What we keep, and for how long

No accounts

There is no sign-up, no email address and no password. Your book is opened by a random private link. We store only a scrambled form (a hash) of that link, so the link itself is not in our database; this browser keeps it in one cookie that only this site can read.

What a book holds

Exactly what a grown-up types: park names, dates, weather, activities, time outside, best moments, the family name for the cover, explorer names or nicknames, the yearly goal and the time zone. No photos, no locations, no ages, no contact details. The site is meant for grown-ups and does not ask children for anything.

How long

• A book stays until you delete it (Book settings, Delete the book). A book nobody has opened for 400 days, without a running Pass, is deleted automatically.
• Backups: the site makes a nightly copy of its database and keeps each one 14 days. The server it runs on also takes its own account backups, which rotate out after about a month, and WeldonPC.com keeps off-site archive copies of its servers for disaster recovery, which are not deleted on a fixed schedule. A deleted book can therefore stay in backup copies after you delete it. Backups are used only to restore the site after a failure, never to look at, use or share what is in a book.
• To limit abuse we count saves per connection per day using a salted, scrambled form of the internet address; those counts are deleted after 2 days.
• The web server keeps standard access logs (address, time, page) for its normal security and troubleshooting purposes. The book's private link never appears in them.

What we do not do

No tracking cookies, no analytics services, no fonts from other sites, no selling or sharing of anything you type. The only outside service any page loads is the AdEngine banner on the home, pricing and about pages, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total. The spotting cards (including ones you write) are not saved at all.

Advertising

The home, pricing and about pages show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC's own services. Your book, your stamps, the stamp form, the spotting cards, this page and the terms never show an ad.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your internet address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests. Nothing from your book is sent with them.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your internet address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC's own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (internet address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser's site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.

Payments

When payments open, PayPal handles them; we receive only what PayPal sends to confirm a Pass (a subscription reference and its status), never card details.

Questions

parkweldon.org is run by WeldonPC.com. Questions go to WeldonPC.com: weldonpc.com/contact.