Count Dracula — Privacy and House rules

Count Dracula counts trick-or-treaters at your door and shows them on your TV. One person runs it as a hobby. Here's what it keeps, in plain words.

What we keep

How you sign in: with Google, your Google account id, email address and name (that's all we ask Google for); with email, your email address. Either way, so you can sign back in.
Your household: its name, its time zone, and, if you add one, a Location: a square about 5 km across. Your exact position never leaves your device: the square is worked out on your phone.
Your nights: each kid counted (when, the costume, and the name of the phone that counted them), your costumes, and your golden tickets.
One sign-in cookie, kept 90 days and renewed while you use it. No other cookies. Phones also remember their join key and phone name, and a TV its link, on the device itself.

We count trick-or-treaters, never who they are. We don't collect anything about them. Please don't type children's names into costumes or phone names. Helpers don't have accounts: we keep only the phone name they type.

Who else sees it

Google, when you sign in with Google: they learn you signed in here. Google's privacy policy
Your email provider, when you ask for a sign-in code: we send it, with a sign-in link, from our own mail server, and nothing else, ever. The code and the link work once, for 15 minutes.
Cloudflare passes every request on to us, so it sees visitors' IP addresses and the pages they open, TV viewers included. Cloudflare's privacy policy
OpenStreetMap map tiles, only while you're picking a Location. OpenStreetMap's privacy policy

No analytics, no ads, and we never sell or share your data. Hosted on our own server in Canada.

What's public

Anyone with your TV link sees your live night as the TV shows it: the count, last year's ghost, costumes and golden tickets. Not the phones' names, and not your household's name.
Anyone with a share link to a night's summary sees that night's slides: your household's name unless you hide it when you share, and nearby figures only as "near you". The page has a "Report this page" link.
Near you, and Count Dracula tonight: households with a Location add to their area's figures (about 20 × 25 km): kids in the last half hour rounded to 5s, how many houses are counting, and a top costume counted at 3 or more of them. Near you is your area's figures, added up with the next area's when you're close to its edge (all four at a corner), so a town split by an edge sees the same figures. They show once another house near you is counting, and they change only every 10 minutes. With only one other house counting, the figures are mostly that house's, rounded and up to 10 minutes old, with nothing that says which house it is. The whole site's totals are rounded and refreshed the same way, and show only once at least 5 households have a night on. Never a name, an address or a place.
Never public: emails, Managers' names, your Location, phone names.

Anyone you give your TV link or a share link to can pass it on. Rotate the TV link or turn sharing off in Setup to cut them off.

How long

Your nights are kept until a Manager deletes the night or the household.
A household nobody has signed in to for 2 years is deleted, with everything in it, without warning (we only ever email you a sign-in code, when you ask for one).
A household that never counted a kid on any Event but its Test night, and that nobody has signed in to for 60 days, is deleted the same way.
If someone reports a shared page, the reason they give is deleted when the report is dealt with.
Our servers log IP addresses to stop abuse and fix problems. Logs are deleted after 30 days. Links that work like keys (TV links, join keys, sign-in links) are blanked out in them.

Deleting

Any Manager can delete the household in Setup. Deleting is immediate. Copies in our backups are gone within 2 months. We can't restore anything for one household, so a mistaken delete is for good.

Leaving a Household deletes your account details. The Household's nights stay with the other Managers.

Contact

Email us at [email protected] and we'll reply as soon as we can. Email us and we'll send you what we hold about you. Your household's name, time zone and Location you can fix yourself in Setup.

If this notice changes, the date at the top changes.

House rules

By signing in, every household agrees to three rules:

Keep names and costume text decent.
One real household per home: no fake ones.
Managers are adults running their own door.

A household that breaks them can be renamed or suspended.