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. We never see your name or your email, and the site has no way to ask for either. 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.

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 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 email newsletter and no signup form anywhere on the site, so there is nothing here that asks for your address.
• 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 of our own 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 — 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.