What this site does with your data

The site runs Google Analytics 4. It tells us things like which guides get read, how long people stay on them, roughly what country you're in, what kind of device you're on, and whether you came from a search engine or a link somewhere. We also record a few things you do on a page: clicking through to Amazon, using the filters and sort on a gear list, opening an FAQ. That's how we tell which picks are actually useful to people and which ones just sit there.

What it doesn't tell us is who you are. Analytics never sees your name or your email. If you sign up for the packing list, analytics records that a sign-up happened and on which page, never the address itself. Google Analytics 4 uses your IP address to work out roughly where you are and then discards it rather than storing it. What we get is counts and patterns across everyone who visits, with no way to pull up one person and see what they did.

We've left Google's advertising add-ons switched off: Google signals (which links visits to signed-in Google accounts for demographics) is off, and nothing here feeds ad targeting. Google keeps the page-by-page detail for 2 months and the data tied to a visitor's cookie ID for 14 months, then deletes it. The overall totals in the reports stay.

If you'd rather not be counted, click this link and this browser stops sending analytics on every page of the site. Nothing else changes about how the site works. The choice is remembered in your browser's local storage, so it sticks until you clear your browsing data, and this link turns it back on if you change your mind. Ordinary ad and tracker blockers stop it too, and we don't do anything to get around them. Worth knowing: Google Analytics ignores the browser "Do Not Track" setting, so that one won't help you here. Use the link instead.

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.

Guides, Basecamp articles and the trip planner offer a free printable packing list in return for an email address. When you sign up we store four things: the address you typed, the page you signed up on, which form it was, and the date. Not your IP address, not your browser, nothing else. It sits in private storage on Vercel, the company that hosts the site, readable only with our own key.

We use it for one thing: emailing you about Tom's Hiking, such as a new guide. We will send those through an email service (we are choosing between Beehiiv and Kit), and when we connect one, your address moves there and this page will name it. Nothing is sent before then, and every email, starting with the first, carries a one-click unsubscribe that deletes you from the list. We never sell or share it.

The list is for readers 13 and older. If you are younger, ask a parent to sign up instead.

The only cookies here are the ones Google Analytics sets: _ga and a second one starting _ga_. They hold a random ID so that you reading three guides in a row counts as one visit instead of three. There's no name attached to that ID and it means nothing outside this site. Google's own documentation puts their lifetime at up to two years.

Nothing else. No login, cart, or session to keep track of, and no advertising cookies. If you use the opt-out link above, the choice is stored in your browser's local storage rather than a cookie, and the analytics cookies stop being set. The same goes for items you tick off in the trip planner: they're saved in local storage so the list remembers them, and they never leave your device. The site's fonts are served from our own domain, so loading a page doesn't send a font request to anyone else. The Google Analytics script itself does load from Google's servers, which means Google sees your IP address as part of that request.

• No user accounts, logins, or profiles.
• No advertising networks or retargeting pixels.
• No selling, renting, or sharing of personal data, including the email list.
• No database of our own storing anything about you beyond the email sign-up.

Tom is 14 himself, and plenty of people getting into hiking are around that age. This site is a gear guide for everyone. The only thing it ever asks for is an email address for the packing list, and that sign-up is for readers 13 and older.

If the site starts doing something new — changing what analytics measures, turning on a 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.