What this site does with your data

There is no analytics on this site at the moment. No Google Analytics, no page-view counter, no session recording, nothing measuring what you read or where you came from. Your visit isn't counted anywhere.

We do plan to turn on Google Analytics eventually — knowing which guides people actually read is the only way to tell which ones are worth writing more of. When that happens, this page gets rewritten to say exactly what it collects and how to opt out, and the date at the top gets bumped. Until you see that here, assume nothing is running, because nothing is.

Tom's Hiking participates in the Amazon Associates program. The "View on Amazon" buttons and product links in the guides are affiliate links, so if you buy something after clicking one, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's what keeps the site going — and it never changes how the picks are ranked.

The part that matters for privacy: once you click one of those links, you leave Tom's Hiking and land on Amazon. From that point on, Amazon — not us — is in charge. Amazon uses its own cookies and tracking to credit the referral and to do whatever it normally does on its own site. That's covered by Amazon's privacy policy, which we don't control and can't change. We never see your Amazon account, your cart, or what you end up buying.

The site's fonts are served by Google Fonts. When a page loads, your browser fetches them from Google's servers, which means Google sees your IP address as part of that request. It's a standard way to load fonts and doesn't identify you by name, but it is a connection to a Google server, so it's worth stating plainly.

This site sets no cookies. With analytics off there's nothing to store, and there's no login, cart, or session to keep track of either. No advertising cookies, no local storage, no fingerprinting.

Amazon is a different story once you click through to it, and Google Fonts is a request to Google's servers — both covered below.

• No user accounts, logins, or profiles.
• No active email newsletter. The signup box you may see is marked "coming soon" and isn't collecting or sending emails anywhere yet.
• No advertising networks or retargeting pixels.
• No selling, renting, or sharing of personal data — we don't collect it to begin with.
• No backend or database storing anything about you.

Tom is 14 himself, and plenty of people getting into hiking are around that age. This site is a gear guide for everyone — it doesn't ask anyone for personal information or knowingly collect it, regardless of age.

If the site starts doing something new — turning on analytics or the newsletter, adding a contact form — we'll update this page to match, and bump the date at the top. The goal is for this page to always describe what the site actually does, not a generic template.