Politique de confidentialité

How Many of Us counts how many people are playing World of Warcraft, using reports from players who volunteer. It is run by Athlonaut LLC. This page says exactly what is collected, from whom, and what happens to it. The short version: no names, no account needed to report, player ids scrambled on your own computer, and only totals are ever published, plus the leaderboard if you choose to join it.

If you just visit the site

• We count page views with umami, which we host ourselves at analytics.athlonaut.com. It sets no cookies and stores no IP address or cross-site identifier: just the page, the referring site, a rough country, and the kind of device.
• Our host, Railway, keeps server logs that include your IP address, for security and debugging.
• Your browser keeps two preferences for us: your language (a cookie) and light or dark mode (local storage). Neither tracks you.

If you report with the addon and app

The How Many of Us addon runs inside your game and notes the players around you through the normal addon interface: nameplates, your target and mouseover, your party or raid, and your guild's online roster. Every five minutes it writes one report into the game's own saved-variables file on your computer. A report holds:

• Each player's game id, with their level, class, race and faction when the game shows them, and when they were seen. Never their character name.
• Your own level, class, race and faction, and your realm and game version.
• Where you were: the zone, and your position rounded to a 20 × 20 grid square of the zone map, every 15 seconds.
• Which layer you were on, worked out from the game ids of nearby creatures.
• A random reporter id the addon makes up when it is first installed. It is not tied to your Battle.net account, character or email.

The How Many of Us desktop app reads those reports and, before sending anything, replaces every player id (yours included) with a one-way scrambled code. The same player always gets the same code, which is what lets us avoid counting anyone twice, but the code can't be turned back into the id. Our server rejects any report that still contains a raw id.

The app also remembers which reports it has sent, on your computer, and writes the last upload time back into the addon's file so the addon can show it. For the Your contribution page it keeps the last 30 days of your own route and counts on your computer, including how many players you helped, grouped with and talked to (numbers only, worked out by the addon, and never uploaded). When you open that page, the app puts them in the part of the link after the #, which browsers keep to themselves, so your route never reaches our server. It downloads addon updates from download.athlonaut.com and checks for its own updates there too.

Without the app, the addon can make a code for you to copy into your browser at howmanyof.us/send. It scrambles every player id the same way first, inside the game, and leaves out the helped, grouped and talked counts, so the code holds exactly what the app would send. We get it only if you paste it.

If you join the leaderboard

The leaderboard is optional. If you sign in and join it, we store your Clerk account (the email you sign in with), a public name you choose (not your character's), whether you want to be shown, and the reporter ids you linked from the app. Linking lets us add up the reports from those ids for you.

While you are shown, the leaderboard publishes your public name next to your hours counted, players spotted and number of realms. Nothing else: no character, no route, no player codes. Turn it off, unlink a computer or clear your name in your account at any time, and it stops at once. Deleting your account takes you off at once, and the links are erased with it.

What we publish

Only totals: players seen, estimated players online, layer counts, faction balance, and how many reporters there were, per realm and zone, and the leaderboard of people who joined it. We never publish a report, a player's code, a reporter id or anyone's track around the map.

Who handles the data

• Railway hosts the site and its database, which stores the reports.
• Cloudflare serves the downloads (the app and the addon).
• Plunk delivers the email when you use the contact form: your name, address and message.
• Clerk handles sign-in, for the people who run the site and for reporters who join the leaderboard. Reporting itself never needs it.

We don't sell data or share it with advertisers, and the site shows no ads.

How long we keep it

Reports are kept in the database to work out the numbers and their history. We plan to fold reports older than 30 days into hourly totals and discard the reports themselves; until that is built, they are kept. Contact-form messages are kept as email.

Your choices

• Turn reporting off in the addon's panel (/hmou), or in the app's settings, at any time. Uninstalling either stops it completely.
• If you joined the leaderboard, your account page lets you hide yourself, change your public name or unlink a computer at any time.
• Because reports carry no name or account, we usually can't tell which are yours. If you want your reporter id's reports removed, send us the id from the addon's saved-variables file through the contact form and we will delete them.

Changes and questions

If this changes, we update the date at the top. Questions go to the contact form. How Many of Us is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment.