Privacy Policy

Overview

The East Africa Travel Guide is a static, offline-first travel guide covering six countries. It has no accounts and no advertising. It does have one anonymous session cookie and an AI trip planner whose searches are saved — this page describes exactly what that means, in plain language.

On your first visit, the site creates an anonymous session identifier and stores it in a first-party cookie called sid:

it is a random number (a UUID) with no connection to who you are — not to your name, email, or any account, because the site has none;
it is first-party (Secure, SameSite=Lax), lasts 1 year, and is never shared with or sold to third parties;
a small banner tells you about it on first visit, and you can dismiss that banner; clearing your browser’s site data removes the session.

The AI trip planner: what we save

When you use the AI trip planner, we save what you searched for and what the planner returned:

Inputs: your budget tier, trip length, month, the countries and interests you selected, and any free-text travel style.
Outputs: the recommended countries and a short summary of the itinerary the planner produced.

These records are tied to your anonymous session id, not to your IP address and not to your identity. We use them to improve the planner’s recommendations and to understand what travellers are actually searching for — which guides to write next, which trips to feature.

Retention: records are kept while the service operates; there is no automatic expiry yet.
Known gap, stated plainly: there is currently no self-serve way to view or delete your saved searches. If you want a session’s records removed before self-serve deletion exists, contact us (below) with the session id from your sid cookie and we will delete it manually.
If accounts are added later, you will be able to claim your anonymous session and control its data; until then nothing is linked to any identity.

Analytics

When the site owner has enabled it, this site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics. It is cookieless and privacy-friendly by design:

it sets no cookies and collects no personal data;
it records aggregate page-view counts (page URL, referrer, approximate country) to tell the owner which guides are useful;
it does not fingerprint visitors or follow you across other sites.

What is stored on your device

The site caches things in your browser so the guide works without a signal:

Offline pages — a service worker saves the pages and images you have viewed so they load with no network connection.
Last known weather — when the live weather layer runs, the most recent reading per region (region name, temperature, condition, time) is kept in your browser’s local storage.
Your session cookie and the banner-dismissal flag — described above.

You can erase all of it at any time with your browser’s “Clear site data” option.

Network requests the site makes

Cloudflare serves the site itself; as with any web request, Cloudflare processes standard request data (such as your IP address) to deliver the pages. Your IP address is not written to our analytics records.
Open-Meteo (api.open-meteo.com) provides the live current-weather readings. Your browser sends this request directly, which means standard request data (including your IP address) reaches Open-Meteo. The request contains no information about you beyond that.
Anthropic runs the trip planner’s AI model. When you request a plan, our server sends the model your search filters and an extract of this guide’s own content — not your session id, not your IP address. The request is not used by us to advertise to you.
No other third parties receive data from the site: no ad networks, no social media pixels, no cross-site trackers.

What this site does not have

No accounts, sign-up or login (planned; your session data will be claimable then, and this policy will be updated first)
No payments, bookings or checkout
No advertising or cross-site tracking
No marketing email or newsletters

The cookie banner on this site is a plain-language disclosure, not a consent-management platform. Depending on where you live, local law (for example the EU/UK e-Privacy rules) may require more than a dismissible banner for non-essential cookies. This is a known limitation pending a proper legal review.

Children

This is a general-audience travel guide. It collects no identity information from any visitor, including children; the only data it keeps is the anonymous, non-identifying information described above.

Changes to this policy

Features that change what data is handled will update this page and the “Last updated” date above. Significant changes (accounts, new data sharing) will be called out at the top of the page, not buried.

Contact

Questions about this policy: [CONTACT EMAIL — TO BE FILLED IN BY SITE OWNER]