Privacy

In short: no advertising networks, no accounts, nothing sold or shared. Visits are counted once, anonymously, on this site's own server in the EU, and nothing about that counting is stored on your device.

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. The script never reads what you type: it does not read the contents of any field at all, the beach search box included.

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.

Until the atlas went offline on 7 September 2026, this point was followed by an optional measurement of clicks and mouse movement that you could switch on here. It did not come back with the atlas on 21 October 2026. Nothing on the site offers it any more, a yes given to it back then no longer counts, and the counting script deletes the random identifier it kept on your device the next time you open a page here. Nothing it recorded is held any more.

3. What this site keeps on your device

Your light or dark theme choice, and nothing else. It is not sent anywhere: it exists so the site behaves the way you left it, and it is exempt from the consent requirement because it does 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. The site itself sets no cookie; the one Cloudflare may set after a security check is described in point 5.

If you answered the old question about the optional measurement before September 2026, that answer may still be in your browser, under atlas_consent. Nothing here acts on it any more, and clearing this site's data removes it.

4. 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 map 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, the country flags 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 script, font or stylesheet from another domain.

Two links on every page lead to another organisation, and only when you follow them: Buy me a coffee (buymeacoffee.com), where a gift for the maker can be left, and Flightmussy Studio (studioflightmussy.com), the maker's studio, which the partnership strip at the top of the pages links to. Nothing from either is loaded on this site, so neither learns anything about you unless you follow the link.

5. 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.

Every request reaches that server through Cloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc., United States), which carries the site's traffic, keeps copies of its unchanging files close to readers, and turns away floods and scrapers before they arrive. It sees what the server log in point 1 records, at the moment of the request, and processes it on my instructions. A browser it finds suspicious may be shown a short check first, and one that passes receives a cookie, cf_clearance, so that it is not checked again for a while; that cookie is set only for security, and only after such a check. Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Cloudflare's network runs worldwide, so a request can be handled outside the EEA; Cloudflare is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and its data processing terms add the EU standard contractual clauses. Apart from that, nothing leaves the EEA from this site: the organisations in point 4 are contacted by your browser directly, and two of the three are outside the EEA.

6. 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).

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.

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.

7. Changes

This notice was first published on 25 July 2026 and last changed on 21 October 2026, when the atlas came back after six weeks offline. That day the optional measurement of clicks and mouse movement, which used to be point 3, was taken out (point 2 says what became of it) and every section after it moved up one number; point 5 began naming Cloudflare, which has carried this site's traffic since 5 September 2026 and should have been named from that day; point 4 gained the two links every page now carries (Buy me a coffee, and the studio behind the partnership strip at the top of the pages); and the first line lost the words "no ads": the strip invites partners, though no advertising network is on the site. On 1 September 2026 point 2 described the anonymous visit counting again, which the shorter notice published with the 30 August rebuild had left out, the list of other organisations was corrected, because the photographs are loaded from Wikimedia's own servers rather than copied onto this one, and the contact address above became 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.