Privacy policy

There is no account, no sign-in and no player database. Nothing you do inside the game is written to a permanent record anywhere. What Darry learns about you lives in your browser’s memory and is gone when you close the tab.

What is not nothing: one preference is stored on your device, one short-lived first-party cookie is set, the server processes gameplay summaries in order to generate predictions, request data is used to enforce abuse and cost limits, and the site uses a privacy-oriented analytics product that counts page views. Each of those is described below.

Only choices and timings. Every interaction in this game is a press of one of two buttons, so what the game observes is: which of the two options you picked, where it was on the screen, how long you took, whether that option paid out, and the round or question number.

There is nowhere in this game to type. It never asks for your name, your email address, your age, your location or anything else about you, and it has no field in which you could offer them.

Those choices are folded into a small statistical profile — a set of rates such as how often you repeat a choice that just paid out, how often you switch after one that did not, and your average decision time. This is the profile Darry predicts from.

It is held in your browser’s memory for the life of the tab and nowhere else. It is not written to your device, not sent anywhere to be stored, and not associated with you. It carries across play again within the same tab, and refreshing the page destroys it completely.

One item, in your browser’s local storage: whether you have muted the sound. That is a setting, not a record of your behaviour, and it is what makes the sound stay off on your next visit.

An earlier version of this game stored behavioural profiles on the device. Those entries are deleted when the current version loads rather than migrated, so an old record cannot be silently carried into it.

One first-party cookie, named hg_sid. It holds a randomly generated session identifier and a signature proving the server issued it. It is marked HTTP-only — so page scripts cannot read it — restricted to this site, and it expires after twelve hours.

It exists because the sealed predictions and the abuse limits have to be attached to the right game. It contains nothing about you, is not used for advertising, and is not used to recognise you across other websites.

No other cookies are set by this site at present. If advertising is enabled in future, the advertising provider may set its own — see section 11.

When Darry needs to produce something, your browser sends the server a compact summary and nothing more: the rounded behavioural rates described above, a short list of this game’s rounds as choice, outcome and decision time, the round number, and a server-issued game identifier.

These requests are processed to answer them and are not written to a database. The game identifier is random, generated by the server, and is not connected to any person.

Calls to the language model cost money, so the server enforces limits per game, per visitor and per day. Enforcing a per-visitor limit requires a stable key.

That key is derived from the network address the hosting platform reports for the request: the address is combined with a secret held only on the server and truncated, so the result cannot be reversed back into an address. That derived value is what the counters are stored against. The address itself is not stored by this application and is not written into its logs. Like any web service, the hosting platform necessarily processes network addresses in order to deliver the page at all.

The counters record only how many calls a key has made, and they expire on their own between two and forty-eight hours after they are written.

When a language model is available, predictions and the closing text are generated by OpenAI on the server’s behalf. What is sent is the numerical summary described in section 6. What is not sent: any identifier, any address, any timestamp, any browser or device information, and any text you wrote — because there is none.

The calls are made with retention switched off at the provider, so the exchange is not kept as part of a conversation history. If a model is not available, or a limit is reached, a deterministic engine in this codebase produces the answer instead and the game continues unchanged.

The site uses Vercel Web Analytics to count page views and referrers. It sets no cookie and does not follow visitors to other websites; to count unique visits it derives a short-lived, non-reversible value from ordinary request data such as the network address and browser identification string.

Alongside page views, a small number of anonymous product events are recorded so it is possible to know whether people who arrive actually start and finish: that a game started, that the questions were completed, that the booth was entered, that a game was completed, that play again was used, and that a share control was pressed. The share event carries one detail — whether the device’s own share sheet or the clipboard was used.

Those events carry an event name and nothing else. Your answers, your profile, your scores, Darry’s predictions, its reasoning and the verdict are never attached to any analytics event. This is enforced in code: the analytics helper accepts only names from a fixed list and discards any property that is not on a per-event allowlist.

Which address you arrived at is itself the campaign measurement. Printed codes point at their own path on this site, so the page view alone shows which placement worked. There is no tracking parameter, no identifier and no cross-site pixel involved in that.

Three, each doing one thing:

• Vercel — hosting and web analytics. It receives requests for this site and, as any host must, the network information that comes with them.
• OpenAI — generates Darry’s predictions and closing text from the summary in section 6, when a model is available.
• Upstash — stores the expiring rate-limit counters described in section 7.

None of them is sent your name, your email address or anything you have written, because the game holds none of those things.

No advertising is running on this site at present. No advertising script is loaded, and no advertising network receives a request as a result of your visit.

This site is being prepared to display advertising through Google AdSense in future. If and when that is switched on, it will change some of what is written above, and this is what it will change:

• Advertising will appear only on informational pages like this one and in the area below the end of a finished game. It will never appear during play — not on the opening, the warning, the questions, the booth, a round, or the ending itself.
• Google and its partners may set cookies or read similar identifiers in order to serve and measure advertising, and may use those to show ads based on prior visits to this or other sites. That processing is Google’s, under Google’s own policies.
• Nothing the game learns about you is passed to any advertising system. There is no code path by which a profile, an answer, a score or a verdict can reach one.

Your options, and what will be available where you are, are set out on privacy choices. This section will be rewritten in the present tense — and the date at the top updated — before any ad is served.

• The behavioural profile: the life of the browser tab. It is never stored.
• The muted-sound preference: until you clear your browser’s site data.
• The session cookie: twelve hours.
• Rate-limit counters: between two and forty-eight hours, then automatic deletion.
• Analytics: aggregate figures retained by the analytics provider under its own retention policy. There is no per-person record to delete.

The site is served over HTTPS with a strict content security policy that forbids the page from sending data to any other host, and with camera, microphone, location and payment capabilities switched off at the page level. Predictions are sealed with authenticated encryption before they leave the server. Error responses carry a fixed code and never a message from an underlying system.

No system is perfect, and this one is a game rather than a bank. It is designed so that the worst case is small: there is almost nothing held about you to lose.

• Close the tab. The profile ceases to exist; nothing is left behind to erase.
• Clear this site’s data in your browser to remove the sound preference and the session cookie.
• Block cookies for this site. The game remains playable.
• Turn the sound off from the menu or from the corner of the screen during play, and enable your system’s reduce-motion setting to remove the moving effects.
• When advertising is enabled, use the controls described on privacy choices.

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct or delete personal information held about you, or to object to its processing. Requests of that kind are welcome, with an honest caveat: this site holds no account and no stored record tied to you, so in almost every case there is nothing to retrieve or erase.

hum(ai)n is not directed to children. It contains sustained psychological horror and is not appropriate for them. It does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13, and it has no mechanism through which a person of any age could provide it.

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it. Material changes — in particular, advertising going live — will be reflected here before they take effect rather than afterwards.

A contact address for hum(ai)n has not been published yet. One will be listed here before any advertising is enabled on this site.