Privacy Policy

Last updated: 6 September 2026

This policy describes what happens to information about you when you use Edinburgh Tourism Guide at www.edinburghtourism.org. Edinburgh Tourism Guide is the data controller for the processing set out below, and you can reach us through the contact page.

What happens when you open a page here

Reading this site requires nothing from you. There is no account to create, no newsletter, no paywall, and comments are switched off across the whole site, so we hold no commenter names, addresses or IP records.

Loading a page does, however, generate technical information automatically. Our web host records standard server log data — the IP address the request came from, the page requested, the date and time, the referring page and the browser user-agent string. This is what a web server has to record in order to serve a page and to spot abuse, and it is kept for a limited period as part of routine hosting operations.

Separately, our analytics and advertising providers run code in your browser, which is where most of the privacy questions on a site like this one actually live. Those are set out next.

Measurement: Google Analytics 4

The site uses Google Analytics 4 to understand which guides get read and how people move between them. It sets cookies in your browser and sends Google information including a randomly generated identifier, the pages you view, approximate location derived from a truncated IP address, device and browser type, and referral source. We use it in aggregate — to see that the Castle guide is read far more than the Leith guide, for instance — and we do not use it to identify individual readers.

Google processes that data as described in its own privacy policy at policies.google.com/privacy. You can prevent Analytics entirely by installing Google’s browser opt-out add-on, available at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout, or by blocking cookies in your browser settings.

Advertising

Display advertising on this site is managed by Mediavine, an advertising management company, and it is how the guides are paid for. Mediavine sells and serves the ad slots on our behalf, and it — not us — decides which of its partners fill them. This section describes how that works, and what it means for the information collected about you while you read.

Mediavine and the advertising partners it works with — ad exchanges, supply-side and demand-side platforms, identity and audience-matching providers, and measurement vendors, including Google in its capacity as an advertising exchange — use cookies, device identifiers and similar technologies in your browser. What they collect through the ad slots typically includes your IP address, a randomly generated advertising identifier, device and browser characteristics, the pages you viewed here and on other sites, approximate location, and whether you saw or clicked an ad. It is used to choose which ads to show, to limit how often you see the same one, and to measure whether a campaign worked. Under some privacy laws, passing data to advertising partners in this way counts as “selling” or “sharing” personal information even where no money changes hands for the data itself.

Mediavine sets out its own processing, its list of partners and the choices it offers in its privacy notice at mediavine.com/legal-and-privacy-center. We do not receive the advertising data ourselves; what reaches us is aggregate revenue and performance reporting.

You can control this. If you are in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, the consent banner described further down is the main control, and you can reopen it at any time to change your answers. Beyond that: personalised advertising from Google can be turned off in your Google account’s Ads Settings; to opt out across many vendors at once, use optout.aboutads.info, thenai.org/how-to-opt-out or, in Europe, youronlinechoices.eu; and Google’s explanation of how it uses data from partner sites is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Readers in California and other US states with comparable laws can exercise their opt-out rights through the consent banner described below and through the request routes set out in Mediavine’s privacy notice.

The contact form

If you send us a message, we receive the name, email address, subject and message text you typed, together with the technical details the form submission carries. We use it to reply to you and for nothing else. It is not added to any mailing list, not sold, and not passed to third parties. Correspondence is deleted once there is no longer a reason to keep it.

Who else receives information

Four categories of recipient, and no others: our web host, which operates the servers the site runs on and therefore necessarily processes requests and log data; Google as our analytics provider and Mediavine as our advertising provider, together with the advertising partners Mediavine works with, all as described above; Consentmanager, which runs the consent banner and records what you chose; and the email provider that carries messages sent through the contact form. We do not sell personal information for money, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing purposes beyond the advertising processing set out in that section.

Cookies, and turning them off

The cookies set on this site come from the analytics and advertising services described above, plus any set by the caching layer that speeds up page delivery. Every current browser lets you block cookies, delete existing ones, or refuse third-party cookies specifically, usually under privacy or site-settings. Doing so will not stop you reading anything here.

Consent for those cookies is managed by Consentmanager, a Google-certified consent management platform operated by consentmanager.net, which we use rather than one run by Mediavine itself. It asks visitors in the UK, the EEA and Switzerland for their choices before advertising and analytics cookies are set, and it signals those answers on to Mediavine and its partners through the standard industry consent frameworks — the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework, and the Global Privacy Platform. The banner does not appear for every visitor, because which rules apply depends on where you are; clearing this site’s cookies brings it back so you can answer again. The browser and vendor opt-out routes linked above remain available alongside it.

Legal bases, for readers in the UK and EEA

We rely on legitimate interests for the server logging and security processing that is inherent in operating a website, and for replying to a message you chose to send us. Analytics and advertising cookies are processed on the basis of consent, gathered through the consent platform described below; for readers outside those territories, the vendor and browser controls described above are how you exercise choice. You may object to processing carried out on legitimate-interest grounds at any time.

Your rights

If you are in the UK or the EEA you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how it is processed, and to receive it in a portable format. Because we deliberately hold almost nothing — no accounts, no comments, no mailing list — in practice a request will usually concern contact-form correspondence. Write to us through the contact page and we will respond within one month.

You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk; in the EEA it is the data protection authority for the country you live in.

Children

This is a travel planning site written for adults. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us information through the contact form, tell us and we will delete it.

Links to other websites

The guides link out to attraction operators, transport providers, festival organisers and official tourism bodies so you can check current details at source. Once you follow one of those links you are on someone else’s site, governed by their privacy policy, and this one no longer applies.

Changes

When this policy changes we will revise it here and move the date at the top. Material changes — a new category of recipient, a new purpose — will be described rather than slipped in. The date above tells you which version you are reading.