Plain English, no legalese: what this site collects, what it never collects, and how to turn tracking off.
No accounts, no ad tracking. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing sold to advertisers. Most tracking below is cookieless; the one exception (Microsoft Clarity, below) is named plainly, not buried.
Anonymous visit analytics. Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights record anonymized page views, referrers, rough location (country), device type, and load performance: enough to see what pages get used and whether the site is fast, not enough to identify a person. Neither uses cookies. If PUBLIC_POSTHOG_KEY is configured, PostHog also records a small set of custom events (e.g. running a race, an activity choice) the same cookieless way, kept only in memory for that page load, with autocapture turned off; it never records clicks or fields it wasn't explicitly told to.
Session recording (Microsoft Clarity). This is the one tool on this site that is not cookieless: Clarity sets a couple of small cookies on this domain to tell a repeat visit apart from a new one, and records how you interact with the page itself, clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement, to build heatmaps and session replays so the site owner can see where a page confuses people. It does not know who you are. It is skipped entirely, never even loaded, for a browser that has opted out below.
The "Ask about this site" chat widget. Whatever you type into the bubble in the corner is sent to a live AI model (via Groq's API) so it can answer your question. That's the only place on this site your browser talks to an AI in real time; everywhere else, the numbers you see are pre-recorded (see how we measure →). Your question is also stored, so the site owner can see what people actually ask and improve pages that don't answer it well, alongside which page you asked it from and when. No IP address, cookie, or other identifying information is stored with it, and the AI's reply is never stored, only the question. It is never sold, shared, or used to train anything.
The feedback box. Text you submit through "Help make this clearer" is stored so the site owner can read it and improve confusing pages. No IP address, cookie, or other identifying information is stored alongside it, just the message, which page it came from, and when. It's never used to train or call any AI.
The "tell me when a new model gets raced" box. If you type your email address into it, that address is stored (with which part of the site you typed it on, the celebration screen or the new-models page, and when) so the site owner can send you a short note when a new model is raced, roughly monthly. Nothing else is stored with it: no IP address, no cookie, no name. It is never sold, never shared, and never used to train or call any AI. Every note carries a way to unsubscribe, and emailing the address below removes you the same day.
"Race a friend" links. When you send a challenge, the link carries your guess and, if you typed one, the name you gave the site, so your friend sees "Sreekanth guessed 12 s." Nothing is stored on a server for this: it lives in the link itself and in your friend's browser while they play, and the name and guess are taken off the page address before the anonymous visit analytics above records the page view.
The 15-second typing test. If you take it (under the "You" gauge on any race), the words-per-minute number it computes is stored in your browser only, to personalize how fast "you" are shown to be on future races this visit. What you actually typed is never stored or sent anywhere, only the resulting number. "Use the average instead," next to the same button once you've taken it, removes it.
Opting out. Visit any page once with ?notrack=1 added to the URL (e.g. howfastai.com/?notrack=1) to stop all analytics tracking for that browser. It's saved locally and applies to every page after. Add ?notrack=0 to turn it back on. One limit: when a race widget from this site is shown inside another website, your browser keeps that site's storage separate, so the opt-out you set here cannot reach it and that view is counted (anonymously, as above) as a view of the widget.
Race widgets on other sites. Other websites can show one of this site's recorded races in a small frame. That frame sends only the same anonymous page-view described above, so the site owner can see which websites use it; it sets no cookie and reads nothing from the page around it.
Third parties involved. Vercel (hosting, analytics, speed insights), Groq (the chat widget's model provider), PostHog (optional, cookieless event analytics), and Microsoft Clarity (session recording, described above): each only receives what's described above, nothing more.
Questions about any of this? Use the feedback box, or email Sreekanth.lingamdinne@cloudkeel.io.