Privacy Policy

What we collect

We collect only what the service needs to work:

• Your account: your email address, a display name, your profile photo if you add one, and your birth year. The birth year tells us whether you are old enough to use CARAOK and whether age-based protections apply.
• Where you are from (required): a country and a province or state, which you choose or type yourself. It is not GPS and we never look up your device's location for it. For people 18 and over it is shown publicly next to your name on your profile and on the Rating Boards. It is never shown for people under 18. You can change it at any time, but you cannot leave it empty.
• Your karaoke life: the songs you queue and sing, when and where (which room) you sang them, your performances and recordings, and the songbooks and playlists you build.
• Ratings and reviews: the scores, tags and short reviews you give to other singers, and the ones they give to you.
• Friends: your friend list, friend requests, the people you follow, and who you block.
• Room activity: which room you joined, the shared queue, chat messages and reactions in the room, and the party recap.
• Devices and TVs: an identifier for your phone and for each TV you connect. TV and device identifiers are stored as a hash (a one-way code), not as the raw identifier.
• Network information: your IP address, used for security, to prevent abuse and to keep the service running. To put the phones at the same party in the same room ("party on your Wi-Fi"), the app sends a hashed code derived from your network. We do not store the raw Wi-Fi name, and we do not store your raw IP address for the nearby-room feature.
• Voice recordings: if you use the Studio voice layer, the recording of your voice is stored on our servers so you can listen to it and share it as you choose. We never use recordings to identify you or train anything. You choose who can hear each Studio song: only you, your friends, or (if the public option is on) anyone with the link; a public Studio song and its page can be seen by anyone with the link until you delete it. People under 18 cannot make a Studio song public. When you delete your account, your voice recordings and Studio songs are deleted too.
• Location (only when you choose): "Near me" uses your phone's position once to show karaoke bars close to you, and we do not save it. If you tap "Location" in a chat, the place you send (a point on the map and an address line) is saved as a message in that chat, like any other message. It is never live and not available to people under 18.
• Payments: coin purchases and subscriptions are handled by Google Play or the App Store. We receive a confirmation of the purchase (product, amount, date, the store's order number), not your card number. We keep these purchase records as long as the law requires (tax and accounting rules), and then delete them. Bar owners who pay for a bar plan on our website pay through Stripe. At a karaoke bar, the bar records your orders and your part of the bill in CARAOK; the bar charges you on its own card machine.
• Problem reports: if you use "Report a problem", we keep what you write, the screenshot if you add one, your app version, phone model, system and the last screens you opened, so we can fix the problem. They are deleted with your account.

Why we use it

• To run the service: sign you in, keep your profile, run the party room and the shared queue, show your songs on the TV and save your karaoke history.
• To make the social parts work: ratings and reviews, the Rating Board, friends, invitations and the party recap.
• To keep CARAOK safe and fair: one rating per person per song, detecting abuse and fraud, and acting on reports.
• To tell you about things you asked for, such as a friend request, a rating window closing or a plan ending.
• To understand how CARAOK is used in aggregate, so we can improve it.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not show third-party advertising based on it.

YouTube

Many songs on CARAOK play through the official YouTube embedded player. When a YouTube video plays, Google receives information about that playback directly, under Google's Privacy Policy and the YouTube Terms of Service. CARAOK does not download, record or modify YouTube videos; we store only the video's identifier so that the song appears in your history.

AI chat with a bar

Some karaoke bars turn on the CARAOK AI Host, an AI assistant that answers guests' questions and prepares booking or event requests for the bar. Every chat starts by telling you that you are talking to an AI assistant. What you type, and the assistant's replies, are sent to our AI provider (Anthropic) so that it can answer, and are shown to the bar's staff. The staff do not see your email address. If you ask for a booking on the web, we use the name and email you give us only to verify your email, to send you the bar's answer, and to deliver the request to the bar. Do not type card numbers or other sensitive information into the chat: the assistant never takes payments. Chats are kept for 30 days and then deleted, and they are deleted with your account. You can ask for a person at any time with "Talk to staff", and report a chat with the Report button.

Chats with friends

You can chat in the app with your friends one to one, in groups of friends, and in the chat of a party you are invited to. Only people who are your friends can start a chat with you, and blocking someone hides your chat with them and stops their messages. We keep your messages, photos, voice messages, stickers, song cards and reactions so that the people in the chat can read them; they are sent over an encrypted connection and stored on our servers, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. Chat photos are re-encoded with their location and camera data removed; photos and voice messages are shown only to the people in the chat through links that expire. We do not read your chats. A chat is seen by our moderators only when someone in it reports it: the report includes the last 20 messages, and every time a moderator opens a report it is recorded. Messages stay until you delete them ("delete for everyone"); a party chat becomes read-only 7 days after the party. When you delete your account, your messages, photos and voice messages are deleted and the others see "Deleted account". If you turn on notifications, we send them through Apple and Google (via Expo), and by default the notification only says who wrote, not what. People under 18 can only chat with their friends, see the bad-word filter, and never get photos from adults who are not their friends. Read receipts and each kind of notification can be turned off in Settings.

CARAOK Camera, Photo Booth and My Album

The CARAOK Camera and the Photo Booth run on your phone: beauty filters, face stickers, background replacement and face tracking happen on the phone, and no face data or face points are stored or sent to us. Photos and videos stay on your phone until you choose what to do with them. "Save to phone" adds them to your phone's photos (CARAOK only asks to add, never to read your library). "Send in chat" sends them to that chat (see Chats with friends). "Save to My Album" uploads that one item to your private album: before the upload the app removes location and camera data, and our server checks the file again and keeps pictures without any of that data. Your album is stored with Cloudflare R2 (object storage); it is private, visible only to you in the app and on caraok.party/account/album, through links made for you that last 10 minutes, and there is no public link or feed. Each plan has an album size (Free 1 GB, Pro 10 GB, Pro Home 25 GB). When you delete an item it goes to Recently deleted and is erased 30 days later (or at once if you choose Erase now). When you delete your account, your whole album is erased, at the latest within 30 days. To keep children safe, album pictures (and one frame our server takes from the middle of each video) are checked by Cloudflare's CSAM Scanning Tool; illegal child sexual abuse material is reported to the authorities (NCMEC / Cybertip.ca) as the law requires, and the account is closed.

Calls with friends

You can make voice and video calls with your friends, one to one or in a group chat (up to 8 people). Calls go through our calling provider Cloudflare, encrypted in transit, and are never recorded. Your voice and video go straight between the phones and Cloudflare; they never pass through or stay on our servers. We keep only what is needed to run calls and keep them safe and good: who was in a call, when it started and how long it lasted, which network type was used (Wi-Fi or mobile data), the country your connection came from, and connection quality numbers (delay, lost data, frozen video). Only friends can call you; you can choose "Nobody" in Settings, and blocking someone stops their calls. You can report a call from the call line in the chat; the report carries only who, when and how long, because there is no recording. People under 18 follow the same friends-only rules as in chats.

Your country

CARAOK is not offered in some countries and regions (see "Where CARAOK is available" in the Terms). To apply this, we look up the country your connection comes from (from our network provider Cloudflare, or from the IP address with the DB-IP database). We keep only the country of your sign-ins for 30 days, never your exact location or city. IP geolocation by DB-IP (CC BY 4.0).

Where your information is kept and how it is protected

Our servers are located in Canada (Toronto). Data travels encrypted between your device and our servers, passwords are stored hashed, and access to production data is limited to the people who run the service. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information and will tell you if a breach affects you.

How long we keep it

We keep your information while your account is active. Chat messages and room activity are kept for a limited time after a party ends, mainly for safety and for the recap. Information fetched from YouTube (titles, thumbnails) is refreshed or discarded within the time YouTube's policies require. When you delete your account, we delete or anonymise your personal information within 30 days. Your voice recordings are deleted with the account, audio files included. Records of purchases and coins, and your orders, bookings and bill parts at karaoke bars (venue activity, which is part of the bar's own records), are kept by us and by the bar as required by law, for tax and accounting reasons, without your name or account (see what is deleted and what is kept).

Your choices

• Privacy settings: choose what is public on your profile, what only friends see, and which performances are shown.
• Friend requests: turn off "allow friend requests from people in my room" at any time.
• Block and report: block or report anyone from their profile, in a room or on a review.
• Access and correction: see and change your information from your profile, and ask us for a copy of it.
• Delete your account: from the app settings (Profile → Settings → Delete account) or by emailing us. Your profile, performances and ratings are removed as described above. See how to delete your account.

Children

CARAOK is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, please contact us and we will remove it. Accounts of people under 18 get extra protections: spending limits on gifts and subscriptions, no purchases without a parent, and the voucher features are for adults only.

Legal framework

CARAOK is operated from British Columbia, Canada, and handles personal information in line with Canadian privacy law, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial law. If you live elsewhere, you may have additional rights under your local law; contact us and we will help.

Changes

When we change this policy, we will update the date at the top and, for important changes, tell you in the app or by email.

Contact

Questions or requests about your privacy: [email protected].