Privacy

Effective August 2026

piano.wiki is run by Grant Larcom, an individual in the United States. There are no accounts, no sign-ups, no advertising, and no payments. This page describes exactly what the site records.

When you look up a serial number

The site stores one row per lookup, containing:

• the manufacturer you chose;
• your serial number, stored partly masked (for example 43•••24);
• the result: the year or year range, how precise it was, and whether we found a match;
• an approximate country, the hostname of the page that linked you here (never the full address), and whether you were on mobile or desktop;
• the date and time.

There is no name, no email address, no account, and no identifier that follows you between visits.

Recent lookups are shown publicly

A small panel on the site displays the most recent lookups — the brand, the masked serial, and the year — along with a monthly total. If you look up a piano, that masked entry may briefly appear to other visitors. It contains nothing that identifies you, and never your full serial number.

Your IP address

piano.wiki does not store your IP address in its database. Our hosting provider necessarily receives it in order to deliver and secure the page, and we derive an approximate country from it; only the country is stored.

Searches and corrections

When a search doesn’t match any brand we hold, the site records what was typed, so we know which manufacturers to add next. If you report a correction, we store the masked serial, the brand, what we told you, the year you believe is right, and your free-text notes. That form has no name field and no email field. Please don’t type personal details into it — we can’t reply, and we don’t want them.

Cookies

The site sets no cookies. It stores a single value in your browser’s session storage, lookupTickerDismissed, and only if you dismiss the recent-lookups panel, so it stays closed. It disappears when you close the tab.

Others who receive data

• Vercel hosts the site and therefore handles every request.
• Vercel Web Analyticscounts visits. It is separate from the logging described above and works without third-party cookies: visitors are identified by a hash derived from the request, and that identification is discarded after 24 hours — which refers to how long a visitor can be recognised, not to deletion of the visit records. It records the page address, the referrer, an approximate location including city, and your browser and device type.
• Neon hosts the database that holds the records described above.
• Sanity stores the written articles and manufacturer entries.
• Google— the site currently loads its icon font from Google’s font servers, so your browser requests that file directly from Google and Google receives your IP address and browser details in the process.

How long it is kept

Indefinitely. The lookup, search and correction records are what tell us which brands need better data and where our dates are wrong, and that value is cumulative. None of it identifies a person, so there is nothing gained by deleting it — and we would rather state this plainly than publish a deletion schedule we do not actually operate.

Contact

Questions about this page: grant@piano.wiki.

See also the terms of use, which cover where the serial data comes from and its limits.