We don’t do anything out of the ordinary on this site.
As travelers, privacy is important to us. In fact, watching privacy become a thing of the past as Net Neutrality is lost in favor of corporate profit is sad indeed. We promise to neither save nor sell your information to anyone. Ever.
We installed an SSL certificate so that our users may enjoy an encrypted browsing experience. You can see when a connection is secure by looking for the closed lock and “https” in the browser address bar.
Privacy Policy for www.startbackpacking.com
Google likes for sites to have privacy policies in place. If you require any more information or have any questions about our privacy policy, please feel free to contact us.
Cookies
EU law requires that we notify users about cookies used on this site.
We don’t have a headquarters or office based in Europe, however, many of our visitors come from there.
No, we aren’t talking about tasty soft batch gooey goodness. These “cookies” are the tiny files your browser stores. We don’t do any deliberate cookie setting, however, our plugins in WordPress, Google Analytics, and our advertisers may utilize them. You can avoid cookies altogether by configuring your browser for privacy (browsing with an “incognito” or “anonymous” tab where cookies cannot be set).
Cookies and Web Beacons
www.startbackpacking.com does not implement cookies aside from those built into WordPress functionality and/or associated plugins. Browser cookies are (mostly) harmless and can be cleared by you at any time. Alternatively, you can view this site in a private browsing tab to block cookies.
Some of our advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on our site. Tracking pixels may be in place on our site to track when we send a customer to an affiliate. This is to ensure that startbackpacking.com receives the pitiful commissions that keep the site running. These do not affect your life in any way.
Our advertising partners may include:
- Commission Junction
- Amazon
- SafetyWing
- Other Direct Advertisers (ads are clearly marked as “advertisement” on the site)
As you can see by clicking around the site, there aren’t many ads at all. Affiliate ads provide us a small commission if you click through and purchase something (e.g., travel insurance, hotel room, etc). Tracking of the transaction is handled by our affiliate networks. Cookies must be enabled for us to get credit for a sale.
Analytics
We implement regular Google Analytics (as millions of sites so) without any of the fancy add-on features. We can’t identify specific visitors. Google Analytics does tell if someone is a first-time visitor or a new soul who wandered in from the cold tangles of the internet.
Log Files
Like all other web sites, www.startbackpacking.com has log files on the server at our web host. Information such as IP address, timestamp of visit, what type of device (e.g., Android, iPhone, etc) may be logged. Data is kept at our host.
We use Google Analytics only to improve the site and user experience by making tweaks to content, SEO, and linking structure. We do not use Google Ads at this time.
Your personal activity is anonymous. We don’t sell site metrics or data about our visitors to anyone.
Emails
If you signed up for a newsletter, updates, or RSS notifications when new content is posted, we will be able to see your email address. That’s it. We keep these addresses private and do not share them with any third party, including our partners. We hate SPAM as much as you do!
If for some reason we do contact you via email (i.e., to announce a site relaunch or other rare news), there will always be an easy way to unsubscribe. Feedburner (a Google service) handles all of our RSS subscriptions at this time.