This policy explains what happens to information about you when you visit glasgowtourism.org, a website published from the United Kingdom and operated as an independent travel guide to Glasgow. It applies to the whole site. We are the data controller for the purposes of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
The short version
You can read every article on this site without giving us anything. We use Google Analytics to see which guides get read, which is the only routine tracking on the site. If you send us a message through the contact form, we receive what you typed and your email address so we can reply. We do not sell data, we have no mailing list, and the site does not accept comments.
Information collected when you simply read the site
Our hosting provider, DreamHost, keeps standard server logs of requests made to the site. These record the IP address the request came from, the time, the page requested, the referring page and the browser’s user-agent string. They exist for security and diagnostics — identifying attacks, tracing errors — and we do not use them to build a picture of individual visitors. DreamHost retains and rotates these logs under its own operational policy.
The site uses WP Super Cache to serve pages quickly. Caching stores a copy of the finished page on the server; it does not store anything about you.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 (measurement ID G-ZSXML9CGHY) to understand which guides people read, how they arrived, and roughly which country or region they are in. Google sets cookies in your browser for this — typically _ga and a property-specific _ga_* cookie — which distinguish one browser from another so that a returning reader isn’t counted twice.
The reports we see are aggregated: page views, traffic sources, device categories, country-level location. We cannot identify you from them and we do not try to. Google Analytics 4 does not store full IP addresses, and location is derived and then discarded at the granular level. Google processes this data as our processor and its own privacy notice applies: policies.google.com/privacy.
If you would rather not be counted, Google publishes a browser add-on that switches Analytics off across every site that uses it: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Blocking cookies in your browser has the same effect here and will not stop you reading anything.
Google Search Console
The site is verified in Google Search Console, which shows us which search queries lead people here and how our pages rank. This data reaches us already aggregated and anonymised by Google. Nothing is added to your browser for it.
The contact form
Our contact page uses WPForms. When you submit it we receive the name, email address, subject and message you typed, and the submission is emailed to us. Sending is handled by WP Mail SMTP, which passes the message through an authenticated mail service so it does not get lost in spam filtering.
- What we do with it: read it and reply. Nothing more.
- What we don’t do with it: add you to a mailing list, share it with any venue or third party, or use it for marketing.
- How long we keep it: the email stays in our inbox while the exchange is live and for up to twelve months afterwards, then it is deleted. If your message resulted in a correction we may keep a note of the change itself, without your details attached.
- Spam protection: WPForms runs its own built-in anti-spam check on submissions. This looks at the submission itself and does not send your data to an external scoring service.
Comments
This site does not accept reader comments. Commenting is switched off across every article and there is no comment form to fill in, so no comment data — no names, email addresses, IP addresses or Gravatar lookups — is collected anywhere on the site.
Cookies in summary
- Analytics cookies — set by Google Analytics (
_ga,_ga_*), typically expiring after two years. These are set on every visit. - WordPress cookies — set only if someone logs in to administer the site. As a reader you will never receive one.
Every browser lets you block or delete cookies. Doing so will not break this site: nothing here requires an account.
Two others may appear. The GDPR Cookie Compliance plugin sets a cookie recording your response to the cookie notice, so it is not shown again on every page. And following an affiliate booking link causes the site you land on to set cookies of its own, but only once you click one. Stay22 itself sets no cookie; how it identifies your device instead is described below.
Our legal basis for using your information
- Server logs — legitimate interests, namely keeping the site available and secure.
- Analytics — legitimate interests in understanding which guides are useful, balanced against the limited and aggregated nature of the data. Where consent is required for the cookies themselves, you can refuse them in your browser or through the Google opt-out above.
- Contact form — legitimate interests in answering a message you chose to send us.
- Advertising, once live — consent, obtained through a consent management platform before any advertising cookie is set for UK, EEA and Swiss visitors.
Information leaving the UK
Google is a United States company and analytics data is processed on its global infrastructure. Google relies on the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and on standard contractual clauses for these transfers. Our hosting is provided by DreamHost, also a United States company, under equivalent safeguards.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us for a copy of any personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it or delete it, object to our processing it on the basis of legitimate interests, or ask us to restrict what we do with it. In practice the only personal data we are likely to hold is an email exchange you started, and we will delete it on request.
Ask through the contact form and we will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with how we have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.
Children
This site is written for adults planning a trip, including adults travelling with children. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
Affiliate links and booking partners
Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. Where a guide points at somewhere to stay, that link is usually one of them. Accommodation links are handled by Stay22, a booking-link service that adds a referral tag when you click through to a hotel or booking site. If you go on to book, the booking site pays us a small commission. The price you pay is the same either way, and nothing on this site is behind a paywall or conditional on using those links.
What that means for your data: when you click one of these links, the partner receives the fact that the click came from this site, along with the standard technical details any website receives, and sets its own cookie or identifier so that a booking made afterwards can be attributed and the commission paid. Glasgow Tourism Guide never sees your booking, your travel dates, your name or your payment details — what comes back to us is a count of clicks and, occasionally, the fact that a booking happened.
Once you follow one of those links you are on the booking partner’s own site, under their privacy policy, and this one stops applying. If you would rather not be tracked that way, blocking third-party cookies in your browser stops the attribution; the links still work and the price is unchanged.
Our booking partner, Stay22, runs a script on this site that rewrites booking links and identifies your device so a booking can be credited to us. It does this using characteristics of your browser and device rather than a cookie, and it stores an identifier in your browser’s local storage. You can refuse this in the cookie settings, and refusing does not limit what you can read here.
Links to other sites
Our guides link out to venues, transport operators and organisers — Glasgow Life, SPT, ScotRail, individual restaurants and distilleries. Once you follow one of those links you are on someone else’s site and their privacy policy governs what happens next. We have no control over and take no responsibility for what those sites do with your information.
Changes to this policy
We update this page whenever what we actually do changes — most immediately, when advertising begins. The date below always reflects the current version.
Last updated 9 September 2026.