At Amateur Traveler, your privacy is very important to us. We have a few fundamental principles that we follow. Read this carefully, so you know your rights.

Principles

Your privacy is very important to us. At Amateur Traveler we have a few fundamental principles that we follow:

We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it.
We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of our site.
Frankly, we are just too busy to do anything creepy with your personal information, even if we wanted to… and we don’t.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Amateur Traveler collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Amateur Traveler’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Amateur Traveler’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Amateur Traveler may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Amateur Traveler also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on our blogs. Amateur Traveler only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Amateur Traveler’s websites choose to interact with Amateur Traveler in ways that require Amateur Traveler to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Amateur Traveler gathers depend on the nature of the interaction.

For example, we ask visitors who comment on our blog to provide a username and email address. Those who wish to receive Amateur Traveler updates via email, we collect their emails. In each case, Amateur Traveler collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Amateur Traveler. Amateur Traveler does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

More specifically:

• If you subscribe to our newsletter, we need an email or we can’t send it.
• If you leave a comment we collect an email so we can respond to you in private when needed or so you can get updates to your comment.

Aggregated Statistics

Amateur Traveler may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Amateur Traveler may monitor the most popular pages on the Amateur Traveler.com site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam. Amateur Traveler may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Amateur Traveler does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Amateur Traveler discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Amateur Traveler’s behalf or to provide services available at Amateur Traveler’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others.

More specifically:

• We use mailchimp.com to send emails so when you sign up for an email newsletter your email gets stored and sent from them.

Some of those employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Amateur Traveler’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Amateur Traveler will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone.

Other than to its employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations, as described above, Amateur Traveler discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when Amateur Traveler believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Amateur Traveler, third parties or the public at large.

If you are a registered fir the Amateur Traveler newsletter and have supplied your email address, Amateur Traveler will occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Amateur Traveler. We primarily use our blog to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. Honestly, we would like to send more email than we currently do, but are pretty busy. It’s not that we don’t love you.

If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish the content (not the email address) in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. We usually don’t include people’s full names when we do publish comments unless they have chosen to do so. Amateur Traveler takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Opting Out

If you desire to unsubscribe from our mailing list simply use the unsubscribe link in the newsletter.

If you want to have your user record and comments deleted from the website, contact us and we would be willing although sad to do so: email host [at] amateurtraveler.com.

Cookies

Cookies are tasty snacks and if you want to send us cookies, send chocolate chip cookies… or snickerdoodles.

A cookie is also is some information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Amateur Traveler uses cookies to help Amateur Traveler identify and track visitors, their usage of the Amateur Traveler website, and their website access preferences. Amateur Traveler visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Amateur Traveler’s website, with the drawback that certain features of Amateur Traveler’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers

If Amateur Traveler or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the event that Amateur Traveler goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that are transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur and that any acquirer of Amateur Traveler may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads

Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Amateur Traveler and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers. We do not know the policy of any of our advertisers to chocolate chip cookies, but we assume they are also in favor or them.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Amateur Traveler may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Amateur Traveler’s sole discretion. Amateur Traveler encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

We assume that if you read this far in our privacy policy you are a detailed oriented person, are really paranoid or are a lawyer (which may be redundant to the first two statements).

Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.0)

The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the Website.

First party cookies are created by the website that you are visiting. A third-party cookie is frequently used in behavioral advertising and analytics and is created by a domain other than the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies, tags, pixels, beacons and other similar technologies (collectively, “Tags”) may be placed on the Website to monitor interaction with advertising content and to target and optimize advertising. Each internet browser has functionality so that you can block both first and third-party cookies and clear your browser’s cache. The “help” feature of the menu bar on most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, how to disable existing cookies and how to clear your browser’s cache. For more information about cookies and how to disable them, you can consult the information at https://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/.

Without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of the Website content and features. Please note that rejecting cookies does not mean that you will no longer see ads when you visit our Site. In the event you opt-out, you will still see non-personalized advertisements on the Website.

The Website collects the following data using a cookie when serving personalized ads:

• IP Address
• Operating System type
• Operating System version
• Device Type
• Language of the website
• Web browser type
• Email (in hashed form)

Mediavine Partners (companies listed below with whom Mediavine shares data) may also use this data to link to other end user information the partner has independently collected to deliver targeted advertisements. Mediavine Partners may also separately collect data about end users from other sources, such as advertising IDs or pixels, and link that data to data collected from Mediavine publishers in order to provide interest-based advertising across your online experience, including devices, browsers and apps. This data includes usage data, cookie information, device information, information about interactions between users and advertisements and websites, geolocation data, traffic data, and information about a visitor’s referral source to a particular website. Mediavine Partners may also create unique IDs to create audience segments, which are used to provide targeted advertising.

If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices to opt-in or opt-out of this data collection, please visit Opt Out – NAI: Network Advertising Initiative. You may also visit http://optout.aboutads.info/#/ and http://optout.networkadvertising.org/# to learn more information about interest-based advertising. You may download the AppChoices app at YourAdChoices.com | AppChoices to opt out in connection with mobile apps, or use the platform controls on your mobile device to opt out.

For specific information about Mediavine Partners, the data each collects and their data collection and privacy policies, please click here.