HOTLIST — TERMS & PRIVACY

Updated August 22, 2026. Written to be read, not to be skipped.

WHAT THIS IS

Hotlist is a free multiplayer game about an automated license plate reader network, set in a simulation of Waukesha County, Wisconsin. The roads, businesses, municipalities, agency names, and camera locations come from the public record. Everything that moves is fiction: every car, every plate, every driver, every read, every alert. No real person appears in this game, and no real person's data is in it.

Real agency and vendor names appear because the simulation is built on the public record. Their appearance is not affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement, in either direction. Trademarks belong to their owners.

WHAT WE STORE

• Registrations for fictional plates: the invented plate text, a salted hash of a four-digit game key, and a random account number that links your cars to your in-game money. None of it describes a person.
• If you save your game: a passkey public key and a credential id. The private half never leaves your device — that is what a passkey is. We receive no name, no email, nothing from your device account.
• Gameplay records — plate reads, searches, citations, audit lines — keyed to fictional plates, because generating that record is the entire subject of the game.
• Ordinary web server logs, which include IP addresses, kept briefly for security and never joined to any game identity.

WHAT WE DO NOT DO

• No accounts, emails, phone numbers, or names. Ever asked, ever stored.
• No third-party analytics, no ad scripts, no fingerprinting, no trackers. Nothing watches you.
• No cookies. None. Your browser's local storage holds your game keys so you can resume — that data never leaves your machine except to unlock your own fictional car.
• No selling, sharing, or "partnering" with anybody about anything. There is nothing to sell.
• And to say it plainly, because people rightly ask this about plate sites: entering anything here puts you in no system anywhere. The game never asks for a real plate, and if you typed one anyway it would mean nothing to us — it would just be a fictional car with an unimaginative name.

THE COUNTY IS STUDIED. YOU ARE NOT.

This game exists inside a research project about automated license plate readers. The simulation itself is heavily instrumented and always will be: reads, searches, alerts, false hits, chases, camera discoveries and camera vandalism are recorded, analyzed, and may be published — as aggregates and as findings — to compare how a surveillance dragnet behaves in a model county against how the real ones behave in real counties.

Every one of those records is keyed to a fictional plate. None of it is attributable to a person, because the game never learns one exists. The distinction in one line: we study the county, not the people playing it.

THE ONE OUTSIDE REQUEST

The in-game aerial imagery toggle, if you turn it on, fetches map tiles from Esri's public World Imagery service, which sees the tile requests like any map site's server would. It is off by default and the game is complete without it.

TERMS, BRIEFLY

• This is a game, provided as-is, with no warranty of anything.
• It is fiction. Do not use anything in it as a fact about a real person or a real vehicle, because there are none in it.
• Don't attack the service, scrape it, or ruin it for other people. We can remove cars, wipe data, or shut the county down at any time — it is a simulation, and simulations reset.
• Your saved game may be lost at any time. It is a game.

QUESTIONS

Through the project this game is built on: wisco-flockwatch.org.