Privacy Policy

MP3Pdb - The Archive ("MP3Pdb", "we", "us") is a fan-run hobby archive operated by a single collector in the United States. There are no ads, no ad networks, and no sale of personal data — ever. For any privacy question or request, email legal@mp3pdb.com.

• Account data — your email address and password (stored hashed). Optionally, if you choose to add them: first and last name, username, bio, city/region, postal code, and country. If you pick a collector type (the kind of collector you identify as, used only to highlight rating categories), signed-in members can see it on your member profile card unless you hide it in Settings → Privacy. It is also counted, without your name or username, in the site-wide statistics about what kinds of collectors use the site, whether or not you hide it.
• Collection and wishlist data — figures you track, including any purchase and sale details (dates, prices, retailers, condition, ratings, notes) that you enter yourself. Prices and other money details are private to your account and are never shown to anyone. Non-monetary collection stats (counts, ratings, display status) can appear in anonymous site-wide aggregates, and — once you set a username — with your username on members-only community leaderboards and your member profile card. Nothing that identifies you is ever visible to the public or search engines. The one public use is anonymous: the dates you pre-ordered or bought a figure at a shop, as evidence of when that shop had it (§5, Your collection as evidence). You can turn sharing off any time in Settings → Privacy.
• Community submissions — photos and captions, convention listings, collector-group listings, local-store suggestions, and retailer feedback you submit for publication.
• Contributions — photos of a figure's box or bio card and scans of its instructions that you send in, with the date and your account. Until an editor reviews one it is kept privately and is never reachable on the site; if it is declined, the file is deleted and only the decision and its reason are kept.
• Photo reports — if you report a photo (no account needed), we collect the email address and reason you provide so we can follow up on the report.
• Invitations — while the site is invitation-only, if we invite you by email we keep your email address with the invitation so we can send it, and send it again if you ask. It is used for nothing else, and it is deleted 30 days after the invitation is used, expires, or is withdrawn. If you register with it, we keep a record that your account came from that invitation.
• ROC Merch handoffs — ROC Merch is our partner's store, not ours. When you continue to their checkout we record what was in the cart (items, quantities, estimated value), the date, a referral reference, and your account id if you were signed in. We do not receive or store your email, shipping address, or payment details for those purchases — the partner collects those at their own checkout, under their privacy policy — and we never learn whether you completed the purchase.
• Store orders — if you buy merch (account or guest), we keep the order details: items and totals, the email address you give at checkout, and the shipping name and address you confirm at PayPal, which PayPal shares with us solely to fulfill the order. We never receive or store your card number or other payment credentials, and your shipping address is stored only on the order record — never on your profile, and never shown to other members. The "Share my location" setting is unrelated to orders and never exposes a street address.
• Donations — if you donate, we keep a record of the gift: the date, amount and currency, the name and email address the payment came from, the fundraiser it was for (if any), and PayPal's transaction reference. If that email address matches a verified account here, the donation is linked to that account (an admin can also link it by hand) so it can earn you a supporter trophy. The amount is never shown to other members. Like any trophy, a supporter trophy appears on your member profile card only while trophy sharing is on in Settings → Privacy.
• Usage analytics — we log basic usage events (page or figure viewed, outbound link clicks, and searches — the words searched for, which list, and how many results) with a session identifier, the referring page (another site's address, without anything after a '?'), and your user ID if you're signed in. This is our own first-party log, stored in our own database; it is never shared with advertisers or third-party analytics services.
• Server logs — like nearly every website, our web server keeps standard technical logs (IP address, browser type, pages requested) for security and troubleshooting.

The local-store locator can use your device's location, with your browser's permission, to find shops near you. Your coordinates are sent to our server only to compute that search and are not saved. The only location we store is whatever you choose to put in your profile (city, region, postal code, country).

If you enable "Share my location" in Settings → Privacy (off by default), the city, region, and country from your profile are shown to signed-in members on your member profile card. Your postal code is never shown to anyone.

Location data in images. A photo taken with a phone or camera often carries hidden details inside the file — the exact place it was taken (GPS coordinates), when, and the device used. We remove that embedded information from every image uploaded to the site — photos, store photos, profile pictures, and any other image — before it is stored or published. The image itself is not changed, so anything visible in the picture, such as a street sign or a shop front, is still there: check a photo before you share it.

Details inside PDFs. A scanned PDF carries the same kind of hidden details: the app and device that made it, when, and sometimes an account name, plus the embedded data of each page's picture. When you contribute instructions we blank those document properties and remove the embedded data from the page images before the file is stored. Where a file keeps some of it somewhere we cannot safely reach, the editor who reviews it is told, and checks it before anything is published.

We use only the cookies needed to run the site: a session cookie, a security (CSRF) token, and a "remember me" cookie if you pick that option at sign-in. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, and no embedded analytics services — which is why you won't see a cookie-consent banner here.

Services your browser contacts. A few things on the site are loaded straight from another service, so your browser asks that service for them directly — and, as with any website, it sees your IP address and browser details when it does. The store locator's map is drawn by Google Maps, under Google's privacy policy. Some images are shown from where they live rather than copied here: YouTube video thumbnails, eBay listing photos, sticker shops' product photos, ROC Merch product photos, and older photos hosted on forums. None of these services receives your account or anything you have entered, and we add nothing to those requests to identify you.

We use your data to operate the site: run your account, show your collection back to you, publish the community content you submit, moderate submissions and reports, and understand which parts of the archive get used so we can improve it.

Email is transactional only — account verification, password resets, a security notice when your sign-in email, password or two-factor setting changes, order confirmations and shipping updates if you buy from the store, and updates about photo reports you're involved in. No marketing email, no newsletters, no profiling.

Your collection as evidence. While "Share my collection data" is on (Settings → Privacy), some dates in your collection count as anonymous evidence of when a shop had a figure: the day you pre-ordered it at a shop, and the day you ordered it or bought it there. Only pre-orders and purchases of new figures at shops we list count — never a gift, a trade, a sale, a note, or what you paid. We use those dates in two ways:

• on a figure's public Retail Price History chart, as a hollow point on that shop's line, at the shop's own price. It says that someone pre-ordered or bought the figure there that day, and nothing about who;
• when they show that a figure's recorded pre-order or release date is too late, to suggest an earlier one. A site admin reviews every suggestion before anything changes.

The points are rebuilt every night from your collection as it is, so editing or deleting an entry, switching sharing off or deleting your account takes them off the charts by the next day. An admin can exclude an entry that looks mistaken; that never changes your collection. A release date an admin has approved is a fact about the figure and stays, with nothing linking it to you. Only members who have agreed to this version of the policy are counted.

We never sell personal data. It is shared only with the infrastructure that runs the site — our hosting provider and transactional email provider — and if the law requires it.

ROC Merch: when you continue to Realm of Collectors's checkout, we send them the contents of your cart and a referral reference that identifies the sale as coming from MP3Pdb (that reference is how our revenue share is verified). We send no personal information with it. From that point their store — and Shopify, their platform — handle your details under their own policies.

Store payments are processed by PayPal as an independent payment processor: when you check out, PayPal handles your payment details under its own privacy statement and shares your confirmed shipping address and payer email with us to fulfill the order. We share your order amount and item list with PayPal to create the payment.

Links to retailers, eBay, YouTube, and other external sites take you off MP3Pdb; those sites have their own privacy policies. Our outbound retail links are plain links — they carry no tracking parameters and no personal data from us.

We keep your data while your account exists. When you delete your account (Settings → Delete account):

• your profile is anonymized — email, name, username, bio, and location are removed. So that nobody else can take your username straight away and be mistaken for you, it is held for 90 days; we keep only a one-way fingerprint of it for that time, not the name itself (the same happens when you change your username);
• your collection, wishlist, and retailer feedback are permanently deleted;
• community content you submitted (photos, conventions, groups, store listings) stays on the site, with your attribution removed — except your submitted photos, which are permanently deleted instead if you have turned on "Permanently delete my photos" in Settings → Privacy;
• contributions still waiting for review are permanently deleted. Approved box and bio-card photos are treated like your other photos (above); approved instructions stay on the site, credited to "a community member";
• completed store orders are retained as transaction records (a legal-obligation carve-out: tax records, refunds, and payment disputes), but they are detached from your account — the retained order keeps only the order email and shipping snapshot, like a guest order;
• ROC Merch handoff records are likewise retained as business records and detached from your account. They contain no personal information about you — only what was in the cart and its referral reference.

Abandoned checkouts that were never paid are deleted automatically after 7 days. Usage analytics events (§2) are deleted automatically after 13 months; what we keep beyond that is daily totals, which hold no session identifier and no account. An account whose email address is never verified is deleted automatically 30 days after sign-up, the same way as above. Moderation and audit logs are retained for site integrity, and routine database backups age out on a rolling basis.

You can view and edit your profile data in your account settings, download a copy of your data yourself (Settings → Your data, a machine-readable JSON file), and delete your account yourself at any time. For a correction or a deletion you can't do yourself, or a copy of your data if you can no longer sign in, email legal@mp3pdb.com and we'll respond within 30 days.

If you're in the EEA or UK, you may have additional rights under the GDPR (access, rectification, erasure, portability, and objection) — the same email address handles those requests. For California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as defined by the CCPA.

MP3Pdb is not directed at children under 13, and accounts are limited to users 13 and older. We don't knowingly collect personal data from children under 13; if you believe we have, email us and we'll delete the account and its data.

Passwords are stored hashed, the site is served over HTTPS, and access to the database is restricted. You can add two-factor sign-in — a code from an authenticator app each time you sign in — in Settings, and we email you whenever your sign-in email, password or two-factor setting changes. No online service can guarantee absolute security, but we keep the data we hold to the minimum the site needs.

The site is operated from the United States and data is stored on servers in the US. By using the site you understand your data is processed there.

Updates are posted on this page with a new "last updated" date and listed under What changed below. When the Terms or this policy change in a way that matters, you will be shown what changed and asked to agree the next time you use the site while signed in; until you do, the new use of your data described in that change does not apply to you.