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.
• Site push notifications are opt-in — if you switch them on, we keep your browser's subscription address; the notifications are encrypted, and your browser's push service cannot read them (see section 5).
• Signing in with Steam is optional — if you do, we keep your account's nickname, avatar and SteamID64 and a little information about how you use the “Play together” section; administrators can read lobby chats for moderation (see section 6).
• Our own statistics are anonymous — just daily numbers: how many times broadcasts were opened from the Live section, and how many lobbies were created, join requests sent and auto-searches started. They hold no IP addresses, cookies or accounts; so that one click is not counted twice, the server keeps a mark derived from the IP address in memory for just half an hour (see section 7).
• The site uses Google Analytics — Google's web statistics service, with its own cookies (see section 7). There is no other third-party analytics or visitor counter, and there is no analytics at all in the extension.
• No ads and no data sales; the extension loads 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.
• Teammate auto-search — when you are signed in with Steam and press “Auto-search” in the “Play together” section and auto-search puts you in its queue (this happens when many people are looking for teammates at the same time), the server resolves your IP to approximate coordinates in the same way, using the local DB-IP database, rounds them to a whole degree (about 100 km) and stores them in your queue ticket so that lobbies are put together from nearby players first. While only a few people are searching, auto-search adds you to a lobby straight away and does not determine your location. The IP address itself is not recorded; the coordinates are shown to no one and are erased as soon as the search is over — once you are placed in a lobby or cancel the search, or within a day if the search simply expires.
• 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

chrome.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.

Web Push

Separately from the extension, the rusttv.org website can send notifications to your browser about events in its “Play together” section — someone is asking to join your lobby, you were let into a lobby, auto-search put a squad together for you or added a new player to your lobby — and about the ban of a player you reported. No other event triggers them, including messages in a lobby chat. The feature is off by default: it only works if you signed in to the site with Steam, switched notifications on yourself and allowed them when your browser asked. A subscription covers one browser: on a phone and on a computer, notifications are switched on separately.

• What we store. When you switch notifications on, your browser hands out a subscription address at its push service and two encryption keys for it. We store them together with the account you signed in with through Steam, the site language the notifications are written in, and the times the subscription was switched on and last confirmed by the browser. Nothing else about the browser is kept.
• Why. Only to deliver a notification to that browser while the RustTV tab is closed. The subscription is used for nothing else.
• How they are delivered. Notifications travel through the push service of your browser's maker (Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft and others) — browsers accept notifications from websites no other way. The content is encrypted on our server with your browser's keys (the Web Push standard, RFC 8291) and decrypted only inside the browser, so the push service carries a sealed message it cannot read.
• What a notification contains. A sentence about the event, plus: in “Play together” notifications, the Steam nickname and avatar of the person involved (who is asking to join, who let you in, the leader of the squad auto-search formed, or the player auto-search added to your lobby), the lobby's server name (or the address its creator entered) and a link to the “Play together” section; in a ban notification, the Steam nickname and avatar of the player you reported, the server's name if you named one in the report, and a link to your reports. No links to Steam profiles. No SteamID either, with one exception: if Steam did not give us the player's nickname when you sent the report, the notification shows the player's SteamID64 from your report instead.
• When the subscription is deleted. When you switch notifications off on the site; when you sign out in that browser; when the push service reports that the subscription no longer exists (for example, because you revoked the permission or cleared the site's data); when the account is blocked; and after 90 days in which you never opened RustTV in that browser while signed in.
• The permission can be revoked at any time in your browser's own site settings. Notifications stop at once, and the stored subscription is deleted at the next delivery attempt.

6. Your Steam account on the site

Signing in to rusttv.org with Steam is optional — it is needed for some features, such as the “Play together” section and push notifications. You sign in on Steam's own website: Steam tells us only your SteamID64, and we never see your Steam password. Once you are signed in, we keep:

• Your Steam profile — nickname, avatar and SteamID64, and, if your game details are public on Steam, how many hours you have played Rust. All of this comes from Steam, and we refresh it from time to time.
• Sign-ins and visits — when you first signed in, when you last signed in and when you last opened the site while signed in. While you are signed in, your browser keeps a session cookie and our server keeps a record of that session with the IP address and browser (User-Agent) it came from; records of inactive sessions are deleted automatically.
• “Play together” — the roles you picked for yourself; how many likes and dislikes teammates gave you; how many times you left a lobby put together by auto-search (after that, auto-search closes for a while); and running totals: how many lobbies you created and took part in, how many times you started auto-search and asked to join someone else's lobby, and how many messages you wrote. The lobbies themselves, with their members, join requests, ratings and chats, are deleted about three days after the lobby closed or expired; auto-search queue entries three days after the search ended; site notifications after 30 days.
• Servers — if you prove you own a Rust server: your claims, your conversation with the moderator and the RCON password, which is stored encrypted and never shown to anyone.
• Cheater reports — if you report a player: their SteamID64 and Steam profile link, their nickname and avatar as Steam showed them when you sent the report, the server if you named one, the reason if you wrote one (up to 1,000 characters), when the report was sent, its status (sent or player banned) and the date of the ban, if there is one. Each account can report a given player only once. Reports are kept for as long as your account exists and are deleted with it; they have no deletion schedule of their own.
• Blocks — if the account is blocked: the reason, the term, and which administrator set or lifted the block and when.

Other players see your nickname, avatar, hours in Rust, roles and likes in the “Play together” section. The link to your Steam profile is seen only by the people in the same lobby as you and by the creator of a lobby you asked to join.

You see your own reports in your report history on the site. RustTV administrators see all reports in full, including who sent them. If you named a server in a report, the owner who verified that server on RustTV sees the report too, even if they do so only after you sent it. They see the player's nickname, avatar and Steam profile link, the reason, the server, the time and status of the report, and how many reports on that player have been sent to RustTV in total — but not who sent it.

About the reported player, we keep only what the report says and the public Steam profile data listed above. The report is not shown to the player themselves — unless they are the owner of the server named in it. RustTV does not ban anyone in the game itself.

RustTV administrators see account information and lobby chats — the chats until the lobby is deleted — for moderation. For violations they can block an account for a set time or indefinitely. A blocked account cannot sign in to the site: its seat in a lobby, its join requests and its auto-search are withdrawn, its push subscriptions are deleted, and an attempt to sign in shows the reason and the term of the block.

7. Statistics

RustTV counters

To understand what people use on the site, we keep counters of our own — anonymous daily numbers:

• Clicks through to broadcasts — how many times each channel's stream was opened from the Live section and from the “Live right now” widget on the home page.
• “Play together” — how many lobbies were created and how many auto-search put together, how many join requests there were and how they ended, how many times auto-search was started and how long people waited, and how many messages were written.

These counters hold no IP addresses, cookies or accounts: each record is a day, an action, a detail such as the channel or the lobby language, and a number. So that repeated clicks on one broadcast do not inflate the count, the server remembers in memory for half an hour that it has already been opened from that IP address — the same way rate limiting works (see section 4); the IP address itself never goes into the counters. The running totals of your own account are described in section 6.

Google Analytics

The pages of rusttv.org use Google Analytics, a web statistics service from Google, which shows us how many people visit the site, where they come from and which pages they open. The Google Analytics script is loaded from Google's servers, sets its own cookies in your browser (_ga, _ga_*) and sends Google information about the visit: which pages you open and what you do on them (for example, scrolling or following links), where you came from, your device type, browser, language and screen size; Google works out an approximate location from your IP address. Google processes this information under its own privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy). You can turn Google Analytics off with a content blocker or with Google's official Google Analytics Opt-out add-on. The RustTV Chrome extension does not use Google Analytics.

8. 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.

9. What we do not do

• We do not collect real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses or payment details.
• We embed no ad networks or advertising trackers, and no third-party analytics or visitor counters other than Google Analytics on the site (see section 7).
• We do not sell user data, we do not transfer it to third parties except as described in sections 5, 6 and 7, and we do not use it for purposes unrelated to how the site and the extension work.
• The extension does not load or execute remote code: all of its 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.

10. 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. No extension data remains on our side, because we never stored it.

If you switched on the site's push notifications, your browser's subscription is deleted when you switch them off on the site or sign out in that browser; the other cases are listed in section 5.

Your Steam account information (section 6), including your cheater reports, is kept for as long as the account exists; lobbies, chats and notifications are deleted on their own, on the schedule given in that section.

11. Children

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

12. 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.