Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29 August 2026

This policy explains what Athens Tourism Guide (www.athenstourism.org) does with information about the people who visit it. It describes the site as it is configured today. When the site changes, this page is updated and the date above changes with it.

The short version: you can read every guide on this site without giving us anything. We hold personal data only when you choose to send us a message.

Who is responsible for your data

Athens Tourism Guide is an independently published website. The publisher is the data controller for the purposes of the UK GDPR and the EU General Data Protection Regulation. All privacy correspondence goes through the contact page, which is the site’s only contact route.

What we collect, and why

When you just read the site

Nothing is asked of you. The site does not require an account, does not run a newsletter, and does not accept reader comments — commenting is switched off across the whole site, so no commenter names, email addresses or IP addresses are stored.

Two things still happen automatically:

  • Server logs. The web host records standard request data — IP address, timestamp, the page requested, referring page and browser user-agent. This is ordinary hosting infrastructure, kept for security and troubleshooting, and it is not used to build a profile of you.
  • Page caching. The site uses WP Super Cache to serve pages quickly. Caching may set a technical cookie to decide whether you should be given a cached or a freshly generated page. It carries no identifying information and is not used for tracking.

When you send us a message

The contact form collects your name, your email address and whatever you write in the message. It is delivered to the publisher by email. We use it to answer you, and to act on the correction or question you have raised — nothing else. It is never sold, rented, added to a mailing list, or passed to a third party for marketing.

The legal basis is our legitimate interest in responding to people who get in touch. Correspondence is kept only as long as it is useful — typically no more than twelve months after the exchange ends, and less if it was a one-line correction.

Analytics

The site uses Google Analytics 4, connected through the Google Site Kit plugin, to understand which guides people read and how they arrive. It tells us that a given Athens guide was read a certain number of times and roughly where readers came from. It does not tell us who you are, and we do not attempt to identify individual visitors.

Google Analytics sets cookies and processes data including your IP address (truncated by Google before storage), device and browser type, approximate location, pages viewed and time on page. Google acts as our processor for this, and may transfer data outside the EEA and UK under its standard contractual clauses. Google’s own account of what it does with the data is at policies.google.com/privacy, and you can opt out entirely with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

The site is also verified with Google Search Console, which reports aggregate search performance. Search Console data is anonymous and sets no cookies on this site.

Advertising

Athens Tourism Guide is funded by display advertising, and this section describes how that advertising works when it is running on the site.

Advertising is served by third-party ad networks, including Google. Third-party vendors, Google among them, use cookies and similar technologies to serve advertisements based on your previous visits to this and other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and elsewhere on the internet.

You can control this directly:

We do not receive, store or have access to any personal data collected by an advertising network. We do not sell or arrange bookings, take affiliate commission, or receive payment for editorial coverage, so no advertiser has any influence over what appears in the guides.

Cookies used on this site

  • Strictly necessary — page-caching cookies set by WP Super Cache, and, if you log in as an administrator, WordPress session cookies. These cannot be switched off without breaking the site.
  • Analytics — Google Analytics 4 cookies, used to count and understand visits.
  • Advertising — cookies set by third-party ad networks when advertising is being served, used for ad delivery, frequency capping and measurement.

Every browser lets you view, block and delete cookies; the method differs by browser and is documented in its help pages.

Images and embedded content

Photographs used in the guides are licensed stock images and are hosted on this site’s own server rather than loaded from a third party. Where a guide links out to an official source — a museum, the Ministry of Culture, a transport operator — following that link takes you to a site with its own privacy policy, over which we have no control.

Your rights

If you are in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to receive it in a portable format. In practice the only personal data we are likely to hold is a message you sent us, so a request will usually be answered quickly.

Make any of these requests through the contact page. We respond within one month. If you are unhappy with the outcome you may complain to your national data protection authority; in the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you are in California, you have the right to know what personal information is collected and to ask for its deletion, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal information as that term is defined in the CCPA.

Children

This site publishes travel guides for adults planning a trip, including a section on visiting Athens with children, which is written for the parents doing the planning. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us information through the contact form, tell us and it will be deleted.

Security and hosting

The site is served over HTTPS. It runs on WordPress with shared commercial hosting; the host processes server logs on our behalf as described above.

Changes to this policy

When the way the site handles data changes — a new analytics tool, an advertising change, a consent mechanism — this page is rewritten to match and the date at the top is updated. There is no mailing list to notify, so the date is how you tell.