What we keep, and what we can’t see.

The short version

• Your thirty answers stay on your device. They are never sent to us.
• A results link contains three scores and nothing about you.
• Adding your result to the anonymous totals is optional, and what is kept is a set of counts.
• We don’t store IP addresses. The company that hosts the site does see them, because no website can work otherwise.
• No third parties are loaded into the page: no trackers, ad networks or outside fonts and scripts.

What stays on your device

While you take the test, your answers and your place in it are saved in your browser’s own storage so you can leave and come back. When you finish, your browser also remembers your results link and whether you chose to add your result to the totals.

None of this is sent to the server, and it is not a cookie. Anyone who uses the same browser on the same device can see it. To remove it, choose Start over on the test or your results page, or clear this site’s data in your browser settings.

What a results link contains

The eight characters at the end of a results link encode your three scores and the version of the thinker dataset you were compared with. That is all. There is no account, name or timestamp behind it, and the server keeps no list of results.

A link is not secret: anyone who has it can see the scores. If you post it under your own name, you are choosing to connect those scores to yourself.

The anonymous totals

If you press Add my result, your browser sends your results link and any of the four optional answers you tapped (region, age band, kind of work, how often you use AI tools). The server adds one to a set of running counts and then discards what it received.

• No record is kept per person, and nothing ties a count back to you or to your results link.
• Each optional answer is counted separately. Combinations of answers are never recorded.
• Nothing is published until 30 results are in. A group is shown only once it has 30, and published figures move forward 10 results at a time.
• Because a contribution is not linked to you, it cannot be found, changed or removed afterwards.

The counts are kept in a database run by Upstash, a database provider. The people who run the site can see the counts as they stand, including before they are large enough to publish. The methodology lists every count that is kept.

What the hosting provider sees

To send you a page, a web server has to know the address your device is connecting from. This site is hosted by Vercel, which receives that IP address along with standard technical details such as your browser type and the page requested, and keeps its own request logs under its own policies. A results link is a page address, so it appears in those logs like any other.

We don’t copy those logs anywhere, combine them with results or totals, or use them to work out who visited. Two features look at the connecting address for a moment:

• Slowing down repeat submissions. When a result is added to the totals, a scrambled form of the address is held in the server’s memory for up to an hour. It cannot be turned back into an address and is never written to a disk or database.
• Suggesting a region. Where the host labels a request with a country, that is reduced to one of nine world regions and offered as a suggestion for the optional region question. It is not stored, and it counts only if you tap it.

Cookies, analytics and other sites

• Cookies. Visitors get none. The only cookie on the site is a sign-in cookie for the editors who maintain the thinker profiles.
• Analytics and advertising. There are none, and the site sends no data to social networks or other third parties.
• Links out. Source links and the Share on X button take you to other sites with their own privacy practices. They are not told which page of this site you came from.
• Images and video. The downloadable image and video of your result are made in your browser and are not uploaded.

Editors

People who edit thinker profiles sign in with a shared password. The name they type when signing in is stored with each change they make, so there is a record of who changed what.

Questions and corrections

A contact address for privacy questions and corrections will be published here.

If what the site keeps ever changes, this page will be updated first and the date at the top will change with it.