How scans are counted
Short answer
A camera scan is a phone opening your code; a link open is someone tapping the short link in a chat or page. Both count. Link previews, bots, data centres and your own tests before activation don’t. No cookies, no stored IP addresses.
Unique scanners
“Unique scanners” counts different people, day by day. One phone scanning five times in a day is one scanner that day; the same phone tomorrow counts again. We recognise repeats with a pseudonym that changes every day, so nobody can be followed over time.
Where a scan happened
Location comes from the phone’s network, at about city level. Mobile networks sometimes only reveal the country; those scans show as a country, not a pin.
Optionally, “Ask scanners for their precise location” adds a one-tap consent page: people who accept give a real postal code and a pin within about 100 m.
Times
“When people scan” uses each scanner’s own local time, so a breakfast scan in New York and one in London both show as breakfast.
Tip · Testing your own draft? Those scans are logged as previews and never count.