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Privacy policy

Effective

tidesnearby is a set of tide pages that work without anyone signing in. This page describes what happens to information about you when you use them.

In short

There are no accounts or sign-ups. The site's own code sets no cookies. Your location is used only if you ask for it, and it never leaves your browser. Visits are counted with cookieless analytics.

Your location

One feature uses your location: "Find tide pools and tides near you" on the home page. Nothing happens until you press its button. Your browser then asks whether to share your location with the page, and you can say no. No other page asks for your location.

If you allow it, the browser hands the page your position. A script in the page compares it with the 12 beaches on this site, which are already in the page, and finds the closest one (and, if that beach has no tide pool ratings, the closest one that does). It keeps only which beach that is and how far away, in memory, to show you its tides. The coordinates are not sent to us or to anyone else, and they are not saved in cookies or browser storage. When you close or reload the page, the result is gone.

The page does not ask for high-accuracy positioning. How your browser or device works out your position is up to them and their settings. You can withdraw the permission at any time in your browser's site settings. If you decline, the page shows the full list of beaches instead.

Analytics

We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics. Each page loads a small script from Cloudflare (static.cloudflareinsights.com) that reports the visit to Cloudflare. According to Cloudflare, Web Analytics does not use cookies or local storage, does not fingerprint visitors by their IP address or browser, and does not collect visitors' personal data.

What we see are totals: page views and visits, which pages were viewed, the sites visitors came from, and counts by country, browser, operating system and device type. We cannot see who an individual visitor is.

Google Search Console

We use Google Search Console to see how the site appears in Google Search: how often our pages show up in search results, for which searches, and how often people click through. That information comes from Google Search, not from these pages. No Google script runs here. The pages contain a verification tag that proves to Google we own the site; it is a line of text that loads nothing.

Your searches on Google are covered by the Google Privacy Policy.

Cookies and browser storage

The site's own code sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser: no local storage, session storage or other browser databases. Fonts, icons and charts are served from tidesnearby.com itself, not loaded from font or script services, apart from the analytics script above.

The site is served by Cloudflare, which handles every request to it. To deliver the pages, Cloudflare processes information such as your IP address, as its privacy policy describes. Cloudflare can also set its own cookies when some of its security features are switched on; it lists them in itscookie documentation. On this site, Bot Fight Mode and rate limiting rules are off, so Cloudflare does not set the cookies those features use (__cf_bm and _cfuvid). If Cloudflare ever shows you a security check before a page, passing it sets a cookie (cf_clearance) that records that you passed.

This site does not track visitors across other websites and does not change its behavior in response to Do Not Track signals.

Accounts, forms and email

There are no accounts, sign-ups, comment boxes or forms on the site. The only way to send us anything is by email, from the contact page. If you write, we receive your email address and your message. We use emails only to answer you and to fix the errors you report. We do not share them with anyone.