Privacy Policy. Privacy Policy.

Who and what

LOUD is a music player for Android (package be.grunt.loud), published by Grunt SRL, Rue du Couvent 20, 1332 Rixensart, Belgium, VAT BE 0738.575.618. It plays audio files you already own, from a folder on your device that you point it at.

This policy describes the Android app, which is the one you can install. If an iOS version ships, this page will be updated first.

Contact: loud@grunt.be

The core statement

LOUD collects no personal data. There are no accounts, no sign-up, and no login. Your music, its tags, your playlists and your listening position stay on the device. The developer cannot see user data, because nothing is ever transmitted — the app cannot open a network connection at all.

How this is enforced

Everything below this section is the precise version. This one is the plain one: not what LOUD promises, but what actually stops it. A promise is a sentence someone wrote. Each of these is a mechanism that has to be deliberately removed before the promise can break.

The app does not hold the network permission

Android apps must declare the internet permission to open a connection, and LOUD does not declare it. This is stronger than a rule the app keeps: the operating system refuses the connection at the door, so even a bug could not phone home. An automated check reads the actual packaged app — not the source code, the artifact that ships — and fails the build if a network permission ever appears in it.

The code is checked for network calls on every build

Belt and braces with the above: a separate check runs every time the app is built and fails outright if any network API — fetch, sockets, beacons — or any analytics or advertising SDK appears anywhere in the code. The app's internal pages also carry a policy forbidding connections, the same one this website serves.

Your library is encrypted on your phone

The database holding your library index, playlists and listening position is stored encrypted, and the key lives in the phone's own secure store, not in the app. Copied off the device, the file reads as noise — it does not even announce itself as a database. This has been true on every install from the first version; it is not a setting and not a paid feature.

Your library is kept out of backups

Photos and messages ride your Google backup. What you listen to deliberately does not: automatic cloud backup is disabled, and every data domain is additionally excluded from both Google's cloud backup and Android's phone-to-phone transfer — a separate channel that the first setting does not clearly govern, so it is named explicitly.

Folder access is a grant you give, not a permission it takes

Android offers a permission that would let LOUD read every audio file on the phone. LOUD deliberately does not ask for it. Instead you pick one folder, once, through Android's own picker, and that grant — for that folder and its subfolders — is all the access the app has. The native code additionally refuses to read any file outside that folder, even if asked to by the app's own interface: a check on the door, not a habit of the guest.

There is no analytics code, and the build fails if any appears

No Firebase, no Crashlytics, no Sentry, no advertising SDK — and rather than trusting ourselves to keep it that way, the build check above looks for them by name and refuses to produce a build if one has been added. No advertising ID is requested.

None of this makes LOUD unbreakable, and it is not claimed to. What it means is narrower and more useful: the promise on the front page is wired into how the app is built, so breaking it takes a deliberate act rather than an oversight.

What is stored, and where

Stored locally on the device, in an app-private encrypted database:

• The library index: which files are in your chosen folder, and what their own tags say — title, artist, album, genre, year, duration
• The folder you picked
• Playlists you make, and the order of what is playing
• The track you were on and how far into it, so the app resumes

Stored in an app-private plain preferences file, which by design holds nothing that names a file, track, artist or playlist:

• Language, EQ settings, shuffle and repeat

One thing is stored unencrypted, stated plainly: cover art extracted from your files is cached as ordinary image files so your sleeves appear instantly. The cache is app-private and excluded from every backup channel like everything else, but the images themselves are not encrypted at rest. An album cover names what you own just as a title does; if that trade ever changes, this page changes with it.

This data never leaves the device. There is no cloud sync, no backup to the developer's servers, and no export to third parties.

Backups and moving to a new phone

The honest consequence of the backup exclusion: a new phone starts with an empty library. Your music files are your own and a rescan finds them; hand-made playlists are the one thing a rescan cannot rebuild, which is why they export — see below.

What the platform can see

"Nothing leaves the device" and "nothing leaves the app" are different claims, and only the first is true — so here is the second, precisely. While music plays, LOUD hands the current track's title, artist and cover art to Android's media system. That is what puts your music on the lock screen, on a Bluetooth car display, and in Android Auto, and it is what makes LOUD a music player rather than a page that makes noise. Other apps on your phone can also see that LOUD offers a media session, the way they can see any music player; since August 2026 only LOUD itself and trusted system surfaces can control it, and outside apps get nothing beyond that visibility.

None of this is a network call. Nothing is collected, nothing is uploaded, and it all stays between the app and the phone it runs on.

Permissions, and why each exists

The packaged app asks for exactly three:

Just as telling is what is not asked for. Permissions that libraries LOUD builds on would have added — internet, network state, fingerprint and biometric — are explicitly stripped out of the app, because LOUD uses none of them. There is no location permission, no microphone permission, no notification permission, and no permission to read media beyond the folder you granted. There is no advertising ID.

Features that touch your data, and what they do with it

Playlists travel as plain files

Any playlist can be exported as an M3U8 file — a plain-text, open format that VLC, foobar and most other players read, so your playlists are never locked in here. The file lists your tracks by their location inside your music folder and by their names; it deliberately contains no device identifiers and none of the internal grants this install holds. You choose where it is saved through Android's own dialog, the app keeps no access to that location afterwards, and where you send the file is entirely your decision. It is the one way your data deliberately leaves the app. Imports work the same door in reverse: read on the device, matched against your library, transmitted nowhere.

The spectrum needs no microphone

LOUD can draw an analyzer over the sleeve while music plays. Android's built-in visualizer API demands the microphone permission, so LOUD does not use it: the bars are computed inside the app's own audio pipeline, on the device, only while the overlay is open. Nothing is listened to, nothing is recorded, and no audio permission exists in the app.

The equalizer runs on the phone

The five-band EQ is the device's own audio effect, applied to LOUD's playback and nothing else. Your curve is a setting like any other: stored locally, transmitted nowhere.

Retention and deletion

Data is kept until you delete it. Playlists can be deleted in the app; the settings screen has a reset that clears the library index, every playlist, the resume point and the folder grant in one act; and uninstalling LOUD removes the database and the art cache with it. Your music files themselves are never touched — LOUD holds read access only, and only to the folder you granted. Since nothing is transmitted, there is nothing for the developer to delete on request.

Third parties, ads, children

No advertising, no third-party analytics SDKs, no data brokers, no sale or sharing of personal information. LOUD is not directed at children under 13.

This website

The same standard applies to grunt.be itself, including this page and the LOUD pages. They are plain static files.

• No cookies. Nothing is written to your browser's storage, so there is no consent banner — there is nothing to consent to.
• No analytics and no advertising. No Google Analytics, no Google Ads, no Meta pixel, no tracking pixels of any kind, and no third-party tags.
• No third-party requests at all. Fonts are self-hosted rather than loaded from Google Fonts, and every image, stylesheet and script is served from grunt.be. Loading these pages sends your browser to no other company's server.
• Nothing to submit. There are no forms, no newsletter, no sign-up, and no account.

One honest caveat: the site is hosted by Netlify, and like any web host it necessarily receives the IP address of each request in order to send the page back. That is ordinary server operation, not analytics — it is not used to profile visitors, and it is not combined with any app data, because the app sends none.

GDPR

Grunt SRL is established in Belgium, and the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 applies.

Because all processing happens locally on your own device and no personal data is transmitted to or held by the publisher, the publisher holds no user data to access, rectify, port, or erase. You retain full control through the app itself: the library, playlists and settings on your device are yours to view, export, or delete at any time.

Questions can go to loud@grunt.be. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Belgian supervisory authority, the Autorité de protection des données (autoriteprotectiondonnees.be).

Changes

Material changes will be reflected on this page, with an updated date at the top.