Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Maine.com collects when you visit the site, why, and what you can do about it. The short version: we run a cookieless analytics setup on our own servers, we do not sell or share your data with advertisers, and the only personal detail we ever ask for is an email address — and only if you want the newsletter.

We do not use cookies

Maine.com sets no cookies of its own, for analytics or for anything else. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. The one exception is described under Google Maps below: pages with an interactive map load Google’s mapping code, and Google may set its own cookies or browser storage when it does.

Analytics

We measure traffic with Plausible Community Edition, which we host ourselves at analytics.maine.com. Nothing is sent to a third-party analytics company. Plausible is cookieless and does not build a profile of you: it records aggregate counts of page views, referring sites, rough country-level location, and general device and browser type. It does not store your IP address, does not follow you between sites, and does not produce data that identifies you individually.

The newsletter

If you subscribe, we store the email address you enter and a note of which form you used. That is the whole record — we do not ask for your name, and we do not enrich it with data from anywhere else. It is stored in our own database, hosted on Google Cloud in the United States, and used only to send you Maine travel news, events and updates. We do not sell, rent or trade subscriber addresses.

You can unsubscribe from any email we send, or write to us and we will remove you. Once you unsubscribe, we delete the address rather than keeping it on a suppression list.

Search

When you use the site search, the text you type is sent to our server so we can look it up in our own catalogue of destinations, hotels, restaurants and guides. Searches are handled on our infrastructure and are not attached to your identity or passed to any third-party search provider.

Server logs

Like any website, our hosting keeps standard access logs of requests — IP address, timestamp, page requested, user agent. These come from Google Cloud, our hosting provider, and exist so we can debug faults, spot abuse and keep the site up. They are not used for analytics or marketing, are not combined with newsletter subscriptions, and are kept only for a short operational period before being rotated out.

Google Maps

Destination, hotel and restaurant pages embed an interactive map served by Google Maps. When such a map loads, your browser contacts Google directly, and Google receives your IP address and may set cookies or other browser storage under its own policies. We do not control that and we receive nothing from it. See Google’s Privacy Policy for what Google does with it. Pages without a map make no request to Google at all.

Other third parties

Photography and page assets are served from our own storage, and our fonts are self-hosted — no font or image CDN sees your visit. Some listing data originates with providers including Google, but that is fetched by us ahead of time on our servers, not by your browser. Links out to hotels, restaurants, Unsplash photographer credits and data sources such as NOAA only contact those sites if you click them, at which point their own privacy policies apply.

What we never do

• We do not sell or share personal information for money or for advertising.
• We do not run advertising or tracking pixels.
• We do not use third-party analytics or cross-site trackers.
• We do not build advertising profiles or run automated decision-making about you.

Your rights

Because the only personal data we hold is a newsletter email address, your rights are simple to exercise: you can ask us what we hold, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to us and we will act on the request.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, our legal basis for sending the newsletter is your consent, which you may withdraw at any time; our basis for keeping server logs is our legitimate interest in operating a secure, working website. If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what personal information we collect and to request its deletion, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising those rights — note that we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are used in California law.

Children

Maine.com is intended for a general audience and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has subscribed to our newsletter, write to us and we will delete the address.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, and subscriber data is held in a managed database that is not exposed to the public internet. No system is perfectly secure, but the less data a site holds, the less there is to lose — which is a large part of why this one holds so little.

Changes to this policy

If our practices change — a new tool, a new provider — we will update this page and revise the “last updated” date at the top. Material changes to how we handle newsletter subscriptions will be announced in the newsletter itself.

Contact

For any privacy question or request, email info@atmaine.com. Our Terms of Use cover the rest of your relationship with the site.