Privacy

In short: no ads, no advertising networks, no accounts, nothing sold or shared. Visits are counted anonymously on this site's own server in the EU. One optional extra is off unless you turn it on.

Who is responsible

World Beach Map is a personal, non-commercial project published as "Flightmussy", and the controller of the data described below. Contact: ceoflightmussy@gmail.com.

I publish under a pseudonym as a private individual. My full legal name and address are available on request to that address, and to any supervisory authority on demand.

1. Server logs — everyone

Every request a browser makes is written to the web server's log: the IP address, the date and time, the address requested, the referring page, the browser's user-agent string, and the response's status and size.

• Why: to run the server, find faults, and defend against scrapers, floods and brute-force attempts.
• Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR — a website that stays up and is not trivially abused.
• Kept: 14 days, then deleted automatically. Nothing is archived beyond that.

2. Anonymous visit counting — everyone

A small script served from this domain counts what is read. It records the page's address and title, the site you arrived from, any campaign tags on the link you followed (the standard utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign parameters — nothing else from the address is read), whether your browser said you typed this address or followed a link from another site, an approximate location worked out from your IP address (country, region, city) and the name of your network operator, your browser, operating system and device type, your screen and window size and pixel density, your browser's main language and time zone, how long the page stayed in the foreground, and how far down it was scrolled.

It also records a few things whose only job is to tell a person from a program: how many times you interacted with the page and how soon the first of those came, whether your device has a touchscreen and what kind of pointer it reports, how many measurements were sent, and a handful of technical markers that headless browsers give themselves away with — an automation flag some of them set, an empty language list, a desktop browser reporting no plug-ins.

Those exist because a crawler that runs JavaScript otherwise looks exactly like a reader, and this atlas has had days when several thousand "visits" were software. None of it is content: not which key, not which element, not where on the page — only that an interaction happened, and how many times.

What makes it anonymous is what it does not do:

• Nothing is stored on your device. No cookie, no browser storage, nothing to clear.
• Your IP address is not stored. It is used on this same server to look up an approximate location — from a local database, so the address is not sent anywhere — and then discarded.
• To join the pages of one visit together, the server derives a key from your IP address, your browser and this site, mixed with a random value that is regenerated every day and never written to disk. So the key cannot be recreated tomorrow, and the same person visiting two of my atlases produces two unrelated keys. From the stored data there is no way to tell that two visits were the same person.
• Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — knowing which pages are worth keeping, at a resolution that cannot identify anyone. Because nothing is written to or read from your device, this needs no consent under Art. 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive.
• Kept: 400 days.

3. Optional: clicks and mouse movement

Only if you allow it, the same script also records where you click, the path your mouse takes across the page, and repeated frustrated clicking in one spot. Together those draw a heatmap that shows which parts of the map people reach for and which controls they never find. This one does store a random identifier on your device, so that repeat visits can be recognised.

• Never recorded, in either mode: anything you type. The script does not read the contents of any field at all — the beach search box included.
• Legal basis: your consent — Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR and Art. 5(3) ePrivacy. You can take it back at any moment, and doing so does not make what happened beforehand unlawful.
• Kept: 45 days for the click and movement detail.
• If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, this stays off and you are never asked.

4. What this site keeps on your device

• your light or dark theme choice;
• your answer to the question in point 3.

Neither is sent anywhere — they exist so the site behaves the way you left it, and both are exempt from the consent requirement because they do only what you asked for. The map stores nothing of its own: no tile cache, no last position, no record of what you looked at.

5. Other organisations your browser contacts

Some things on a page are fetched by your browser directly from someone else's servers, which means those servers see your IP address and what was requested. I have no control over what they then do with it, so their own policies apply:

• OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org) — the map's tiles and the fonts its labels are drawn with. openfreemap.org
• Amazon Web Services (s3.amazonaws.com) — the Tilezen elevation tiles that give the globe its relief. Their privacy notice. AWS is based in the United States.
• Wikimedia Foundation (upload.wikimedia.org, commons.wikimedia.org) — every beach photograph, and the file page behind each photographer's credit. Their privacy policy. Wikimedia is based in the United States.

That is the whole list. Fonts, scripts, stylesheets and the data behind the map are served from this domain. There are no advertising networks, no social media widgets, no Google Analytics, no Google Fonts and no third-party CDN.

6. Where it is

The server is a virtual machine rented from Contabo GmbH (Munich, Germany) and located in the European Union. Contabo processes the data on my instructions and can reach the machine as any hosting provider can. I transfer nothing outside the EEA myself; the organisations in point 5 are contacted by your browser directly, and two of the three are outside the EEA.

7. Your rights

You can ask me to confirm what I hold about you and give you a copy (Art. 15), correct it (16), erase it (17), restrict how it is used (18), hand it over in a portable form (20), and object to anything I do on the basis of legitimate interests (21). Where something rests on consent, you can withdraw it — that is the button in point 3.

One honest limit: for the anonymous counting in point 2 and for the server logs, I cannot tell which records are yours, because there is no identifier to search on. Art. 11 GDPR covers exactly this case — where a controller genuinely cannot identify someone, the rights of access, rectification and erasure do not apply, because they cannot be carried out. If you have switched on the optional measurement in point 3, that data does carry an identifier, it is shown to you above, and I can act on it.

Write to ceoflightmussy@gmail.com. I answer within 30 days.

You can also complain to a supervisory authority. Mine is the Norwegian Data Protection Authority — Datatilsynet, Postboks 458 Sentrum, 0105 Oslo. You may instead complain to the authority where you live or work.

8. Changes

This notice was first published on 25 July 2026 and last changed on 1 September 2026. Three things changed that day: point 2 describes the anonymous visit counting again, which the shorter notice published with the 30 August rebuild had left out; point 5 is corrected, because the photographs are now loaded from Wikimedia's own servers rather than copied onto this one; and the contact address above is the one that actually reaches me. If what is collected ever changes, this page changes with it and the date here moves. Every change is noted in the changelog as well.