so we can understand which parts of the app are used and fix problems.

• A random identifier is created in your browser's local storage the first time an analytics event is sent. It is not tied to your name or email unless you sign in, and clearing site data removes it.
• Product events record what happened (for example that a band page opened, or that a preview played) and the path you viewed inside the app. Event names and a small, schema checked set of properties are stored; oversized properties are rejected.
• Moving around the galaxy is recorded the same way: which part of the map you opened, how long you stayed, and whether the map failed you — a tap that hit nothing, a search that found nothing, a device the scene ran badly on. It is the only way we can see the map at all, because it is drawn rather than built out of a page. What youtype into the search box is never sent: we record how many characters it was and whether you opened one of the results, and the words themselves stay in your browser.
• If you arrived from another website, we store only that site's hostname, on the first visit of a session. The full referring address is discarded before anything is written down, because a full URL can carry personal information.
• We record a broad device class (desktop, mobile, or tablet) inferred from your browser information, and a country inferred by our network edge. We do not build a fingerprint of your hardware, and we do not store your IP address in our own analytics tables.
• Our hosting, network, and security providers process standard technical and log data — IP address, browser and device type, request paths, and timestamps — to deliver and secure the Service. We also use your IP address transiently to rate limit abusive traffic.
• Automated traffic such as crawlers and bots is identified and dropped before any event is saved.

Signing in lets you save bands, build personal galaxies, rate releases, suggest catalog corrections, and sync across devices. You sign up with an email address and a password. If you forget it, we email a one time link that lets you set a new one. The following information can be associated with your account:

• Email address and, when ownership has been proven, a verification timestamp
• Display name, username, and short bio you choose
• Profile image you upload, stored on our servers and served publicly from your profile
• Preferences stored as structured settings (for example view mode)
• Your saved likes and galaxy collections, including any you choose to share by link
• Ratings you give to bands and albums, one per account per subject
• Catalog corrections you suggest, including your note and the reviewer's outcome
• Product events linked to your account instead of only the anonymous browser id

Passwords are never stored in plain text. We keep a one way hash produced with scrypt. Password reset and email change flows use single use tokens, valid for 15 to 30 minutes; only a hash of each token is stored. Requests are rate limited per address and per IP to slow abuse.

Sessions are represented by an HTTP only, SameSite=Lax cookie signed on the server, marked Secure over HTTPS. It lasts about one week, refreshes as you keep using the Service, and can be invalidated immediately when you change your password or sign out everywhere. The cookie does not contain your email or password.

Signed in users can rate bands and albums from 1 to 10, and can propose corrections to catalog fields with a short note explaining the change and its source. Both are tied to your account, deliberately: a rating is one vote per account, and a reviewer weighing a claim about a band needs to know who stands behind it.

Ratings are published only in aggregate — an average and a count — never as your individual score attached to your name. Correction proposals are visible to our reviewers, together with your account, the value you proposed, and your note. Accepted corrections change the catalog; the resulting catalog value is public, and it is not labelled with your name.

Voluntary contributions are processed by Polar, which acts as the merchant of record. You choose a preset tier or a custom amount between $1 and $1,000. We do not receive or store full card numbers. We keep a record of the amount, currency, tier, status, and the Polar checkout and order identifiers needed for accounting, receipts, and support. If you are signed in, the contribution is linked to your user id. If you pay while signed out, we store the email address you provide at checkout so we can send a receipt and answer questions about the payment.

Contributions support platform development, hosting, and maintenance. They are optional, give you no goods, services, or perks in return, and are non refundable except where the law requires. Polar collects your payment and billing details and processes them under its own privacy policy, and is responsible for collecting and remitting applicable sales tax or VAT.

When you contact support, we store the name and email you submit, the category and subject you choose, and your message. If you are signed in, the ticket is also linked to your account. The form attaches lightweight diagnostics — your browser user agent string, the page you were on, and the build identifier — used only for troubleshooting.

We send transactional email for verification, passwordless sign in, email changes, support acknowledgements and replies, and similar operational messages, through a third party email provider. Each send is logged internally with the recipient address, purpose, subject, delivery status, and any error, so we can prove whether a message you were expecting actually left our system.

We do not currently run a marketing mailing list. If we introduce one, it will be opt in, will be about our own features, and every message will carry a one click unsubscribe.

Some pages link to an external feedback form hosted by Google Forms. Following that link takes you to Google, and anything you submit there is handled by Google under its own privacy policy, not by us.

We measure how the Service is used so we can improve it. None of it is used for advertising, and none of it is sold. Depending on how the Service is configured, some or all of the following are active. Each one ships only when it has been configured; where a provider is not configured, no script is served and no data leaves your browser to it.

• Our own event pipeline. Product events are written to our own database, as described in When you browse. This is the source of truth and involves no third party.
• Contentsquare(formerly Hotjar, which Contentsquare acquired) for product analytics: heatmaps and zoning showing where visitors click and scroll, session replays reconstructing how a visit moved through the app, and occasional on site surveys. Contentsquare sets its own cookies to recognise a session across page views, and receives the paths you visit and the names of the events listed above — names only, without their properties. Replays capture your interactions with our interface; they are not a recording of your screen, your other tabs, or your camera. We do not use Contentsquare for advertising and we do not sell what it collects.
• PostHog for product analytics. Where configured, it receives the same event names together with their properties, and uses its own browser storage to keep a device and session identifier. Its automatic pageview capture is switched off; we send our own explicit visit event instead.
• Plausible for aggregate traffic statistics. It is cookieless, sets no identifier, and collects no personal data.
• Sentry for error and performance monitoring. When something breaks, it receives the error and its stack trace, the page it happened on, and technical context about the browser and request. A small sample of requests is traced for performance. We do not use it for analytics, and we do not enable its session replay.

Album art is served from our own domain: we fetch it from the Cover Art Archive once, cache it, and serve it to you ourselves, so your browser never contacts them and they never see your IP address. Our fonts are served from our own domain too, so no font provider sees your visit. Band photographs load directly from Wikimedia, which therefore sees your IP address and browser information as part of serving them, under its own policy.

Players. Audio and video play in embedded players from YouTube (operated by Google) and Bandcamp. Neither loads while you are simply reading: nothing is requested from either until you press play, and until then they see nothing of your visit at all. When you do press play, that provider receives your IP address and browser information and may store data in your browser in order to play the content, under its own policy. We use YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain, youtube-nocookie.com, which does not set Google's advertising identifier. We receive nothing back about what you played, and no player is connected to any account of yours unless you signed into that provider yourself.

We use cookies and browser storage for two things: keeping you signed in, and measuring how the Service is used. We set no advertising cookies and no cross site tracking cookies.

• Essential — session cookie. Set when you sign in. HTTP only, SameSite=Lax, Secure over HTTPS, about one week. Without it you cannot stay signed in.
• Essential — admin session cookie. The same, for operator accounts only. Ordinary visitors never receive it.
• Essential — consent cookie. Records the answer you gave to the question below, so we do not have to ask again. Named tmn_consent, it holds one word — granted or denied — and the date you chose, SameSite=Lax, Secure over HTTPS, six months. Remembering that you declined is what honours the refusal, so this one needs no consent of its own. If you are signed in we keep the same answer on your account, so it applies on your other devices too.
• Essential — local storage. A copy of that consent answer for browsers that block cookies, a random analytics identifier, your saved view preferences, and flags recording which one time hints you have already seen. These stay in your browser.
• Analytics — Contentsquare. Cookies that recognise a session across page views, so a replay or heatmap is a session rather than a series of unrelated page loads.
• Analytics — PostHog. Browser storage holding a device and session identifier, where PostHog is configured.
• Analytics — Plausible. None. Plausible is cookieless by design.
• Players — YouTube and Bandcamp.When you press play, the provider's embedded player may store what it needs in your browser in order to play the content. This is not set by us and not until you ask for a track: reading the catalog never loads either player. We use YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain, which does not set Google's advertising identifier.
• Marketing. None, in any category, from any provider.

Essential cookies do not require consent. The non essential ones — Contentsquare and PostHog — are set only after you agree, and we ask everyone, not only visitors in regions whose law requires it. Until you answer, they stay off; declining keeps them off permanently. You can change or withdraw your choice at any time using Cookie settings in the footer of any page, which states the choice currently in force and lets you switch it; withdrawing reloads the page so collection actually stops rather than merely being marked as unwanted. We ask again after six months, or sooner if the tools we use change materially.

You can also block or clear cookies in your browser: the Service will treat you as a guest, and the catalog stays fully browsable either way. Nothing behind the consent question is needed to read anything on the site.

If you are in the EEA or UK, the GDPR requires us to name a legal basis for each purpose. Ours are:

• Running, delivering, and securing the Service— technical and log data, essential cookies. Legitimate interests, and performance of the terms you accept by using features you ask for.
• Providing your account and its features— email, profile, saves, galaxies, ratings, suggestions. Performance of a contract with you.
• Analytics that use non essential cookies or storage— Contentsquare, PostHog. Your consent in the EU and UK; legitimate interests elsewhere.
• Aggregate measurement and improving the Service— our own event pipeline, cookieless statistics, error monitoring. Legitimate interests in understanding and fixing a product we give away.
• Answering support requests and sending operational email— ticket and message content, email log. Performance of a contract, and legitimate interests in answering you.
• Processing voluntary contributions— payment confirmation data. Performance of a transaction, and legal obligations for tax and accounting.
• Preventing abuse and keeping users safe— technical data, rate limits, audit logs. Legitimate interests, and legal obligation.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights, and you can object at any time using the contact details above.

Operator accounts use an additional signed session cookie and, where enabled, WebAuthn passkeys as a second step. Passkey public keys and metadata are stored; private keys remain on your device and are never sent to us.

Sensitive admin actions, including failed sign in attempts, are written to an audit log for security investigation. This logging applies to the admin surface, not to ordinary browsing analytics.

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information: encryption in transit, encryption at rest for third party access tokens, one way password hashing, single use short lived sign in tokens, rate limiting, and a strict content security policy. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, so we also keep what we collect to the minimum the Service needs.

Most of what the Service displays is factual music information, not personal data about our users. Our sources:

• Open music metadata databases. We host copies of public, openly licensed music-metadata datasets, released into the public domain under CC0 1.0. Such a dataset can include limited personal data about the volunteer editors who compiled it, such as usernames and edit history, which we use only to operate the Service and to handle related requests.
• Wikipedia / Wikimedia. Descriptive text under CC BY-SA, credited to the article it came from. Photographs only where the file is hosted on Wikimedia Commons under a licence permitting reuse, credited to the photographer and the named licence beneath the image.
• YouTube and Bandcamp. Audio and video, played in their own embedded players and subject to their privacy policies.
• Artists, labels, and rights holders. Names, images, and biographical facts, shown for factual identification.

If you are a musician listed here

The catalog includes a page for each person recorded as a member of a band, built from public music-metadata sources rather than from anything you gave us. Where those sources record it, such a page can show your name, the country and city associated with you, the years you were active, the bands you played in, and a biography drawn from Wikipedia. We did not collect this from you directly, so this paragraph is the notice the GDPR requires us to give you about it.

• Where it comes from: publicly available music-metadata databases and Wikipedia. We add no private information of our own and we do not attempt to find any.
• Why we publish it: our legitimate interest in operating a free reference work about metal music, and the public interest in accurate information about published creative work. We do not use it for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not profile anyone.
• What you can do:ask us to correct anything inaccurate, or to remove your entry altogether. A removal is permanent — we keep a record of the request itself so that later refreshes of our data cannot quietly put the entry back.

Write to contact@solaris-e.com or use the support page. You do not need to give a reason, and you can also complain to your data protection authority — see Your rights and choices.

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

• Service providers who host, deliver, secure, measure, and support the Service — our hosting and network providers, Polar for payments, our transactional email provider, and the analytics and error monitoring providers named in Analytics and monitoring— under arrangements that require them to protect your data and use it only to provide their service to us.
• YouTube and Bandcamp, when you press play — the provider serving that track receives your IP address and browser information in order to play it, under its own privacy policy.
• Authorities or others where the law requires it, to meet legal process, enforce our terms, or protect users, the public, or Solaris.
• A successor, in the event of a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, under this Policy.

Anything you choose to publish is shared by you, not by us: a public share link exposes the collection you shared to anyone holding the link, and your profile page shows the display name, username, bio, and image you set.

Solaris is based in Israel, which the European Commission recognizes as providing an adequate level of data protection for transfers from the EU and, separately, the UK. Our service providers may process data in other countries, including the United States. Where personal data leaves the EEA or UK, we rely on that adequacy decision or on safeguards such as the EU or UK Standard Contractual Clauses.

We keep data for as long as it serves the purpose we collected it for, rather than deleting it on a fixed schedule. We would rather describe that plainly than publish a timetable we do not run. Where a period is fixed by law, or by how the server stores something, it is named below — and whatever the period, you can ask us to erase your data or delete your account yourself at any time.

• Account data is kept while your account exists, and is deleted when you delete the account.
• Sign in tokens expire after 15 minutes and are single use.
• Product events are kept for as long as they serve recommendation quality and product measurement, which in practice means we do not delete them on a timer. On account deletion the link to your account is removed immediately, leaving events that point at no one. You can ask us to erase yours at any time.
• Server and security logsare rotated by the server on a short cycle — web server logs within about two weeks — and system logs are kept until their storage is reclaimed.
• Support tickets and the email log are kept so we can reference past conversations and prove delivery. We do not delete them on a timer; you can ask us to erase a conversation and we will unless we are required to keep it.
• Contribution recordsare kept for at least 7 years, as tax and accounting law requires. They carry the payer's email independently of any account.
• Admin audit log entries are kept for security investigation and are not linked to ordinary user analytics.

What deleting your account does.Deleting removes your user record, and the database removes everything that hangs off it: your profile and uploaded image, your passkeys, your saves, your ratings, your suggestions, and every saved galaxy — including any share links other people are holding, which stop working. Two things deliberately survive, and you should know about both. First, a record of the deletion is written to our support queue before the account is removed, holding your name, email, when the account was opened, how many bands it had saved, and the reason you gave; it exists so we can answer questions about a deletion afterwards, and it is kept under the support retention above. Second, contribution records are kept for the statutory period described above. You can ask us to delete the support record too, and we will unless we are required to keep it.

Some things you can do yourself, immediately, without asking us:

• Delete your account and its data from your settings.
• Change your email, display name, username, bio, and profile image.
• Sign out everywhere, invalidating every existing session.
• Browse signed out, so nothing is linked to an account.
• Clear site data in your browser to remove the anonymous analytics identifier.
• Change or withdraw your analytics cookie choice.

EU / UK. If you are in the EEA or UK, you can access your data and get a copy, correct it, erase it, restrict or object to certain uses, get it in a portable format, and withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing already carried out. You can also complain to your local supervisory authority, or the ICO in the UK. We may need to verify your identity before we act on a request, to protect your data.

California. If you are a California resident, you can know what we collect, access it, delete it, correct it, and not be treated differently for exercising these rights. The categories we collect, our sources, our purposes, and who we disclose to are set out in the sections above, and retention is in Retention and deletion. We do not sell or share personal information, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16, so there is nothing to opt out of. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request, and we will verify it.

Israel. If you are in Israel, you have rights under the Protection of Privacy Law, 5741-1981, as amended, including to review the personal information we hold about you and to ask us to correct or delete information that is wrong, incomplete, or out of date.

Outside these regions you may still have rights to access, correct, or delete personal information under applicable law. We honor valid requests consistent with the law that applies to you. To exercise any right that is not self serve above, contact us through the support page or at contact@solaris-e.com.

TheMetalNet is a general audience service for music lovers of all ages, not one aimed at children. Browsing is open to everyone, requires no account, and collects no data that identifies a child beyond the limited technical data described above. We do not build advertising profiles, track across sites, or sell anything we collect. Some catalog content is mature by nature, so viewer discretion is advised.

Creating an account, rating, suggesting corrections, and contributing are intended for users 16 or older, or the minimum age required in your country if higher. We do not currently run a technical age check at sign up, so we rely on this policy and on you providing accurate information.

United States (COPPA). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. We never require anyone to provide personal information in order to browse.

Parents and guardians. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us using the details above and we will check and delete it promptly.

This document describes the product as built today and will change as it evolves. We will revise the “Last updated” date whenever it changes, and describe material changes in the app or by email where appropriate. For material changes to how we use your personal data, we will seek fresh consent where the law requires it. We will not apply material changes retroactively.

Questions about data handling can be sent through the support page or to contact@solaris-e.com.