Privacy Policy

Last updated August 2026

Verdant Traveler is a directory of public parks. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to buy, and no newsletter. We keep no accounts and run no analytics. The site does carry advertising, served by Google AdSense, and that is the one part of it that involves a third party placing cookies or similar identifiers on your device — it has its own section below. This page describes that, and the small amount of data that unavoidably passes through the site anyway.

What we do not collect

• No accounts. There is no login, and no way to create one.
• No cookies set by us. Our own code sets no cookies and uses no local storage for tracking. Google's ad tags are a separate matter, described under Advertising.
• No analytics. No Google Analytics, no tag manager, no first-party pixels, no fingerprinting, and no visitor measurement of our own.
• One form, and only one. The contact page has a form for reporting a correction or asking a question. What you type in it goes to our helpdesk (Dispatch Tickets) so we can reply, and nowhere else. There is no comment box and no subscription field.
• No sale or sharing of personal information — we hold none to sell.

Advertising

The site carries advertising served by Google AdSense. Ads appear on park pages, guides and index pages; they do not appear on the search page or on error pages.

• Google and its partners set cookies or read device identifiers to serve and measure ads. That is done by Google's own tag running in your browser — the data goes to Google, not to us.
• We receive no personal information from it. Our reporting is aggregate: how many times ads were shown and what they earned. We cannot identify a reader from it, and we do not combine it with anything else, because we hold nothing else.
• Third-party vendors may also serve ads through Google's exchange, each under its own privacy policy.

Google explains what it collects on sites that use its services, and why, at How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Turning off personalised ads. You can switch off ad personalisation for your Google account at My Ad Center, opt out of personalisation by many other vendors at aboutads.info or, in Europe, Your Online Choices. You will still see ads; they will simply be less relevant. Browser settings and content blockers also work here, and we do not detect or discourage them.

Approximate location, and how "Near you" works

The home page shows a row of parks close to you. To do that, our server reads the approximate location that Cloudflare — the service that delivers this site — attaches to your request. Cloudflare derives it from your IP address at the point your connection reaches its network.

• It is coarse: roughly city-level, and often only the nearest large city.
• It is used during that single request to sort a list of parks by distance, and is gone when the response is sent.
• We do not store it, log it, attach it to anything, or send it anywhere.
• The row tells you which city it used, so you can see what the site inferred — and it simply does not appear if no location is available, which is the normal outcome on a VPN or a privacy relay.

We never ask your browser for precise GPS location. You will not see a location permission prompt from this site.

Search

Site search runs entirely inside your browser. The search index is a static file your browser downloads; what you type is matched locally and never sent to any server. We cannot see your searches because they do not reach us.

The contact form

Submitting the contact form sends your name, email address, message and — if you fill it in — the page you are writing about to Dispatch Tickets, the helpdesk we use to keep track of replies. That is the only reason we hold it: to answer you. It is not added to a mailing list, not used for advertising, and not passed to anyone else. Ask us to delete a message and we will.

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted on Cloudflare. As with any web host, Cloudflare processes the requests needed to deliver pages and keeps its own operational and security logs, which include IP addresses. That processing is Cloudflare's, under their terms and privacy practices, and is the ordinary technical requirement of serving a website rather than anything we have added.

Images and outbound links

Photographs on park pages come from two places. Most are served from our own image CDN. The remainder are still loaded directly from Wikimedia Commons, which means your browser requests those files from Wikimedia and Wikimedia can see that request, subject to their privacy policy. We are steadily moving these onto our own CDN.

Park pages link out to the agency that runs each park, and offer a Google Maps directions link. Those are ordinary links: nothing is sent to them unless you click, and once you do, that site's own policies apply.

Children

The site is a general-audience reference and is not directed at children. We knowingly collect no personal information from anyone, including children.

Your rights

Rules such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, or delete personal information a company holds about you. We hold none, so in practice there is nothing to request from us — but if you believe otherwise, write to us and we will look into it and answer. Data collected by Google's ad tags is held by Google rather than by us, so a request about that is best made to Google directly, through the links in Advertising above. We do not sell or share personal information, and we have none to sell.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top. If a change is significant — adding analytics, say, or anything that stores data about visitors — we will say so plainly here rather than quietly revise the wording.

August 2026: we added a contact form and advertising. The form is the first place on this site where you can send us anything, so it is the first data we hold at all; it is described above.

On the ads: Until then this page said the site ran none, and that was true. It now carries Google AdSense, which means a third party sets cookies or reads device identifiers in your browser where it previously did not. Nothing else about what we collect has changed — still no accounts, no analytics, and nothing stored about you.

Contact

This policy describes how the site is actually built and what it actually does. It is not legal advice, and it has not been reviewed by a lawyer. If you are relying on it for compliance in a particular jurisdiction, have counsel review it.