Roaming Down Under

Privacy

Privacy policy of the Roaming Down Under website

The short version of my privacy policy is:

This website does not collect or share any personal information.

The longer and more detailed version follows ...

Server logs

When you access any website, your browser automatically sends information such as your IP address, your browser version, the date and time you visited, and which pages you viewed. None of this identifies you personally. Most server software, including mine, stores this information in temporary log files for the purpose of generating statistics.

My only use for this information is to check total monthly visitor numbers, which pages are most (and least) visited, and which countries the website is most commonly viewed from. That's all I need to satisfy my curiosity.

E-mail Addresses

This website is not a blog, and has no comments system requiring e-mail addresses. The only way I can receive an e-mail address is if somebody chooses to send an e-mail to the address on my contact page. I do not, and will never, use senders' e-mail addresses for any purpose other than replying to that sender.

Third party embedded code

A single page on this website - the maps page - contains an embedded Google map. This imports Google content which inevitably includes some form of tracking. Unfortunately, when I began this site, Google provided the only decent service for plotting travel locations on interactive map. Nowadays OpenStreetMaps has become a viable alternative and I hope to switch to that someday.

Note that the small location maps near the bottom of other pages are not normal Google maps - they are simple images taken from screen shots of their maps.

Some of my pages contain embedded videos, but these are hosted on Vimeo (not Youtube). I've used a switch in the embed code which prevents tracking - it just displays the video.

So what's missing?

I can claim to not collect or share any personal information because this website has:

Why?

This website is purely a hobby and a creative outlet: I'm not selling anything or trying to make money. My reward is mainly in the satisfaction I gain from creating it, and also the knowledge that a few like-minded fellow travellers might find something helpful or interesting on my pages, or be inspired to visit some of the places I write about.

In the past I dabbled in affiliate advertising links (two book sellers and a travel review site). However I never earned enough to reach the minimum thresholds for payment and ended up being paid exactly nothing. I fared better with Google Adsense, but over the years the returns for a low-traffic hobby site like mine shrunk dramatically. I persisted while it was zero effort on my part, but when Google's new "smart" ads broke my pages and began requiring time and effort to fix, I questioned if it was worth my time. I decided it wasn't.

Then increasing concerns about privacy, and growing awareness of how web users are tracked - and my in-principle distaste for that - led me to cleanse my website of advertising and anything that tracks users. Now this website just displays text and photos - like websites did in the innocent early days of the internet.