Privacy

Who is responsible

World Train 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. Visit counting (everyone)

One thing counts visits here: this site's own script, which is anonymous and stores nothing.

This site's own counter. 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 one week's figures contained several thousand such visits. 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.

Google Analytics is gone. From 8 September to 7 October 2026 the site also loaded Google Analytics 4, which set its own _ga cookies and reported each page view to Google. It has been removed: no page loads it any more, and nothing is sent to Google. If your browser still holds those cookies, nothing reads them now; the map deletes them the next time you open it, and you can delete them yourself whenever you like. What Google Analytics had already collected stays with Google for the time set on that property, two months for the event-level records and fourteen months for the user-level ones, unless the property is deleted sooner.

3. What this site keeps on your device

• your light or dark theme choice;
• whether Station names is on or off on the map, once you have pressed its switch;
• any routes you save as favourites.

None of it is sent anywhere; it exists so the site behaves the way you left it. All of it is exempt from the consent requirement because it does only what you asked for. The site itself sets no cookie; the one Cloudflare may set after a security check is described in point 5.

Until 19 October 2026 the map stored the Station names switch on every visit, pressed or not. It no longer reads that value; if your browser still holds it, clearing this site’s data removes it.

Until 26 September 2026 the site also kept the time you last closed the note in the corner of the page, so that the note stayed away for four hours. The note has been removed, and nothing reads or writes that time any more; if your browser still holds it, 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: the map tiles. openfreemap.org
• Amazon Web Services (s3.amazonaws.com): the elevation tiles the map shades its hills with, published as open data by the Tilezen project. Served from the United States.
• Buy Me a Coffee: only if you press the Buy me a coffee button or the link at the foot of each page. Both are plain links to the maker's page on Buy Me a Coffee, so nothing on these pages loads from Buy Me a Coffee and it learns nothing about your visit unless you follow one. If you give, Buy Me a Coffee and Stripe, which handles its payments, show me what they show anyone who receives a payment, which is normally the name and the message you enter, your email address and the amount. Their privacy policy.

That is the whole list, and it used to be longer: until 29 August 2026 the photographs were loaded straight from Wikimedia's servers, so your browser talked to them on every page. They are now copied onto this one and served from here, which means Wikimedia sees nothing unless you click a photo credit to open the file on Commons. Fonts, stylesheets, images and every script this site wrote itself are served from this domain, the typefaces deliberately so, because loading them from Google would hand Google your address before the first word rendered. Google Analytics was the one exception, from 8 September to 7 October 2026, and it has been removed. There are no advertising networks, no third-party analytics, no social media widgets, no Google Fonts, and no script, font or stylesheet from another domain.

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 the elevation tiles answer from the United States, as does Buy Me a Coffee if you follow its link.

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 this site's own 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. The Google Analytics records collected until 7 October 2026 carry an identifier, but it is Google's cookie rather than anything of mine, and I have no way to connect it to a name or an email address.

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 point 5 began naming Cloudflare, which carries this site's traffic, and point 3 the security cookie it may set. On 19 October 2026 point 3 came to say that the Station names switch is stored only once you press it. On 12 October 2026 the Buy me a coffee button moved from the foot of the map to the top of each page, which point 4 now says. On 7 October 2026 Google Analytics was removed from the site: point 2 now says that it is gone and what becomes of the cookies and the records it left, point 4 no longer lists Google, and points 5 and 6 lost their sentences about it. On 5 October 2026 point 4 came to name Buy Me a Coffee in PayPal's place: on 2 October the Donate button to PayPal at the end of the About page gave way to a Buy me a coffee button at the foot of the map, and on 5 October a Buy me a coffee link joined the foot of every page. Nothing else changed. On 27 September 2026 the Donate button moved from the map's panel to the end of the About page. On 26 September 2026, when the note in the corner of the page was removed: point 3 no longer lists the time it kept of when you last closed it, and says what becomes of a time already stored. On 23 September 2026 the note stopped linking to PayPal, which from then on was reached only through the Donate button in the map's panel (point 4); what the note stored did not change. On 12 September 2026 the note began to stay on screen until it was closed and to come back four hours after that, and the second time it used to keep, of when its donate button was last pressed, was dropped. The note itself was added on 11 September 2026, with its PayPal link explained in point 4. Before that, on 8 September 2026, Google Analytics was added to the site and written into points 2, 4, 5 and 6 of this notice, and the optional click and mouse-movement measurement, formerly the third point of this notice, was withdrawn from this site altogether; it is switched off for this site in the counter itself, so there is nothing left to describe. If what is collected ever changes, this page changes with it, and the date above moves.