Privacy policy

The official Privacy Policy for this site. (In brief: We do not collect any personal information, or use our own cookies to track you. We hate that, too.)

The privacy of our visitors to ReidsEngland.com and your personal information is important to us.

Here is what types of personal information we receive and collect when you visit ReidsEngland.com, and how we safeguard your information.

Personal information

First of all, we do not collect any personal information on you at all. We don't even know who you are, unless you send us an email (and we're always happy to hear from readers). Even if we did, we would never sell your personal information to third parties. That's just plain rude.

Frankly, we wouldn't even know how to do that. This is just an informational site run by an independent travel journalist who only knows (barely) enough HTML, CSS, and PHP programming to make the site look more or less how he pictured it.

Also, we hate junk mail and spam just as much as you do, and would never do anything to subject our loyal readers to any more of it than they already receive. (We have a long-running fantasy of meeting one of these spam e-mailers at a cocktail party or something and punching him squarely in the nose.)

Servers, trackers, cookies, and ads

The server this site uses, like all servers, keeps track of such things as the search terms you used that led you to the site, your browser or platform (Mac, PC, iPad, etc.), and the site from which you came (if you surfed here from Google, Yahoo, MSNBC.com, or whatever)—but it has no idea who you actually are.

We do love to peek at that information, and use Google's Analytics program to keep track of it all, but this is only for general statistical purposes (how many visitors the site receives, what countries they come from, that sort of thing) so we can better shape the site to match the needs of our readers. (Also, it's just darn exciting to see that you have a visitor from a place like, say, Vanuatu.)

Like most sites, ReidsEngland.com uses third-party advertisements (Google ads, affiliate links, and the like) to support the site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether or not you have Flash installed.

This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

Truth be told, that's all we know about it. We don't really understand how it all works ourselves. Frankly, we are also a little creeped out when Facebook or Amazon ads alter to show things related to whatever our last search term was, but that's how the modern information economy works—and really the only reasons the Internet remains free of charge.

All we know is that Google requires us to post this privacy policy and disclaimer. Google also requests that we post the following:

• Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to your website.
• Google's use of the DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and/or other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the advertising opt-out page. (Alternatively, you can direct users to opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.)

Frankly, we have no idea what a DART cookie is (an Oreo that can also be used as a projectile weapon? Something you eat on the Dublin public transport system?), but we dutifully cut-and-pasted those three bullet points above so you can opt out (perhaps because DART cookies are even more fattening than regular ones).

One thing we do know is that you can also choose to disable or selectively turn off third-party cookies in your browser settings or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with websites, especially if you're booking something (cookies keep track of who you are so that, say, the airline website will know it's you when you return the next day and can call up your itinerary—that sort of thing). This could also include the inability to log in to services or programs, such as forums or accounts.

(We would also like to take this opportunity to point out that there's no need to turn off javascript for this site. We know some people do that to keep popup ads from, well, popping up, but we can assure you that there are no popup ads on this site—we find those astoundingly annoying. There are just the regular kind of ads in the margins. The only thing this site uses javascript for at all is for certain functionality issues, like controlling drop-down menus, photo galleries, and tabbed content—so if you turn it off, the site won't work properly.)

We cannot be held responsible...

As for the information contained on this site, it is all merely personal opinion and is intended for informational purposes only.

All assertions of fact were as accurate as we could make them at the time of publication, and we cannot be held responsible for any changes that have happened in the meantime. (Travel information has an infuriating tendency to mutate when you're not looking: restaurants close, new museums open, tourist offices move, ferry schedules change, and hotels rates always, always go up.)

This site also links to many, many other sites we think might be useful to travelers and readers, but we cannot be held responsible for the quality of information or other content on those sites.

And that's all I have to say about that.