What this site does with your data

Right now the site runs no analytics at all — no Google Analytics, no tracking pixels, no visit counters. Nothing about your visit is recorded by me.

At some point I plan to turn on Google Analytics 4 so I can see which pages and picks people find useful — anonymous traffic data like which pages get visited and how people got there, never your name or email. When that happens, I'll update this section and the date at the top of this page before it goes live.

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, I 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 me — 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 I don't control and can't change. I 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 of its own — there's no login, cart, or session to keep track of, and with analytics off there are no analytics cookies either. If that changes when analytics goes live, this section will say so.

• 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 — I 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 — I'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.