Privacy

Privacy

In short: no ads, no advertising networks, nothing sold or shared. Visits are counted twice: anonymously on this site's own server in the EU, and by Google Analytics, which sets its own cookie and reports page views to Google.

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

Two things count visits here, and they are taken in turn: this site's own script, which is anonymous and stores nothing, and Google Analytics, which is neither.

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. (Google Analytics, below, is a different matter.)
• 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. Since 8 September 2026 the site also loads Google Analytics 4, from googletagmanager.com, on every page except the embeddable map. It reports to Google which page was opened, and a handful of interactions it watches for by itself: how far you scrolled, clicks that lead off the site, file downloads, video plays, and searches or form entries on the few pages that have them. It works out an approximate location from your IP address, and it records the same sort of technical detail as the counter above — browser, operating system, device, language, screen size and where you arrived from.

• It does store something on your device. The _ga cookies hold a random identifier that tells a returning visitor from a new one, for up to two years. Delete them in your browser whenever you like, or block googletagmanager.com, and the site works exactly the same.
• Your IP address is still not stored by this site, and Google states that it does not log or store the address it uses for that coarse location either. Your browser sends it to Google directly, because it cannot reach them without it.
• Advertising is switched off in the tag itself: Google signals and ad personalisation are both disabled, so these visits are not joined to signed-in Google accounts across other sites and build no advertising profile. This site runs no ads and sells nothing.
• Legal basis: legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f) — the same interest as above, knowing which pages are worth keeping, with a second measurement to check the first against. If you would rather not be counted this way, delete the cookies or block googletagmanager.com, as above, and nothing else on the site changes.
• Kept by Google: two months for the event-level records and fourteen months for the user-level ones, which are this property's settings. The aggregate reports Google builds from them are Google's own.
• Google, not I, holds this copy: their privacy notice and terms apply to it on top of this page.

3. What this site keeps on your device

• your light or dark theme choice;
• any routes you save as favourites;
• when you last closed the note inviting partnerships and sponsorships, so that it stays away for four hours, on every page and in every tab, before it comes back. Nothing is written while it is merely on screen.

None of these are sent anywhere — they exist so the site behaves the way you left it. All are exempt from the consent requirement because they do only what you asked for.

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.
• Google (googletagmanager.com, google-analytics.com) — Google Analytics, described in point 2. It is the only third-party script on the site, it is not loaded on the embeddable map, and Google is based in the United States. Their privacy notice.
• PayPal — only if you press the Donate button in the map's panel. It is a plain link to PayPal's donation page, so PayPal learns nothing about your visit unless you follow it, and then only what you choose to send them. Their privacy statement.

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, added on 8 September 2026, is the one exception on the whole site. There are no advertising networks, no social media widgets, no Google Fonts and no third-party CDN.

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. I transfer nothing outside the EEA myself; the organisations in point 4 are contacted by your browser directly, and two of them — the elevation tiles and Google Analytics — answer from the United States. Google states that it is certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which is the basis on which European measurements reach it.

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 in point 2 carry an identifier as well, but it is Google's cookie rather than anything of mine: deleting the _ga cookies unlinks everything after from everything before, and blocking googletagmanager.com stops the collection outright.

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 23 September 2026, when the corner note in point 3 changed from asking for a donation to inviting partnerships and sponsorships; what it stores did not change, and PayPal in point 4 is now reached only through the Donate button in the map's panel. Before that it changed on 12 September 2026, when the note began to stay on screen until it is closed and to come back four hours after that: point 3 names the one time it remembers, when you last closed it, and the second note it used to keep, of when its donate button was last pressed, is gone. 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.