Privacy Policy

Who we are

We are two Florida-based authors who have written almost a dozen guidebooks together and have nearly three decades of travel writing experience.

Our website address is trailsandtravel.com. It is hosted by Ghost.io.

What personal data we collect and why

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available on their website

After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. We reserve the right to moderate comments.

You may delete a comment at any time.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select "Remember Me", your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Our host provides us web analytics so we can see how many people have looked at a webpage or clicked on a link. These do not tell us exactly who did so, just an aggregate of which country the click was from.

Memberships and Newsletter

If you choose to become a member on our website (free or paid), the profile you create is visible to us, along with the web page you were on when you created it. If you open a newsletter or click a link in it, that action is recorded by our web host.

Your actual activity on the website (reading articles, clicking external links, etc) is never shared with us.

We do not see or handle payment information. That is all done by Stripe.

Who we share your data with

We do not share our membership lists or the contents of what you put in your own profile with any third party. Ever.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators (us) can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service by our host. We never actually see the processing or results of that.

Additional information

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

We are affiliates of Bookshop.org, a online bookseller that works with independent bookstores to ship books to people who buy them from their online store. We receive a small commission on the sale of any book if you click on a Bookshop link from this website and subsequently order from them.