Updating Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Creative Commons licenses

[EDIT: new Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Cookies Policy have just been released and are accessible through the links below]

Hi everyone,

This post is to let you know that have been working on an updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Use of the Freesound website, and are also starting the process to migrate old Creative Commons licenses to newer versions. The changes will be effective on April 4th 2022, and all registered users browsing Freesound will be asked to provide consent about the updated terms before continuing to use Freesound. In addition, users that have uploaded sounds will also be given the option to update the licenses of their sounds (more on that below).

The updated terms of service and privacy policy are intented to clarify your rights as users, the ways in which we process your data and, in general, to protect you and us against incorrect uses of the site. This update does not alter the Freesound philosophy in any way, it is just a necessary step that we need to make in order to better comply with regulations such as the GDPR.

Please, take some time to read our updated Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use. Also, it is worth mentioning here that we have rewritten Cookies Policy to make it more clear so you might also want to check it out. We prepared a brief summary of contents of the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use which we include here:

• Uploaded sounds are released under one of the CC licenses you choose. Other content (metadata, tags, comments, etc…) is provided as CC-Zero.
• Your activity in Freesound is public and can be seen by all users (except your private messages).
• You are responsible for your posted content.
• We (Freesound) keep your data confidential and apply security measures to keep this confidentiality.
• We (Freesound) don’t warrant that all the data on the site is correct. We are not liable for information not posted by us on this site.
• We (Freesound) may remove accounts of users that do not comply with the terms of use or who do not behave correctly (spam, offensive comments…).
• We can use anonymized data collected from Freesound (sounds, statistics about sounds, tags, comments, downloads…) for research purposes.
• You agree to receive email notifications in accordance with your email preferences.

Beyond providing consent for the updated terms, starting on the 4th of April users with sounds will also be given the opportunity to upgrade current Creative Commons licenses from 3.0 to 4.0. The main difference between these two is that Creative Commons licenses 4.0 are more user-friendly and more internationally robust, but the general terms are the same. More information can be found here. The option to upgrade licenses is only offered to users who have uploaded sounds with any of the “old” CC-BY or CC-BY-NC licenses, and will also be available in the user settings page as long as user has sounds with old licenses.

Please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to discuss about these updates by commenting to this post. Thanks everyone!!!

frederic, on behalf of the Freesound Team