Privacy Policy.

Information We Collect

Strange Route collects the following types of information:

• Account information, such as your email address and display name
• User profile data, including avatar, bio, and saved or visited locations
• Comments, contact messages, and corrections you submit
• Photographs you upload
• Usage data collected through Google Analytics and the Google Ads tag, such as the pages you view, the blog posts you open and read, your browser and device, and an approximate location derived from your IP address
• Sanitized technical error details used to keep the service reliable

How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to operate, maintain, and improve Strange Route, including to display your public profile and submissions, moderate community content, respond to contact and support requests, process guide purchases, understand how the site is used so we can improve it, and measure whether our advertising works. We do not sell your personal information.

Analytics, Advertising & Cookies

Strange Route uses Google Analytics to understand how the site is used, and the Google Ads tag to measure whether our Google ads lead to visits and account signups. Both are Google services, and both use cookies or similar browser storage.

Accept allows analytics and advertising measurement and personalization. Reject declines both purposes. Manage preferences lets you choose each purpose separately and save your choices. Updated wording requires a new choice, including from existing visitors. You can change or withdraw your choice through Privacy choices in the footer. Google tags load with storage denied before your choice and may send consent signals.

Optional site analytics can record pages you view and actions you take. If you sign in, activity recorded afterwards can be linked to your account. Earlier anonymous activity stays separate. Detailed visitor history and its browser identity are kept for up to 12 calendar months from that identity’s first observation, then become eligible for scheduled cleanup. Cleanup normally runs hourly; outages or failed jobs can delay physical deletion. Deleting an account or withdrawing analytics can erase associated history sooner. You can sign up and use essential site functions when optional analytics and advertising are off.

When they are on, Google receives the pages you view, the actions you take on the site, your IP address, and cookie identifiers. Signup ad measurement can also send an account identifier as a conversion reference. Google may use that information to measure ad performance and to personalize the ads you see on other websites. Google's handling of it is covered by How Google uses information from sites that use its services.

You can turn off personalized Google ads in My Ad Center, and block Google Analytics on every site with Google's opt-out browser add-on. Your consent choice is stored in your browser, and clearing this site's data resets it.

Public Submissions & Visibility

Content you choose to make public, including comments and public visit photos, may become visible to other visitors of the site. Choose your visibility settings accordingly before submitting.

Photo Metadata

To help protect user privacy, Strange Route automatically removes identifying metadata from photos uploaded to the platform before they are stored or made publicly available. This includes embedded metadata such as GPS coordinates, device information, timestamps, and other image metadata that may identify where or how a photo was taken. This process occurs automatically and does not affect the visible image itself.

Data Sharing

We do not sell your personal information. We share information with the service providers who help us operate the platform: our hosting and database providers, Stripe for guide payments, Google for analytics and ad measurement as described above, Mapbox for maps and place search, YouTube for videos embedded in some articles, and our email delivery provider. We may also share information when required by law. Card details for a guide purchase go directly to Stripe, and Strange Route never stores them.

Security

We take reasonable measures to protect your information, including access controls and row-level security on our database. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security of your data.

Your Rights & Contact

You may request a review of any privacy-related concern, including questions about what information we hold or requests to remove submitted content, through the contact form on our Contact page.