How we handle your data

What we collect

Basic visit data. Like any website, our hosting infrastructure logs standard request data — IP address, browser/user-agent, requested page — to serve pages and keep the site secure and running.

No analytics script. Waymark loads no analytics product and no third-party tracker: there is nothing in these pages measuring you. Cloudflare, which hosts the site, produces aggregate traffic counts from the request data above — totals of how often a page was served, not profiles of who read it, and no cookies involved.

Comments, only if you choose to comment. Signing in to leave a comment stores your name, email address, and the profile picture Google gives us, plus the comment text and standard session data (IP address, user agent) tied to that sign-in. Google sign-in is the only sign-in method here. We never post, comment, or sign in on your behalf anywhere else.

If you email us. Writing to hello@waymarkroutes.com means we receive whatever you send — your address and your message.

Cookies

One cookie, and it only remembers a language. Waymark is published in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. If you read it in Hebrew or Arabic — or switch back to English — we store that choice so the next page you open comes up in the same language instead of guessing again from your browser settings.

What’s in it. The cookie is named lang and holds a language code — en, he, or ar. Nothing else. It isn’t an identifier, it isn’t tied to an account or to anything you’ve commented, it holds no personal information, and it can’t be used to recognise you.

How long it lasts, and how it’s set. One year, unless you clear it sooner. It’s set SameSite=Lax and Secure, so it’s sent only to this site, only over an encrypted connection, and never to anyone else’s.

Who doesn’t get it. Search-engine crawlers, which are served every language directly and are never given a cookie at all.

It’s a preference, not tracking. No profile, no cross-site history, no advertising use, and it’s never shared with anyone. Clearing your cookies removes it and the site works exactly the same afterwards — it simply falls back to your browser’s language setting. Other than lang, this site sets no cookies; if you sign in to comment, the sign-in session is held by our comments service on its own comments. subdomain.

Maps and photos come from other services

Route maps. A trip’s map is drawn with the Leaflet library, loaded from unpkg.com, over map tiles from CARTO built on OpenStreetMap data. It loads only if you scroll a map into view. When it does, your browser fetches those files directly from those services, and — as with any file a browser fetches — the request carries your IP address and browser to them. We pass them nothing about you, there is no account or API key involved, and we don’t use them to track anyone.

Photos and place descriptions. Route photos come from Wikimedia Commons and the place summaries from Wikipedia, credited on the page. The photos are loaded straight from Wikimedia’s servers as a page renders, so those requests carry the same basic request data any image fetch does.

“Open in Google Maps” links. Each day and each segment has a link that opens Google Maps with the place names filled in. It is an ordinary link: nothing goes to Google unless you click it, and what travels with the click is the route’s place names, never anything about you.

What we don’t do

No ad trackers, no marketing pixels, no ad networks, no profile of what you read, and we don’t sell or rent your data to anyone. There’s no newsletter and no mailing list.

Third parties involved

• Cloudflare — hosting and the database the routes are served from. It is also the layer that stores your language choice in the lang cookie; that choice stays on this site.
• Wikimedia (Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons) — the photos and place descriptions your browser loads from their servers.
• unpkg and CARTO (map tiles built on OpenStreetMap data) — the map library and the map itself, loaded only when a map comes into view.
• Google — only if you sign in to comment, or if you click an “Open in Google Maps” link.

Each handles data under its own privacy policy; we share only what a feature needs to work, and we hand none of them a profile of you.

Your comment data

You can delete your own comment at any time. To delete your account and everything tied to it, email hello@waymarkroutes.com and we’ll handle it.

Children

Waymark isn’t directed at children, and we don’t knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we’ll update this page and the effective date above.