We know very little about you. We would like to keep it that way.

No accounts, no advertising trackers, no analytics scripts and no cookies of our own. This page lists everything the site does handle, feature by feature, and how long it keeps it.

Last revised 26 September 2026

The short version

• There is nothing to sign up for. The only place we ask for a name or an email address is the contact form.
• We run no advertising networks, no analytics or tracking scripts and no social-media widgets. The share buttons are ordinary links: nothing reaches those networks unless you press one.
• The site sets no cookies. (Cloudflare, which hosts it, can set a technical security cookie if it suspects automated traffic.)
• We don't store IP addresses. Two features, the contact form and The Argument Room, turn yours into a scrambled code that changes every day, only to stop abuse, and throw it away within two days.
• Your streaks, scores, votes and reader profile live in your own browser.
• We don't sell, rent or share reader data, and we build no profiles of anyone.

What stays in your browser

The interactive features remember things in your browser's local storage, which stays on your device:

• qt.bstest.v1: your anonymous reader id (below) and your Daily BS Test answers, scores and streak.
• qt.credulity.v1 and qt.detector.v1: your Credulity Meter votes and BS Detector picks, so you see the result instead of the question.
• qt.conclusions.v1: the conclusions you filed, so you can read them again.
• qt.championship.v1: your Weekly BS Championship entries and the pen name you last used.
• qt.latest.v1: when you last dismissed the red LATEST bar.
• qt.room.cid: a random id for The Argument Room, from which your room name is made.

Your Intelligence File is calculated from these on your device and is never sent to us. A transfer code is made in your browser and goes only where you paste it. It holds your answers, votes and filed conclusions, so treat it like a diary. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes all of it, including your streak, which we will mourn privately.

The anonymous reader id

The first time you use an interactive feature, your browser makes up a random identifier and keeps it in qt.bstest.v1. It isn't derived from you, your device or your address. It travels with your answers and votes so that each browser is counted once, and it is never shown to other readers. We can't connect it to a name or an email address, because we don't have one.

What our servers keep

The interactive features run on a small Cloudflare Worker with its own storage. This is everything it keeps.

The Daily BS Test

When you finish a test: your reader id, your score and the time, plus anonymous running counts of which answer and which confidence level readers chose for each question. That is how we can tell you how many readers sat the test and how they did. None of it has an expiry date.

The Credulity Meter and the BS Detector

Your reader id, your vote (or the paragraph you picked) and the time: one per browser per story. Other readers only ever see totals. No expiry date.

You Write the Conclusion

Your reader id, the story, your conclusion, your pen name if you gave one, and the time. Up to five a day per browser, one per story, with no links or email addresses. Entries are not public. The next morning our editorial desk reads the day's entries (without reader ids) with the help of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, and picks one. The winner is published under its pen name, or as “A reader”, and stays in the archive; up to two runners-up are recorded with it in the paper's files. Entries are not deleted on a schedule. If you want one removed, write to us.

The Weekly BS Championship

Your reader id, your pen name if you gave one, your score, your calibration score and the time. Your individual answers are kept only as anonymous counts per question. The top twenty appear on a public table under their pen names; an entry without one is listed as “Anonymous reader #1234”, a number worked out from the reader id that doesn't reveal it. Pen names are filtered automatically but not reviewed by a person before they appear.

The contact form

Your name, email address, topic and message are sent as an email to the newsroom through Cloudflare Email Routing and kept in the editor's mailbox like any other email. The website itself keeps no copy. To stop the form being used for spam it accepts at most five messages per sender and 200 in total per day, and to tell senders apart it keeps a scrambled one-way code (a hash) made from your IP address and a random secret that is replaced every day, with the time you wrote. The codes and the secrets are deleted after two days. We don't publish or share what you send.

The Fun Department

Everything in the Fun Department happens in your browser. Nothing you type there is sent anywhere.

The Argument Room

The Argument Room is a live, anonymous room. It was built to forget.

• Your name. Your browser keeps a random id (qt.room.cid) and our server turns it into a name such as “Disappointed Ferret #281” with a secret key that only the room holds, so you keep your name when you come back but nobody else can work out which id belongs to which name. It isn't a login, and it isn't connected to your reader id or to anything else you do on the site.
• What you type is handled in memory and is never written to storage or to logs. Before anything is published, the statement is checked by our server and sent to Anthropic's Claude API, which decides whether it can appear as written, should be rewritten, or must be refused. Only that one statement is sent: not your name, not your id, not your IP address and not the rest of the conversation. Anthropic handles it under its commercial terms, which say it does not train its models on data sent to its API; it deletes what it receives through the API within 30 days, unless it needs to keep something longer to enforce its usage policy. See Anthropic's privacy policy.
• What is published is the approved statement (often rewritten), your room name and the time. Everyone in the room can read it for 30 minutes; then it is deleted. There is no archive, no history and no search, and statements never appear in the page's HTML, so search engines can't keep them either. When a statement is rewritten, the original is never shown to anyone and never stored. Refused statements are not stored anywhere.
• Typing. Other people see that your name is preparing a statement, never what you are typing.
• House Regulars. The room has a few resident characters, such as Municipal Pigeon, marked “House Regular” on everything they say. They are automated characters (bots), not visitors, and they are never counted as people. Most of their lines are written in advance. When one of them is to answer something said in the room, the room sends its most recent public messages (at most the last fifteen from the past 30 minutes: the published, already civilised wording, the room names, the times and which message answers which, plus any Civility Engine remarks) and a few of the day's headlines to a computer run by the newspaper, which asks Anthropic's Claude, through the newspaper's own Claude subscription, to write the reply. Nothing else goes with them: never the original of a rewritten statement, no ids, no IP addresses. Anthropic's privacy policy covers what it receives. That computer keeps no copy of the messages; its log records only counts, lengths and timings. The House Regulars know nothing about you beyond what is on screen, and forget it with everyone else after 30 minutes. So that they talk less when the room is busy, the room also notes when each person last published a statement, under the same kind of scrambled code as below, and deletes the note after 10 minutes.
• Talking to the House Regulars. So that a regular you speak to can carry on the conversation, the room keeps two short-lived notes under your public room name: that you are talking with a particular regular (who, since when, how many exchanges, the topic in a few words and your last question as it was published in the room, at most 140 characters), which lapses after a few minutes of quiet and is deleted within 30 minutes; and each regular's attitude to you, one word such as “suspicious” plus a short note such as “sided with the pigeon”, written by the model with the regular's reply and deleted 30 minutes after it last changed. Both go back to the newspaper's computer with the next messages, together with a nickname made from your room name (such as “Reception”), so the regular can use them. They are filed only under your public room name, hold only what was already public in the room (never your original wording when the Civility Engine changed it) and are never shown to anyone.
• Abuse prevention. To limit floods the room notes when each statement arrived, filed under scrambled codes (hashes) made from your browser id and from your IP address, never the id or the address themselves; those notes are cleared out after an hour. It also counts statements per connection address each day (addresses on the same home or office network are counted together) and, if someone floods the room, notes a cooling-off period of up to an hour, both under the same scrambled codes and deleted within two days. To catch repeated copies it keeps a scrambled fingerprint of each recent statement, cleared out when the statement would expire. The secret that does the scrambling is made fresh every day and the old one deleted, so nothing can be matched up across days. None of it is shown to anyone.
• Counters. How many statements were published and how many needed repair each day (numbers only, kept for two days), how many people are connected right now and, separately, how many House Regulars are in residence. These are the figures on our front page.
• Room statistics. To see whether the room works, it keeps daily totals for 14 days: how many people came in, how long visits lasted in total and on average, how many statements were published, rewritten or declined, how often the House Regulars spoke and how often people answered them, how many people were in the room at a time, how often the Civility Engine was consulted and how long the newspaper's computer was connected. They are numbers only, with no names, ids, addresses or text. To count each visitor once a day, the room keeps that day's scrambled codes (made from your browser id with the daily secret above), each with a note of whether that visitor published a statement or answered a House Regular, and deletes them together with that day's secret, within two days.
• Screenshots. Anyone in the room can take one, and we can't delete those. Nothing said here survives longer than 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the embarrassment may.

Cloudflare, our host

The site is served by Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes your IP address and ordinary request details, such as your browser type, to deliver pages and to protect the site from attacks, under its own privacy policy. It shows us aggregate traffic totals, such as requests per day. Requests to the interactive features (addresses beginning /api/) run through our Worker. We have switched off Cloudflare's per-request logs for it; it keeps only its own short technical notes, for example that a statement was rewritten and how long it was, never what anyone wrote. They expire after a few days. We have added no analytics of our own.

Search engines and other sites

Search engines receive our public sitemaps, and Cloudflare tells them when a page changes. They receive nothing about readers. Source links, share buttons and the clearly labelled Sponsored Intelligence links (when there are any) take you to other sites, which have their own privacy policies. A sponsored link may tell the merchant that you came from us, and we may earn a commission; it doesn't change what we write.

Questions and removals

Everything kept in your browser can be removed by clearing this site's data. To have a conclusion, a pen name or a championship entry removed, or to ask anything about this page, use the contact form or email editor@questionabletimes.com. Because we don't know who you are, tell us what to look for: the story, the date, the pen name or the text. If what we handle changes, this page changes with it.