Privacy Policy

Last updated: 31 August 2026.

This policy explains what Beijing Tourism Guide (www.beijingtourism.org) collects when you read it, who else can see that information, and what you can do about it. It describes the site as it works today. Where something is planned but not yet running, it says so rather than describing it as though it were live.

The short version

You can read every guide on this site without giving us anything. There are no accounts, no logins, no newsletter, no comments and nothing to sign up for. The only way to hand us personal information deliberately is to fill in the contact form, and that is emailed to a person rather than stored in a database. Google Analytics measures traffic in the background. Advertising is not running on the site yet; the section on it below explains what will change when it starts.

Who is responsible for this site

Beijing Tourism Guide is an independently published website. For data protection purposes, the publisher of beijingtourism.org is the data controller for the personal information described here. The contact form is the route for any question or request about your data, including the rights set out further down this page.

Information you give us: the contact form

The contact form asks for your name, your email address, the topic of your message, optionally the URL of the page you are writing about, and your message. Your IP address and browser user-agent are captured alongside the submission as a standard anti-spam measure.

Submissions are sent by email to the site’s editor and are not written to the website’s database, published, or displayed anywhere on the site. We use what you send to answer you and, where you have reported a problem, to correct the guide in question. We do not add you to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list. We do not sell, rent or share contact form data with anyone, and it is not used for advertising or profiling.

Messages are kept in the editor’s email account for as long as they remain useful — a correction may be kept until the guide is next revised, so that we can check we actually fixed what you told us about. If you would like your message deleted sooner, ask and it will be deleted.

The legal basis for handling this information is legitimate interest: you have written to us and we need to be able to read and reply. Email delivery is handled by the site’s hosting provider, DreamHost, which processes messages in transit.

Information collected automatically

Server logs

Our hosting provider records standard web server logs for every request: IP address, timestamp, the page requested, HTTP status, referring page and user-agent string. These are generated by the hosting infrastructure, are used for security and diagnosing faults, and are retained according to DreamHost’s own retention schedule rather than ours.

Google Analytics

The site runs Google Analytics 4, connected through the Site Kit by Google plugin. It tells us which guides are read, roughly where in the world readers are, what kind of device they use, and how they arrived. This is what tells us that, for example, the visa guides need checking more often than the temple guides.

Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and processes data on Google’s infrastructure, which includes servers outside your country. We do not have access to anything in Analytics that identifies you personally. You can prevent Analytics entirely with Google’s official browser opt-out add-on, or by blocking the scripts in your browser or an extension. How Google handles this data is described in Google’s privacy policy and in how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Google Search Console

Search Console is connected to the site and shows us aggregated search queries and click data. It does not set cookies on your browser and does not identify individual readers.

Caching

The site uses WP Super Cache to serve pages faster. It may set a technical cookie to identify requests that must bypass the cache. It does not track you and is not used for analytics or advertising.

Advertising

Advertising is not currently displayed on this site. No advertising scripts run on these pages today and no advertising cookies are set by us.

We intend to fund the site with advertising served by Google AdSense. When that starts, this section will be updated with the date it went live, and the following will apply. Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and other sites on the internet. You can opt out of personalised advertising at any time by visiting Google’s Ads Settings, and you can opt out of third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info/choices or youronlinechoices.com. Third-party vendors other than Google may also serve ads on this site and set their own cookies, subject to the same opt-out routes. Full details are in Google’s advertising privacy notice.

Where advertising requires consent — in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland — that consent will be collected through a Google-certified consent management platform before any advertising or measurement cookies requiring consent are set. That consent mechanism is not live yet, because advertising is not live yet. This paragraph will be rewritten to describe the mechanism actually in use on the day it goes in.

Cookies, in summary

• Analytics cookies — set by Google Analytics 4 to measure readership. Currently in use.
• Technical cookies — may be set by the caching layer to decide whether to serve you a cached page. Currently in use.
• Advertising cookies — not currently set. See the advertising section above for what will apply when they are.
• Login and session cookies — only ever set for the site’s own administrators. Readers do not receive them, because there is nothing here to log into.

Every browser lets you block or delete cookies, and blocking them will not stop you reading anything on this site.

What we do not do

We do not sell personal information. We do not run a newsletter or any other mailing list. Comments are closed across the site, so there is no comment data. There are no reader accounts and no e-commerce, so we never see or handle payment details. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13, and the site is not directed at children; if you believe a child has sent us something through the contact form, tell us and we will delete it.

Links to other sites

The guides link out to official sources — the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs consular service, the China Online Visa Application portal, China Railway’s booking platform and similar. Those sites have their own privacy policies and we have no control over and no responsibility for what they collect once you leave this site.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to how it is used, to restrict its use, or to receive a copy of it. Readers in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom have these rights under the GDPR and UK GDPR; residents of California and several other US states have comparable rights, including the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them.

In practice, the only personal information we hold about a reader is a contact form message they chose to send us, so most requests amount to “delete my message”, which we will do on request. Use the contact form to ask. If you are in the EEA or UK and you are not satisfied with how we handle a request, you can complain to your national data protection authority.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes materially — and the switch-on of advertising will be a material change — the date at the top will be updated and the section concerned rewritten to describe what is actually running. We will not backdate or quietly amend it.