PRIVACY POLICY

Last updated: September 2026.

Shortwave (shortwaveradio.online) is a personal project built to collect as little as possible. There are no accounts, no sign-up, and no profile. This page describes everything the site does with data, including the parts that are out of our hands.

What stays on your device

Your callsign, chosen frequency, receive mode, trainer progress and anything you type in the operator's notepad are saved in your own browser (localStorage and sessionStorage). They never leave your device and we never see them. Clearing your browser storage deletes them permanently.

What passes through the relay

When you transmit, your callsign and the live key events — dots, dashes and decoded letters — are relayed in real time to the other operators tuned to your frequency, so they can hear you. These messages are a pass-through: they are not written to disk, not logged, and not associated with any identity, and they cease to exist the moment they are delivered. There is no message history to retrieve, for you or for anyone else.

Connecting to any server on the internet necessarily reveals your IP address to it. The relay application does not record, store or log IP addresses. The hosting and proxy layer in front of it may hold short-lived operational logs, as any web host does, and those are used only to keep the service running.

Advertising and cookies

This site displays ads served by Google AdSense. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website and to other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on those visits.

You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google Ads Settings, or opt out of third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info. How Google handles data from sites that use its services is described at policies.google.com.

Consent in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland

If you visit from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, a consent message appears before personalised advertising cookies are set, and your choice is recorded and respected. You can change or withdraw that choice at any time through the same message, which is reachable from the privacy link shown with the ads. Declining does not restrict any part of the site — the station works the same either way.

Analytics

We run no analytics of our own: no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no pixels, no fingerprinting, no heatmaps. The only third-party code on the site is the Google advertising script and the web fonts served by Google Fonts, which is requested by your browser when a page loads.

Your data rights

Because nothing is stored, there is no account to access, export or delete — clearing your browser storage removes everything the site holds about you. For the advertising cookies described above, the controls linked in that section are the effective route, since those cookies are set by Google rather than by us. If you have a request we can act on, write and we will.

Children

Shortwave is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided personal information through the site, write to the address below and it will be removed.

Changes to this policy

If what the site does with data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated. There is no mailing list to notify, so the date is the record.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Write to info@shortwaveradio.online. See also the terms of service and the station notes.