Privacy

This privacy page is for a small editorial website. It should be readable in one sitting and slightly boring. If a sentence sounds like a product launch, it does not belong here.

4x4adventures.com.au publishes field guides about Australian 4WD travel. You can read those guides without creating a login, without joining a club through this site, and without telling us who you are. The only time we ask for a name and an email address is when you choose to send a message through the contact form.

Information you send on purpose

The contact form asks for a name, an email address, a subject and a message. Those fields exist so a person can reply and so a correction can be traced to a conversation if we need to ask what you meant.

We use that information to:

• reply to you
• fix or clarify a guide
• keep a record of a sourced correction so the same error does not quietly return

We do not use that information to build a marketing list. We do not sell it. We do not pass it to a tour desk, because this project does not run a tour desk.

Do not send payment card numbers, scanned identification, or other people’s contact details “for context”. A field-guide correction almost never needs those. If you paste them by mistake, say so in a follow-up so the inbox can be cleaned.

Messages are delivered through a third-party form service to an editorial email inbox. Those providers process the message in order to deliver it. Their own notices apply to that transit, just as a postal service has rules about envelopes.

Information a host may log

Any public website is delivered by machines that may record technical basics: the fact that a page was requested, roughly when, and the usual server diagnostics used to keep the site up and to understand failures. Those logs are a function of hosting, not a profile of your travelling life. We do not treat them as a research product, and we do not combine them with contact-form names to see who read which track page.

If this site uses a content-delivery or analytics tool in future, that tool’s job would be to understand whether pages load and whether the writing is findable — not to follow you around the rest of the web. This page would be updated if that picture changed in a way you should know about.

Cookies and accounts

You do not need an account. There is no members’ area behind the guides. We do not set a cookie to remember your favourite track, because this site is not trying to be an application.

Your browser may still store what browsers store — a language preference, a session used by a form service, the ordinary mechanics of the modern web. You control those through the browser. If a page ever needs something more persistent, it should say so in language as plain as this.

Links to park authorities and other sites

The useful part of this project is often a sentence that sends you to Parks Victoria, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, DBCA, a land council, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, or a local council. When you follow that link, you are on their site. If you buy a permit or register a beacon there, you are dealing with their privacy and payment arrangements. Read them. This field guide cannot rewrite a government form.

How long things stay

A contact message stays as long as it is needed to finish the conversation and to keep the editorial record of a correction honest. It is not a reason to hold a traveller’s name indefinitely “in case”. Technical logs follow whatever retention the host already uses to operate a website — the minimum that still lets someone find out why a page failed.

If you asked us to reply and then would like the message removed, write again and say so. A small inbox can do that when the request is clear.

Children

These pages are written for adults planning vehicle travel. They are not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from children through the form. If you believe a message was sent by a child, contact the desk so it can be deleted.

The tone we are aiming for

Privacy writing on the web often hides the only sentence that matters. Here it is: we want enough information to answer you and to keep the guides accurate, and we do not want a dossier. If you are deciding whether to write, you can assume the message will be read by a person working on these pages, not by a department of monetisation.

For the editorial rules that sit beside this page, read about. For the letterbox itself, use contact. For the travel problem you came to solve, return to the landscape guides — they are the public part, and they do not require a name.