Secrets of Surf Travel
Privacy Policy
What we collect, why, and what we never do with it. Same straight talk as the rest of this site.
The short version
We collect almost nothing. There's no login, no account, no tracking profile built up across your visits. The only things we ever ask for by name are an email address if you sign up for Field Notes, or your trip details if you fill out the Real Estate form. Everything else on this page is us explaining exactly how those work and what analytics we run in the background.
Effective 2026-07-14. This is a plain-language policy written by us, not a law firm — if you have a specific legal question about your own data, email us and ask directly.
How we measure traffic
We use Plausible Analytics to see which pages get read and roughly how many people visit. Plausible is built to be cookie-free — it doesn't drop a cookie on your browser, doesn't build an individual profile of you, and doesn't track you across other websites. We see aggregate numbers (page views, referrers, rough location by country), never a record tied to you personally.
The one exception is a single custom event: when you tap a vendor's WhatsApp link on a zone page, we log that a click happened and which vendor it went to — so we know which local businesses the outreach is actually reaching. That event carries no name, email, or personal identifier, just "someone clicked WhatsApp for [vendor]."
The newsletter
If you sign up for Field Notes, we collect your email address and use it to send the newsletter — stories and zone-page intel, never spot reveals. Every email includes an unsubscribe link; using it removes you immediately. We don't sell, rent, or share this list with anyone.
The "get matched" form
The Real Estate page's form collects your name, email, and the trip/property details you type in (region, budget, timeframe, message). It goes to Jed and nobody else. It's shared with exactly one other person — the local agent we match you with — and only after you've said yes to the introduction. It's never sold or added to any list you didn't ask for. Email us and we'll delete it.
Technically, this form is handled by Netlify Forms (our hosting provider) — they process the submission on our behalf and don't use it for anything of their own. See Netlify's privacy policy for how they handle that.
Booking links to local businesses
As explained on every zone page's fine print, some links to vendors, camps, and stays are — or will become — affiliate links: if you book through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Today, most links on this site are plain courtesy links with no tracking attached. As partnerships with platforms like Booking.com, Vrbo, and Airbnb come online, some of those links will start carrying a tracking parameter that lets that platform credit us if you book.
That tracking happens on the booking platform's own site, not ours — clicking through, they may set a cookie in your browser to remember the referral. We don't see who you are or what you booked; we just see that a booking under our link happened. Each platform's own privacy policy governs that part (Booking.com, Vrbo, and Airbnb each publish their own).
No selling, no ad trackers, no surprises
- We don't sell or rent your personal information to anyone, ever.
- We don't run ad-retargeting pixels (no Meta Pixel, no Google Ads tag) — Plausible is the only measurement running on this site.
- We don't build browsing profiles across visits or devices.
- Nothing here is directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.
Questions, deletions, updates
If we change how this site handles your information, we'll update this page and the effective date above — nothing changes quietly. For anything in this policy — deleting your data, a question about the newsletter, whatever — email secretsofsurftravel@protonmail.com and a real person (Jed) will answer.
Related: the No-Reveal Code covers what we publish and never publish about surf spots specifically. This page is about your data, not the coastline.