Privacy policy

In short

• Favourites and settings stay in your browser — in chrome.storage inside your own profile. They are never sent to our servers.
• Direct ping measurement is opt-in and runs from your device straight to game servers; the results stay on your machine.
• Our API sees your IP address, like any site your browser connects to. It is used during the request and ends up only in ordinary web-server logs.
• No analytics, no ads, no data sale, no remote code.

1. What the extension does

The extension shows a list of Rust servers in the browser toolbar, using data from our public API: name, player count, map, provider, and last and next wipe times. Ping is measured by the extension itself, with your consent — see section 3. You can star a server as a favourite and get a notification shortly before it wipes (and, optionally, right after). The toolbar icon shows a countdown to the next wipe among your favourites.

The extension injects no content scripts into web pages and never reads your browsing history, tabs, clipboard or page content. It only touches its own popup, its options page and our API.

2. What the extension stores

All extension data lives in browser storage (chrome.storage) inside your profile. That is the only place it exists — there is no copy on our servers.

chrome.storage.sync

• Favourite servers — a list of server identifiers from our catalog (up to 50).
• Settings — how long before a wipe to warn you, whether to also notify after a wipe, and the default region filter.

The sync area is replicated across your own devices by Chrome itself, if you are signed in and have sync enabled. That transfer happens between you and Google; we have no access to it and never receive its contents. You can turn sync off in Chrome settings.

chrome.storage.local

• Data cache — the last fetched snapshot of your favourites and upcoming wipes, so the popup opens instantly and still works when the API is unreachable.
• Notification bookkeeping — which wipe has already been announced, so the same alert is not shown twice.
• Ping cache — measured values, distance-based estimates and the baseline latency to the API; entries expire after 5 minutes and are capped in size.
• Your approximate coordinates — the answer of /api/v1/geo (city/region level), kept for a few hours so the popup does not ask again on every open, and used only for the distance-based ping estimate.
• An “already asked” flag for the optional permission prompt, so you are not asked repeatedly.

None of this leaves the browser. Uninstalling the extension removes its storage with it.

3. Direct ping measurement (opt-in)

Manifest V3 gives extensions no raw sockets, and Rust servers speak UDP, so a real in-game ping cannot be measured from a browser. The extension approximates it: it opens an ordinary network connection to the game server's IP:port and times how long the answer takes (usually a connection refusal). That round-trip time is the ping estimate.

• The feature is off by default. It requires an optional host permission that is requested through the standard Chrome dialog (chrome.permissions.request).
• Connections are made from your device directly to game-server IP addresses. Like any network connection from your computer, they are visible to your ISP and to the server operator.
• No data is transmitted: the request is sent in no-cors mode without cookies or credentials, and the response is never read — only the elapsed time is.
• Results stay in your browser (cached for 5 minutes) and are never sent to us.
• The permission can be revoked at any time from the extension's options page (“Revoke access”) or through Chrome itself.

Without this permission the extension opens no connections to game servers at all: it only measures its own round trip to our API and shows that figure at the bottom of the list, while the ping column falls back to a distance-based estimate marked with “≈”. The rusttv.org website estimates the ping the same way, and that calculation happens entirely in your browser (see section 4).

4. Requests to the rusttv.org API

Both the site and the extension read from the public API at https://rusttv.org/api/v1. The API is read-only (GET), anonymous, with no authentication and no cookies.

As with any HTTPS request, our server sees the IP address the request came from and the standard browser headers (User-Agent, language). We use that as follows:

• Rate limiting — a per-IP request counter (60 requests per minute; 300 for the latency probe) so the API cannot be hammered offline. The counter lives in memory and expires on its own.
• Geo-based ping estimate — the website and the extension call the /api/v1/geo endpoint, which resolves your IP to approximate coordinates (city/region level) using a local offline DB-IP database and returns them to you immediately with Cache-Control: no-store. The answer is not written anywhere; the distance and the ping estimate itself are computed in your browser. No third-party geolocation service is contacted.
• Web-server logs — a standard nginx access log (IP, timestamp, path, status code, User-Agent), kept for troubleshooting and abuse protection, rotated by the server's normal log rotation. It is not used for profiling and is not linked to any identity.

There are no user profiles, no user identifiers, no cookies and no cross-site tracking. Your favourites and settings are never sent to the API: catalog requests are identical for everyone.

5. Notifications

Wipe notifications are produced on your device through chrome.notifications: an alarm (chrome.alarms) refreshes your favourites and compares the next wipe time against your setting. No push service is involved and nothing is sent to any third party.

6. Permissions and why they are needed

storage

Keep favourites and settings in the browser, plus the catalog and ping caches.

alarms

Refresh favourites periodically and fire exactly at wipe time: an MV3 service worker is torn down, and timers inside it do not survive that.

notifications

Show the “wipe incoming” alert for a favourite server and, optionally, the “wipe done” one.

offscreen

Run a series of round-trip timings in a hidden document: the service worker is shut down before a measurement run finishes.

https://rusttv.org/*

Read the server catalog and wipe schedule from our API. This is the only remote address the extension contacts on its own.

*://*/* (optional)

Used solely for direct ping measurement: game-server addresses are chosen by server owners, are not known in advance and change over time, so no fixed host list can be declared in the manifest. It is requested only with your explicit consent, is used only to open a connection to a catalog server's IP:port, injects no scripts into any page and reads no site content. Revocable in the options page.

7. What we do not do

• We do not collect names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, payment details or any other personal information.
• We embed no analytics, counters, ad networks or trackers.
• We do not sell or transfer user data to third parties, and we do not use it for purposes unrelated to the extension's single feature set.
• We do not load or execute remote code: all extension code ships inside the published package.
• We do not use data for creditworthiness or lending purposes, and we do not share it with data brokers.

8. Deleting your data

Remove the extension from chrome://extensions and both of its storage areas go with it. You can also clear favourites by un-starring servers, and revoke the ping permission from the options page. Nothing about you remains on our side, because we never stored it.

9. Children

The service is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone, children included.

10. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the effective date at the top of the page will be updated. Material changes will also be reflected in the extension's Chrome Web Store listing.