Privacy

Privacy

In short: no ads, no advertising networks, nothing sold, and no Google Analytics. Visits are counted once, anonymously, on this site's own server in the EU, and nothing about that counting is stored on your device.

Who is responsible

Castle Map is a personal, non-commercial project published as “Flightmussy”, and the controller of the data described below. Contact: ceoflightmussy@gmail.com.

I publish under a pseudonym as a private individual. My full legal name and address are available on request to that address, and to any supervisory authority on demand.

1. Server logs: everyone

Every request a browser makes is written to the web server's log: the IP address, the date and time, the address requested, the referring page, the browser's user-agent string, and the response's status and size.

• Why: to run the server, find faults, and defend against scrapers, floods and brute-force attempts.
• Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (a website that stays up and is not trivially abused).
• Kept: 14 days, then deleted automatically. Nothing is archived beyond that.

2. Anonymous visit counting: everyone

A small script served from this domain counts what is read. It records the page's address and title, the site you arrived from, any campaign tags on the link you followed (the standard utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign parameters: nothing else from the address is read), whether your browser said you typed this address or followed a link from another site, an approximate location worked out from your IP address (country, region, city) and the name of your network operator, your browser, operating system and device type, your screen and window size and pixel density, your browser's main language and time zone, how long the page stayed in the foreground, and how far down it was scrolled.

It also records a few things whose only job is to tell a person from a program: how many times you interacted with the page and how soon the first of those came, whether your device has a touchscreen and what kind of pointer it reports, how many measurements were sent, and a handful of technical markers that headless browsers give themselves away with (an automation flag some of them set, an empty language list, a desktop browser reporting no plug-ins).

Those exist because a crawler that runs JavaScript otherwise looks exactly like a reader, and one week's figures contained several thousand such visits. None of it is content: not which key, not which element, not where on the page, only that an interaction happened, and how many times. The script never reads what you type; it does not read the contents of any field at all.

What makes it anonymous is what it does not do:

• This counting stores nothing on your device. No cookie, no browser storage, nothing to clear.
• Your IP address is not stored. It is used on this same server to look up an approximate location (from a local database, so the address is not sent anywhere), and then discarded.
• To join the pages of one visit together, the server derives a key from your IP address, your browser and this site, mixed with a random value that is regenerated every day and never written to disk. So the key cannot be recreated tomorrow, and the same person visiting two of my atlases produces two unrelated keys. From the stored data there is no way to tell that two visits were the same person.
• Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f): knowing which pages are worth keeping, at a resolution that cannot identify anyone. Because this tier writes nothing to and reads nothing from your device, it needs no consent under Art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive.
• Kept: 400 days.

The embeddable map at /embed/ is excluded from all of this. It runs inside other people's pages, so it counts nothing and stores nothing.

From 8 September to 7 October 2026 the pages also loaded Google Analytics, which counted the same visits a second time for Google and set its _ga cookies on your device. It is gone: no page loads anything from Google any more. The cookies it set are not this site's and nothing here reads them; if your browser still holds them, deleting this site's cookies removes them, and Google deletes what it collected on its own schedule (the individual records after two months, anything tied to that cookie fourteen months after the last visit).

3. What this site keeps on your device

• your light or dark theme choice;
• your rounds, average and best score in CastleGuessr.

Neither is sent anywhere, and neither identifies you: they exist so the site behaves the way you left it. Both are exempt from the consent requirement because they do only what you asked for. The site itself sets no cookie; the one Cloudflare may set after a security check is described in point 5.

Until 26 September 2026 a note in the corner of the pages also kept the date and time you last closed it (castlemap.donate). The note is gone, and nothing on this site writes or reads that value any more; if your browser still holds it, clearing this site's data removes it.

4. Other organisations your browser contacts

Some things on a page are fetched by your browser directly from someone else's servers, which means those servers see your IP address and what was requested. I have no control over what they then do with it, so their own policies apply:

• OpenFreeMap: the basemap tiles. openfreemap.org
• Wikimedia Foundation (commons.wikimedia.org, upload.wikimedia.org): the castle photographs. Their privacy policy. Wikimedia is based in the United States.

That is the whole list. Fonts, scripts, stylesheets and images other than the above are served from this domain. There are no advertising networks, no social media widgets, no Google Fonts, no Google Analytics, and no script, font or stylesheet from another domain.

Buy Me a Coffee is not on that list, because nothing on these pages loads from Buy Me a Coffee: the coffee button at the top of the pages and the link at the foot of each page are ordinary links. If you follow one, you are on Buy Me a Coffee's own site and under its privacy policy, and if you give, Buy Me a Coffee and Stripe, which handles its payments, show me what they show anyone who receives a payment, which is normally the name and the message you enter, your email address and the amount.

5. Where it is

The server is a virtual machine rented from Contabo GmbH (Munich, Germany) and located in the European Union. Contabo processes the data on my instructions and can reach the machine as any hosting provider can.

Every request reaches that server through Cloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc., United States), which carries the site's traffic, keeps copies of its unchanging files close to readers, and turns away floods and scrapers before they arrive. It sees what the server log in point 1 records, at the moment of the request, and processes it on my instructions. A browser it finds suspicious may be shown a short check first, and one that passes receives a cookie, cf_clearance, so that it is not checked again for a while; that cookie is set only for security, and only after such a check. Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Cloudflare's network runs worldwide, so a request can be handled outside the EEA; Cloudflare is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and its data processing terms add the EU standard contractual clauses. Apart from that, nothing leaves the EEA from this site: the organisations in point 4 are contacted by your browser directly, and Wikimedia is outside the EEA.

6. Your rights

You can ask me to confirm what I hold about you and give you a copy (Art. 15), correct it (16), erase it (17), restrict how it is used (18), hand it over in a portable form (20), and object to anything I do on the basis of legitimate interests (21).

One honest limit: for the anonymous counting in point 2 and for the server logs, I cannot tell which records are yours, because there is no identifier to search on. Art. 11 GDPR covers exactly this case, where a controller genuinely cannot identify someone, the rights of access, rectification and erasure do not apply, because they cannot be carried out.

Write to ceoflightmussy@gmail.com. I answer within 30 days.

You can also complain to a supervisory authority. Mine is the Norwegian Data Protection Authority: Datatilsynet, Postboks 458 Sentrum, 0105 Oslo. You may instead complain to the authority where you live or work.

7. Changes

This notice was first published on 25 July 2026, and last changed on 21 October 2026, when point 5 began naming Cloudflare, which carries this site's traffic, and point 3 the security cookie it may set. Before that it changed on 12 October 2026, when the coffee button moved from the map to the top of the pages (point 4); on 7 October 2026, when Google Analytics was taken off the site: its point was removed, every section after it moved up one number, and the site sets no cookie again; on 2 October 2026, when the donation links moved from PayPal to Buy Me a Coffee (point 4); on 26 September 2026, when the note in the corner of the pages was taken off the site (point 3 says what became of the value it kept); on 20 September 2026, when that note's wording changed and what it stored did not; on 11 September 2026, when that note and what it stores were added; and on 8 September 2026, when Google Analytics was added to the site, and the optional click-and-mouse measurement that used to follow it was switched off and taken out. If what is collected ever changes, this page changes with it, and the date above moves.