Privacy

We Build Humanoids is an independent knowledge project about humanoid robotics. It is not a company or any other legal entity: it is run privately, on a non-commercial basis, by the site owner.

The person responsible for the personal data described here (the data controller) is the site owner, a private individual. Questions about this policy and requests about your data: hello@webuildhumanoids.com.

• You can use WBH without an account. If you create one to take part in the community, we store what “Community accounts” below describes.
• WBH sets cookies only when you sign in, to keep you signed in, and never tracks you across sites.
• WBH counts page views and a few interactions as anonymous daily totals, without storing IP addresses or identifiers.
• If you e-mail us, we receive what you send and use it to answer.

Delivering a web page involves your IP address, the page requested, the time and your browser's user agent. Our hosting and network providers (Cloudflare, Inc. (hosting and network) and Neon (database)) process this data to deliver the site and protect it against abuse, and keep it in their logs for the periods they define. They may set strictly necessary security cookies to block automated attacks.

WBH's own application records errors so they can be fixed: the kind of error, the page or route, and the time. It does not record IP addresses, cookies, query strings or anything you type. If error monitoring is enabled, these error reports (and nothing about you) are sent to our monitoring provider.

To learn which pages are useful, WBH counts events on its own server, as totals per day and page. Nothing is stored in your browser, no cookie or identifier is used, and no IP address or user agent is stored. The counted events are:

• Page views: a page was shown, counted per page path.
• Landing pages: the first page of a visit, with the referring site's domain (for example google.com) or “direct”.
• Search attempts: the search form was used; the search text is not recorded.
• Source and resource clicks: a link to another site was followed, counted with the destination's domain only.
• Correction clicks: a “Suggest a correction” link was used.
• Hardware recommendation views: a hardware recommendation (an affiliate link) was shown, counted per page path and recommendation.
• Hardware recommendation clicks: a hardware recommendation's link was followed, counted per page path and recommendation.

The counts cannot be linked to a person. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, nothing is counted at all. Counts are kept for 25 months and then deleted. No analytics data is shared with third parties or used for advertising.

A hardware recommendation's link goes through webuildhumanoids.com/go/ to the seller's product page, with WBH's affiliate code in the address. Following one works like any other request (see Server and network logs); WBH adds no identifier to it, and counts only, anonymously, that the link was shown and followed (see Analytics). The seller receives the code and records the visit under its own privacy policy (Seeed Studio). WBH uses the seller's reports only to see its commissions and never asks who bought.

If you subscribe to This Week in Humanoids, your e-mail address is kept on the newsletter list at Resend (Resend, Inc.), which sends the newsletter for WBH. You are added only when you confirm with the link in the confirmation e-mail; a request you do not confirm adds nothing to the list. Every issue has a one-click unsubscribe link that takes effect at once; after that your address stays on the list marked as unsubscribed, so that no issue reaches you again. To have it deleted completely, write to hello@webuildhumanoids.com. WBH uses the address for this newsletter only and shares it with no one else. Resend keeps a log of the e-mails it sends, including the confirmation e-mail, for a limited period, and records deliveries and bounces; opens and clicks are not tracked. See Resend's privacy policy.

If you write to us, we receive your e-mail address, your message and anything you attach, and use them only to handle your request, for example to check and make a correction. Correspondence is retained only for as long as reasonably necessary to handle the enquiry and any related follow-up. We do not add you to any mailing list.

You can read everything on WBH without an account. If you create one to take part in the community, we store the following.

• Your email address, and that it is verified by a one-time code we send.
• Your profile: username, display name, and anything you add (bio, website, LinkedIn, organisation, occupation, country), and whether those optional details are public.
• That you confirmed you are 16 or older and accepted the community guidelines and these terms, and when.
• Your sign-in methods: passkeys (their public keys and the names you give them) and, if you turn it on, two-factor authentication (an encrypted secret and encrypted backup codes).
• Your sessions: when they started and expire, your browser's user-agent string, and a keyed one-way hash of your IP address, never the address itself.
• Security events, kept 90 days: sign-ins, changes to your sign-in methods and two-factor authentication, exports and deletion requests, with a keyed hash of the IP address and a coarse device description (for example “Firefox on macOS”).
• To stop abuse: counters of recent requests per keyed hash of an IP address, email address or account, kept at most two days.

• Your threads, replies and edits, and earlier versions of edited posts (kept for moderation, never shown publicly).
• Which websites your posts link to, to apply the link policy against spam.
• Reports you file (the item, the reason and your note). The member you report never sees who reported them.
• Moderation decisions about your posts or account, with their reason, recorded by the moderator who took them.
• Your trust level and any restriction on your account; these are never public.

What is public: your username, display name and the month you joined; your optional profile details while you leave them public; and what you post, with your username. Never your email address, sign-in methods, sessions, reports or trust level.

All are strictly necessary, HttpOnly, and set only when you sign in, so no consent is needed and none is used for tracking: the session cookie __Host-wbh.session_token (30 days); and while you complete a two-factor sign-in, __Host-wbh.two_factor (10 minutes).

A bot check (Cloudflare Turnstile) runs on the sign-in page and when a new member starts a thread. Cloudflare evaluates signals from your browser for that check only; WBH receives a pass or fail.

We send sign-in codes and notices about security changes to your account and about its deletion, and nothing else unless you ask for it. Emails are sent through Cloudflare Email Service.

Your account, profile and posts: to provide the community you joined (contract). Sessions, security events, abuse counters, the link policy, bot checks and moderation records: to keep the community secure and free of spam and abuse (legitimate interest).

In Settings you can change your profile, sign out devices, download everything we store about your account and what you posted as a file, and delete your account. Deletion signs out every device at once and hides your profile. After 14 days, during which you can sign in and cancel, your account and its personal data are deleted. You choose what happens to your posts: they stay anonymised (shown as “former member”), or their text is erased. If a backup has to be restored, accounts deleted after that backup are deleted again.

Cloudflare (hosting, email, the Turnstile bot check) and Neon (database, EU region). Sign-in codes are deleted a day after they expire, sessions a week after they expire, security events after 90 days, accounts 14 days after you ask for deletion. Backups are kept 30 days (monthly copies for a year), encrypted.

WBH reads publicly available pages and metadata about robots, software releases, datasets and research papers from a fixed list of official sources, to build its knowledge base. It stores titles, dates, identifiers and short excerpts about products and publications, not profiles of people; it does not store paper authors' names or commit authors' e-mail addresses.

WBH links to manufacturers, repositories, papers and documentation. Those sites have their own privacy practices, which this policy does not cover. When you follow an outbound link, WBH counts the destination's domain name (for example github.com) as part of the analytics above.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal data about you, to object to its use, and to complain to a data-protection authority. Because WBH's analytics are anonymous totals, there is no analytics data about you to access. For e-mail you sent us, write to the contact address above. For your account, use Settings or write to the same address.

This policy changes when the site does, for example before a newsletter is introduced; the date above shows the last change. See also the terms of use.