Privacy policy

1. What we collect

travelcityindex.com is a reference website. There is no account to create, nothing to buy and no newsletter. We collect nothing you type, because there is nothing to type — the only way to contact us is by email, and then we hold only what you send.

What is collected automatically is website analytics, described in section 2, and the standard server logs kept by our host.

2. Website analytics & cookies

We use Google Analytics 4, a service of Google LLC, to understand which pages are read and how people arrive at them. It records the pages you visit, the site or search that referred you, an approximate location derived from a truncated IP address, your browser and device type, and clicks on links within the site.

To do this it sets first-party cookies on travelcityindex.com — _ga and _ga_* — which last up to two years. They hold a random identifier used to tell one browser from another across visits. That identifier is not linked to your name, your email or anything else that identifies you, and we never attempt to identify an individual visitor.

Google processes this data on our behalf as a data processor. Their handling of it is described in the Google Privacy Policy and in How Google uses information from sites that use its services. The property is configured with a 14-month retention period, after which event-level data is deleted. We do not use this data for advertising, we do not run ads on this site, and we do not sell or share it.

Hosting is provided by Firebase Hosting (Google), which keeps standard server logs (IP address, request time, URL, user agent) for security and operational purposes.

How to opt out

• Block or clear cookies for this site in your browser's settings.
• Install Google's Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, which disables it on every site.
• Use a tracker-blocking extension, or a browser that blocks analytics by default.

None of these affects how the site works. Nothing on travelcityindex.com is behind a cookie.

3. How we use it

• To see which cities and pages are worth expanding or correcting.
• To find pages that are slow or broken.
• To answer your email, if you send one.
• To meet legal obligations where they apply.

4. Third parties

Only one: Google, for both analytics and hosting (Firebase Hosting is a Google product), described above. The public datasets this site is built from are fetched by our own pipeline, not by your browser, so reading a page sends nothing to GeoNames, Open-Meteo, the World Bank, the US State Department or the UK FCDO. Outbound links to those sites are plain links; follow one and their own policies apply.

5. Your rights

You may ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted, by writing to contact@travelcityindex.com. In practice the only data tied to you personally is an email you chose to send. If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, the GDPR gives you these rights and the right to complain to your data protection authority.

6. Security and children

The site is served over HTTPS and holds no account data to lose. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.

7. Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Questions go to contact@travelcityindex.com, and the terms of service cover use of the content itself.