Privacy

Privacy

In short: no ads, no advertising networks, nothing sold. Visits are counted twice: anonymously on this site's own server in the EU, and by Google Analytics, which sets its own cookie and reports page views to Google.

Who is responsible

Castlemap 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. Google Analytics, in point 3, does set one — this bullet is about the tier described here.
• 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. Your browser sends it to Google as well, which point 3 covers.
• 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, and from Google Analytics in point 3. It runs inside other people's pages, so it counts nothing and stores nothing.

3. Google Analytics — everyone

The pages also load Google Analytics 4, which counts the same visits a second time and reports them to Google. It records the page's address and title, the site you arrived from and any campaign tags on the link you followed, an approximate location worked out from your IP address, your browser, operating system, device and screen size, your language, and how long you stayed. Google's “enhanced measurement” adds the few things it can see for itself: how far the page was scrolled, clicks that lead off the site, and downloads of the data files. Three more it offers never fire here: its site-search event reads a search term out of the address bar and the map's own search box never puts one there, there is no form anywhere on this site, and there is no video. It never reads what you type — not in that search box, not anywhere.

• It sets a cookie. Google Analytics stores its _ga cookies on your device — a random client number, kept up to two years, which is how it tells a returning visitor from a new one. Delete them in your browser whenever you like, or block googletagmanager.com, and the site works exactly the same.
• Switched off in it: Google signals and ad personalisation, so nothing here is joined to your Google account or used to target advertising, and all three advertising consents ship denied. Nothing is sold to anyone.
• Why: the same reason as point 2 — knowing which pages are worth keeping — counted a second time in the tool most of the web is measured with, so the figures can be compared with anyone else's. Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR.
• Who receives it: Google. Your browser contacts Google directly, so it sees your IP address; Google states that it uses that address for the same coarse location and does not log or store it. Google's privacy policy. Google is based in the United States.
• Kept: Google's own defaults, unchanged: it deletes the individual event records after 2 months, and anything tied to that cookie 14 months after your last visit. The aggregate reports it has already built from them — how many people read a page, from which country — are not on a clock and stay.
• Not loaded on the embeddable map, and not on the not-found pages.

4. What this site keeps on your device

• your light or dark theme choice;
• your rounds, average and best score in CastleGuessr;
• the date and time you last closed the note asking for a donation, so it does not come back for four hours.

None of these are sent anywhere, and none of them identifies you — they exist so the site behaves the way you left it. The first two are exempt from the consent requirement because they do only what you asked for. The third is written when you close the note (Donate, Not now or its close button), without a separate question, because a note that could not remember being closed would come back on every page; it holds that date and time and nothing else, and deleting it only means the note appears again. Where a browser will not store it, the note is not shown at all.

Google Analytics keeps a cookie on your device as well. That one is not this site's, it is read by Google, and it is described in point 3.

5. 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.
• Google (googletagmanager.com, google-analytics.com) — the analytics in point 3. Their privacy policy. Google 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 and no third-party CDN. The donation links open PayPal's own page, and PayPal hears nothing from this site unless you follow one.

6. 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. I transfer nothing outside the EEA myself; the organisations in point 5 are contacted by your browser directly, and both Wikimedia and Google are outside the EEA.

7. 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.

Google Analytics in point 3 is the same case with one difference: the only identifier is the client number in the cookie on your own device, and nothing here can tell me which of them is yours. Deleting that cookie, or blocking googletagmanager.com, ends it immediately and costs you nothing on this site.

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.

8. Changes

This notice was first published on 25 July 2026, and last changed on 11 September 2026, when the donation note and what it stores were added to point 4. Before that it changed on 8 September 2026, when Google Analytics was added to the site and point 3 was written for it, 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.