The method, in plain words

The full method will live here, with version numbers and sources. These are the four rules that never change, not even when they cost us money or users.

• Your article texts stay with you. What you read never goes to our servers — no full text, no excerpts, nothing from which the text could be reconstructed. We keep only an address or a hash, some numbers, and counts.

• The estimate is made in your own browser. That is why Undertone also works behind a paywall, and why we need no newspaper subscription of our own.

• Without a source we show nothing. No author background, no estimate and no source without a record of where it came from. What we do not know is shown as unknown — never as zero and never as a guess.

• Computed and sourced are never the same thing. An estimate from our model and a cited fact look different everywhere. Other people's numbers are shown as their numbers, with their method; they never enter ours.

This page is a summary in preparation. The worked-out method follows before the beta.