Privacy policy.

Account features use your email address to authenticate you. If you choose to use them, the site stores your private favorites, planning preferences, saved itineraries, reminders, and trip notes. Event submissions, newsletter requests, purchases, and administrative records retain the information needed to provide those services and protect the site.

If you subscribe, Deep in the Lakes stores your email address, the date and source of consent, subscription state, and the delivery history needed to send and protect the list. The email provider processes each delivery. Every edition includes an unsubscribe link; unsubscribing suppresses future sends while retaining the minimal consent and suppression history needed to honor that choice.

Only after you allow analytics, we count public-page visits, public link clicks, section reach, scroll milestones, active reading time, search-result counts, and planning progress. Private account, saved-trip, shared-link, guest, host, administration, checkout, submission, and unsubscribe pages are excluded. Dynamic page names are grouped into route classes, and queries and URL fragments are removed. We do not collect search wording, chat text, field contents, click coordinates, precise locations, visitor IDs, session IDs, account IDs, IP addresses, raw browser identifiers, recordings, or fingerprints in this analytics dataset.

With that same permission, our hosting provider supplies an approximate country and, for the United States and Canada, state/province/territory for geographic activity totals. We retain only those broad codes, not the provider's IP address, city, postal code, coordinates, or full geographic response. No GPS permission is requested. Geography is not linked to your account or a visitor identity, and private-page activity is excluded. Network location may be inaccurate or differ from your home, especially with a VPN or mobile connection. It measures website activity, not everyone searching on Google.

New behavior and geographic metrics are combined into daily counters, retained for up to 395 days, and shown only to administrators; detailed cohorts below 20 observations are withheld. Weekly geographic trends apply the same threshold. These counts are observations, not unique people, and the threshold is not an anonymity guarantee. Legacy public product-action records are retained for up to 90 days. Your optional analytics choice is stored on this browser for 180 days without an identifier. You can change it below; browser Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals override an allow choice. An older allow choice must be renewed when the measurement scope changes. Declining has no effect on site features.

Our hosting and security providers necessarily receive technical request information to deliver and protect the site. The abuse limiter uses separate, short-lived keyed security buckets; these are not joined to visitor analytics. Payment, account, email, security, and commercial service records have separate purposes and retention controls. Blocking analytics stops future optional measurement; unlinked aggregate counts cannot be traced back to a person to remove their individual contribution.

Questions sent to Ask a Local and the limited research, event, weather, catalog, preference, and favorite context needed to answer them are processed by the site's AI provider. Private source documents and server credentials are not sent to your browser. Do not include highly sensitive personal information in a question or trip note.

The public map uses OpenFreeMap and other credited map sources by default. An optional Google-powered immersive 3D view is loaded only after you deliberately choose to open it. At that point, your browser connects to Google Maps Platform and may send technical information such as your IP address, browser or device details, referrer, and map interactions to Google. When Google road routing is enabled, the coordinates of mapped itinerary stops are also sent to Google to calculate distance, typical drive time, and route geometry. The site does not send your account email or private trip notes with either request. Google processes that data under the Google Privacy Policy.

Deep in the Lakes uses service providers for hosting, authentication and databases, email, AI responses, maps, payment processing, print fulfillment, storage, analytics, and security. Payment card details are entered into Stripe-hosted payment interfaces and are not stored directly by this website.

You can remove favorites, delete saved trips, disable sharing, turn off reminders, unsubscribe from The Field Note from any edition, and sign out through the planning workspace. You can also choose not to create an account. Signed-in travelers can download their account data or submit a deletion request. Deletion requests have a seven-day cooling-off period, remain cancellable until completion, and receive a supervised review so payment, fraud-prevention, consent, and legally required records can be handled under the applicable retention policy.

Use of the site is also governed by the Deep in the Lakes terms. Google-powered map content is subject to the Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms.