Privacy Policy

Effective October 13, 2026

This policy explains what information is collected when you visit howtheworldends.org (the "site") and how it's used. The short version: we don't run accounts, we don't ask for personal information, and we don't set cookies of our own. Advertising partners and the data services the site relies on may collect standard technical information as described below.

Information we don't collect

The site has no sign-up, login, comments or forms. We don't ask for your name, email address or any other personal details, and we don't sell personal information.

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted on Vercel. Like most web hosts, Vercel automatically processes technical data such as your IP address, browser type, the pages you request and the time of each request, in order to deliver the site, keep it secure and diagnose problems.

Live data feeds

To keep the board live, your browser requests public data directly from third-party services: Polymarket (prediction-market prices), the Wikimedia REST API (Wikipedia pageviews), Hacker News Search by Algolia, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, NASA's open APIs and the USGS earthquake feed. These services receive standard request information, including your IP address, and handle it under their own privacy policies. No personal information is sent to them by the site.

Fonts

Fonts are loaded from Fontshare and Google Fonts, which receive your IP address and browser information when the font files are requested.

Advertising and cookies

The site may show ads from third-party advertising networks, which may include Google AdSense and other networks. These vendors may use cookies, web beacons and similar technologies to serve and measure ads.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.

You can opt out of personalized advertising from Google by visiting Google Ads Settings. You can also opt out of many third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalized advertising at www.aboutads.info, or, in the EU and UK, at Your Online Choices. For more detail, see how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Where the law requires it, for example for visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK or Switzerland, we'll ask for your consent before personalized ads or non-essential cookies are used, through a certified consent tool.

Your choices

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and use your browser's tracking protection or a content blocker. The rankings work without cookies.

Children

The site isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from children.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, for example in California or the EU, you may have rights to access, delete or opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. Because we don't hold personal information ourselves, requests about ad data are best directed to the relevant ad provider through the links above. You can also contact us at hello@howtheworldends.org.

Changes

We may update this policy as the site changes, for example when ad partners are added. The effective date above will always show the latest version.