Platform policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: March 16, 2026

How Are We All? is designed around anonymous participation. This page explains what is stored, what is not stored, and how daily responses, summary discussions, Google sign-in, and anti-spam systems are handled.

1. Purpose

How Are We All? is designed for anonymous thought sharing in response to a daily question. This policy explains what we collect, what we do not collect, and how we protect your privacy.

2. Anonymous responses

We do not store a personal identifier with your response. Your submitted text is stored without account information, name, email address, profile ID, or similar identifying fields. In short, responses are kept totally anonymous in storage.

3. Summary discussion sign-in

Reading summary discussions is public. Posting a summary discussion message requires a Google account sign-in through Azure App Service authentication. That sign-in exists only to help reduce spam and abuse in the discussion area.

4. Generated discussion usernames

When you post a message in a summary discussion, the site generates a unique username from your signed-in Google account for display inside the discussion. The same Google account receives the same generated username each time, but that displayed username does not reveal your Google account, Google name, or Google email address to other users.

5. Data we process

• Response text you submit.
• Summary discussion message text you submit.
• Submission date used for daily grouping and summaries.
• Security and anti-spam checks (including Google sign-in for summary discussions, reCAPTCHA verification, and temporary abuse controls).

6. Data we do not store with responses or summary discussion messages

• No name, email, username, or account profile attached to a response.
• No direct personal identifier stored as part of the response record.
• No additional Google account profile information stored with a summary discussion message beyond the generated discussion username shown on the site.
• No public path from the displayed discussion username back to a user's Google account identity.
• No public regional or demographic segmentation displayed in summaries.

7. Security and abuse prevention

We use anti-spam and integrity controls including rate limiting, reCAPTCHA, and Google sign-in for summary discussion posting. These safeguards are used to protect platform quality and reduce spam, not to create public user profiles.

8. Retention and access

Submitted content may be retained to support daily summaries, moderation, and platform reliability. Access is limited to authorized platform operations.

9. Summary publication policy

Summaries are published only when data volume is sufficient. We intentionally avoid summary breakdowns by region or similar comparison metrics, because we treat thoughts from people across the world as equally important.

10. Updates to this policy

This policy may be revised as the platform evolves. Material changes will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date on this page.