ZenHoot
Legal

Privacy

Last updated September 9, 2026

ZenHoot is a local music player. Your library, playback history, and listening habits stay on your device — none of it is uploaded to ZNOWSOFT, and there is no product analytics or advertising SDK in the application itself. The website and the optional self-hosted server do report limited operational events; both are described below.

The application

  • Your files never leave your machine. ZenHoot reads local folders and any remote library you configure yourself. It does not copy your music to us.
  • What you play is not reported. There is no play-history telemetry.
  • Licence checks. An activated device asks ZNOWSOFT's licensing service whether its licence is still valid. That request carries the device's own credential — not your email address, and not anything about your library.
  • Third-party lookups. Artwork, lyrics and metadata come from services such as LRCLIB, MusicBrainz, Cover Art Archive, iTunes, TheAudioDB and AcoustID. Those requests contain the track and artist name being looked up, and reach the provider directly — they do not pass through us. AcoustID and TheAudioDB are reached with a key ZenHoot ships with, which identifies the application rather than you; for files whose tags are unusable, AcoustID additionally receives an acoustic fingerprint, which is not a copy of the audio. Adding your own AcoustID, TheAudioDB or Genius key in Settings sends that provider's lookups under your own account instead — the key stays on your device and is never sent to us.

This website

  • Email address. Used to sign you in, to bind your licence, and to contact you about a purchase. Sign-in codes are stored as a hash and deleted once used or expired.
  • Session cookie. One first-party, HTTP-only cookie holding a random token. There are no advertising or analytics cookies on this site.
  • Purchase records. We keep a record of each checkout you start — product, tier, the address it was for, and the payment-session identifier — so a completed payment can be matched to the licence it produced.
  • Entitlement snapshots. We cache the result of the last licence verification for your address, so ordinary page views do not require a fresh lookup.
  • Server logs. Ordinary web-server records, including IP address and user agent. Application logs identify accounts by a partial address (for example ti***@example.com), not the full one.
  • Account events. This site reports six events to ZNOWSOFT's licensing service, tied to your account: signing in, a failed sign-in code, starting a checkout, completing one, a licence check from the mobile app, and deactivating a device. Each carries only what it needs — the tier you bought, whether a device slot was freed, the reason a code failed. Your address is sent in a dedicated attribution field, not in the event data, and is resolved to an account identifier on arrival rather than stored. There is nothing about your library, and no advertising or analytics cookies on this site.

Commercial website analytics

On our commercial website, ZnowSoft measures public page views, traffic-source categories, button and link clicks, and observed active time to understand how people find and use our products. A random browser-tab identifier expires after 30 minutes of inactivity. We estimate device type, browser, operating system, preferred language, country and region. Location is looked up locally; raw IP addresses, full browser strings, cities and coordinates are not stored in these analytics records.

Website analytics is separate from account and product telemetry. It does not collect private pages, form contents, search queries, full referral URLs or recordings, and does not join visits across websites or to customer accounts. Records expire after 90 days. The tracker respects Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. You can exclude this browser on this website; include it again to reverse that preference. The exclusion preference uses local storage; the tab identifier uses session storage.

Payments

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your card number. Stripe collects a billing address and records the country of your IP address, billing address and card issuer as evidence for tax and fraud purposes. See refunds and payments for how that affects who can buy.

Sharing and retention

We do not sell personal data. It is shared only with the processors needed to run the service: ZNOWSOFT's licensing and telemetry service, Stripe for payment, and our email provider for sign-in codes. Purchase and licence records are kept as long as needed for support and tax obligations. Sign-in codes and expired sessions are purged automatically.

Self-hosted servers

When you connect to a ZenHoot Server, its operator controls that server, its logs, its network exposure and its retention. If that is your own machine, those choices are yours.

Official ZenHoot Server images report an anonymous install ping to ZNOWSOFT at start-up and once a day, so we know which platforms and library sizes to support. There is no account attached to it, and it does not require a licence.

  • What it sends. A random install identifier generated on first run; the server version, operating system, architecture, Node version, CPU count and memory; and library counts — how many tracks, albums, artists and folders, and total hours.
  • What it never sends. Track, album or artist names; file paths; your music folder names; hostnames; IP addresses; anything you have typed into the server; and no identifier tying the install to you, your account or your licence.
  • The install identifier is a coin flip. It is random, not derived from anything about your machine, so it cannot be recomputed or correlated to you. It lives at $CACHE_DIR/znowsoft-install.json — delete that file and the install becomes a new, unrelated one.
  • Turning it off. Set ZENHOOT_TELEMETRY=off and the server sends nothing at all. Nothing about the server depends on it.

Your choices

You can sign out at any time, deactivate any device from your account, and ask us to delete your account data by writing to info@znowsoft.com from the address on the account. Deleting account data ends the ability to recover your activation key, so keep a copy first.

Changes and contact

We may revise this notice as ZenHoot changes; the date above identifies the current version. Privacy questions may be sent to info@znowsoft.com.