Privacy Policy

The privacy of our visitors to ReidsGuides.com is important to us.

At ReidsGuides.com, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use visit ReidsGuides.com, and how we safeguard your information.

Personal information

First of all, we don't collect any personal information on you at all—we don't even know who you are, unless you send us an e-mail—and would never sell your personal information to third parties even if we did.

Frankly, we wouldn't even know how to do that. We're just an informational site, run by an independent travel journalist, and only know enough HTML and CSS programming to make the site look more or less how we pictured it.

Also, we hate junk mail and spam just as much as you do, and would never do anything to subject our loyal readers to any more of it than they already receive.

Servers, trackers, cookies, and ads

Our server, like all servers, keeps track of such things as the search terms you might have used that led you to the site, your browser or platform (mac, PC, iPad, etc.), and the site from which you came (if you surfed here from Google, Yahoo, MSNBC.com, or whatever), but it has no idea who you are.

We do love to peek at that information, and use Google's Analytics program to keep track of it, but this is only for general statistical purposes (how many visitors the site receives, what countries they come from, that sort of thing) so we can better shape the site to match the needs of our readers. (Also, it's just darn exciting to see that you have a visitor from a place like Vanautu.)

ReidsGuides.com does, like most sites, use third party advertisements (Google ads and the like) to support the site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether or not you have Flash installed.

This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

Truth be told, that's all we know about it. We don't even quite understand how it all works ourselves; all we know is that Google now requires us to post this privacy policy and disclaimer. Google also requests that we post the following:

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to your website.
Google's use of the DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and/or other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the advertising opt-out page. (Alternatively, you can direct users to opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.)

Frankly, we have no idea what a DART cookie is (one that can also be used as a projectile weapon? Something you eat on the Dallas public transport system?), but we dutifully cut-and-pasted those three bullet points above so you can opt out (perhaps because DART cookies are even more fattening than regular ones).

We do know that you can also choose to disable or selectively turn off third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

(We would also like to take this opportunity to point out that there's no need to turn off javascript for this site. We know some people do that to keep popup ads from, well, popping up, but we can assure you that there are no popup ads on this site—we find those astoundingly annoying—just the regular kind of ads in the margins. The only thing this site uses javascript for at all is for certain functionality issues, like controlling drop-down menus, photo galleries, and Twitter feeds—so if you turn it off, the site won't work properly.)

We cannot be held responsible...

As for the information contained on this site, it is all merely personal opinion and is intended for informational purposes only.

All assertions of fact were as accurate as we could make them at the time of publication, and we cannot be held responsible for any changes that have happened in the meantime. (Travel information has an infuriating tendency to mutate when you're not looking: restaurants close, new museums open, tourist offices move, ferry schedules change, and hotels rates always, always go up.)

This site also links to many, many other sites we think might be useful to travelers and readers, but we cannot be held responsible for the quality of information or other content on those sites.

And that's all I have to say about that.