Drive-By privacy
What this website and the Drive-By service do with information. Effective 14 October 2026. Written from the code as it stood that day, and checked against it.
The short version
Drive-By is one household's windowsill project. It is not offered to the public: there are no accounts, no sign up, no analytics and nothing to download. The parts that touch other people are the microphone at the window, which records a street, and the phone page that anyone holding the frame's QR code can open. This page says what each part keeps and where it goes.
Who this covers
This page covers this website and the Drive-By service: the box at the window, the computer at home that listens, the small Cloudflare Worker that files what was heard, the e-paper frame, and the phone page the frame's QR code opens. Questions go to the Contact me button on this page.
This website
- The site is static files served by Cloudflare Workers. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Images are served from this domain.
- The pages load the Schibsted Grotesk, Martian Mono and VT323 typefaces from Google Fonts, so Google receives the requests for the stylesheet and font files, including your IP address, under the Google privacy policy. No other third party script or stylesheet is loaded.
- Cloudflare processes each request to deliver it, which involves your IP address and browser details, under the Cloudflare privacy policy. The site's Worker has Workers Logs turned on, so those request details are also kept for a limited time in the Cloudflare account that runs it.
The microphone at the window
- The box records the street continuously and streams the audio, over the home network only, to the computer at home. That computer keeps a rolling recording of the last 24 hours and deletes anything older at each new hour.
- When someone taps to listen, short windows of that recording, twelve and eight seconds long, are sent to Apple's Shazam service to be named. During auto listen one twelve second window goes every three seconds, for up to two hours. Only when Shazam names nothing does one window go to AudD, a second recognition service, and that one clip is kept by the Worker with the result.
- A deep listen that still names nothing keeps the stretch it searched, about three minutes, on the computer at home so the miss can be studied. Those clips, and a handful of hand marked passes from the first week, are not deleted on a schedule.
- The recording is of a public street from inside a window. It can contain voices from the sidewalk. Nobody reviews it, and nothing on it is transcribed.
The camera
The box has a camera. In the build running now it is off. Two camera tests, on 22 September and 4 October 2026, stored about 500 photos of the street at 640 by 480 in the Worker's storage and on the computer at home. Nothing in the code reads plates or detects faces, and the photos have no deletion schedule.
What the service keeps
The Worker stores each named song as an event: the title, artist, album, the song's year, the cover image's address, the time to the second, and which surface started the listen (the box, the phone page, or the desk). It also keeps the last 200 events as a list, the last song for the frame, and a marker per song so a song is added to a playlist once. None of it has a deletion schedule. There is a cap of 100 recognitions and 300 named songs a day. Workers Logs are turned on for the Worker and kept for a limited time; a request's path is in the log.
Playlists
A song started from the box or the phone page is added to a Spotify playlist. A song started from the desk, and every song, is added to an Apple Music playlist in the owner's library. Spotify and Apple receive the song's title and artist, or its Apple Music id and ISRC, to find it, under their own policies. MusicBrainz receives the title and artist to find the song's first release year; it needs no account. The Spotify playlist is linked from the phone page and is public. The Apple Music playlist is not linked anywhere.
The phone page
The frame shows a QR code. Scanning it opens the phone page, and the code in that link is the only key: anyone who can see the frame can open the page, tap to listen, start auto listen, choose which song the frame shows, and see the songs heard before. The page sets no cookies and stores nothing in the browser. It polls the Worker for a tap's progress for up to two minutes. Cover images load from Spotify's image servers, and the VT323 typeface from Google Fonts, so each receives the phone's IP address. Share sends the song's Spotify link and nothing else. The link can be revoked by changing the code, which leaves every other key alone.
Location
No request carries coordinates. The phone page names the street corner in its text and its share message, because it is the frame's own household page.
Retention and deletion
The 24 hour recording deletes itself. Everything else above stays until the owner removes it. Nothing is sold, shared or used for advertising. To ask for something to be removed, use the Contact me button on this page.
Children
Drive-By and this site are not directed at children under 13 and do not knowingly collect information from them.
Changes
This page changes when the code does. The effective date at the top is the date of the current version.