Last updated: 10 October 2026
Shanghai Tourism Guide (www.shanghaitourism.org) is a travel publication. We are not a booking platform, we have no user accounts and we do not sell anything, so the amount of personal data involved in reading this site is small. This page sets out exactly what there is.
The short version
- You can read every guide on this site without giving us anything. There is no login, no newsletter, no comment section.
- The only way to send us personal data deliberately is the contact form, and we only use what you send to reply to you.
- We use Google Analytics to understand which guides get read. We do not sell or share data with data brokers.
- Advertising is being introduced to this site. That involves third-party cookies, and the section on advertising below explains it and how to control it.
Who is responsible
Shanghai Tourism Guide is the publisher and data controller for this website. All privacy enquiries — access, correction, deletion, objection — go through the contact page, which is the fastest route to a person who can act on them.
Information we collect
1. Information you send us
The contact form asks for your name, your email address, a subject category and your message. That is the whole list.
Submissions are delivered to us by email and are not stored in a database on this website. We keep the resulting email only as long as it takes to deal with what you raised, plus a reasonable period in case you follow up. We use it to answer you and, where you have sent a correction, to fix the guide. We do not add contact-form addresses to any mailing list, because there is no mailing list, and we do not pass them to anyone else.
2. Information collected automatically
Server logs. Our hosting provider records standard web-server information for every request — IP address, timestamp, the page requested, browser and operating system, and the referring page. This is ordinary hosting infrastructure, used to keep the site running and to investigate abuse or faults. It is retained on a short rolling basis by the host.
Analytics. We use Google Analytics 4 to see which guides people read, how they arrive, and roughly where in the world they are — country and city level, not an address. This tells us that, say, the visa guide needs attention before the nightlife guide does. Google Analytics sets cookies and processes a truncated version of your IP address. We do not use it to identify individuals and we have no interest in doing so.
Google Search Console. Connected to this site so we can see which search queries lead here. It reports aggregated, anonymous data only.
Caching and performance. The site uses page caching and image optimisation software. These may set a technical cookie to determine whether you should be served a cached page. They do not track you.
3. What we do not collect
There are no user accounts on this site. There is no newsletter or email signup. Comments are closed site-wide, so no commenter names, emails or IP addresses are stored. We do not run quizzes, surveys, competitions or lead-capture forms. We do not use fingerprinting or session-replay tools. We do not knowingly collect anything from children under 13, and this site is not directed at them.
Advertising
Shanghai Tourism Guide is funded by commission on some booking links, which is set out in the affiliate disclosure. There are no display ads on the site. The commission comes through Travelpayouts, an affiliate network whose script sits in the Advertising category of the cookie settings and does not run until that category is allowed.
Once it is allowed to run, the script receives your IP address and browser details, as any service your browser connects to does, and it reports to Travelpayouts how the page is used: the page’s address and the one you arrived from, which links you click, how many keys are pressed and in which part of the page (not what is typed), and whether an ad blocker or a private window is in use. Those reports are tied together by a random session identifier kept in a cookie on this site called am_user_session, which lapses 30 minutes after you stop reading, and, if Google Analytics is allowed as well, by the identifier Google Analytics keeps for your browser. The script also fetches typefaces for its booking boxes from Google Fonts and, to check for an ad blocker, may contact Google’s advertising servers; both give Google your IP address.
Booking companies and the affiliate network have no involvement in what our guides say and no advance sight of them. A booking box or suggestion added by the script is not an endorsement by us, and no one has ever paid to be recommended in, or removed from, a guide.
Cookies and your choices
Cookies on this site fall into three groups: strictly necessary ones set by WordPress and the caching layer so pages load correctly; analytics cookies set by Google Analytics; and — once advertising is live — advertising cookies set by Google and its partners.
Before non-essential cookies are set for visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, this site will present a consent choice through a Google-certified consent management platform, as required by Google’s EU User Consent Policy. That mechanism is not yet enabled, because advertising is not yet live; it will be in place before the first ad is served, and this page will be updated to say so plainly when it is.
Independently of any of that, your browser can block or delete cookies at any time. Blocking analytics and advertising cookies will not affect your ability to read anything on this site.
What runs before you choose, and how to change it
What runs before you choose depends on where you are reading from, because the law does. In the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, and in Brazil, Chile, China, Israel, Nigeria, South Korea, Thailand, Türkiye and Vietnam, nothing beyond the strictly necessary runs until you answer the dialog on your first visit — not analytics, not Travelpayouts — and Reject all sits on that first screen next to Accept all, not behind a second click.
In the United States you are shown a bar rather than a dialog, and it is not only a notice. Analytics starts on arrival there, but advertising and booking-partner scripts stay switched off until you answer it. In Switzerland you get the dialog too, but analytics starts on arrival there and only advertising and booking-partner scripts wait for your answer. In Canada, and in the countries where notice is enough — among them Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, India and Mexico — everything described on this page starts when you arrive; the notice tells you so, and the same control switches it off. Everywhere else, and whenever we cannot tell where you are, the strictest setting applies: nothing beyond the necessary runs until you answer.
Your answer is kept on your own device, in a first-party cookie called cookie_consent_2535f1 that only this site can read, so you are not asked again on every page. It lasts about a year. The Cookie settings link in the footer of every page reopens the choice, and withdrawing is the same two clicks as agreeing: the scripts stop running, and the analytics cookies this site can reach are cleared. The one cookie Travelpayouts keeps on this site, am_user_session, is no longer renewed once its script stops and lapses within half an hour. Its other item of storage, a note of the page’s colours (YeaMoAvnmSamSLml), and anything Travelpayouts or a booking site set on their own domains are cleared in your browser rather than from this page.
Refusing costs you nothing. Every guide here is readable in full either way, nothing is paywalled, and no part of Shanghai Tourism Guide is held back from readers who say no.
If you are reading this in the United States
Several US states give you the right to opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information, and those words are broader than they sound: letting an advertising or affiliate partner receive information about your visit can count as sharing even though no money changes hands for your data and we have never sold anything of the kind. Rather than argue the definition, Shanghai Tourism Guide treats it as covered.
So the bar shown to US readers carries a Do not sell or share button, and for US readers the Cookie settings link at the foot of every page reads Do not sell or share my personal information. Using it stops the advertising category, which is what Travelpayouts and any ad partner sit in. Travelpayouts stops running from that point; anything it set earlier on its own domains is cleared in your browser rather than from here.
This site also honours Global Privacy Control. If your browser or an extension sends a GPC signal, it is treated as a valid opt-out on arrival — you do not have to find the control and click it as well, and we do not ask again on later visits. Do Not Track is a different and long-abandoned signal, and to be straight about it: this site does not act on DNT, because nothing agreed what it ought to mean.
The record kept of your choice
Proving that a choice was offered and honoured means keeping a record of it. Each answer is logged with the date and time, the two-letter country the choice was made from, which of the rule sets above applied, a reference to the exact wording you were shown, and the choice itself, against a random identifier generated for your browser.
That record contains no name, no email address and no IP address. It holds a salted hash of your browser’s user-agent string, and the salt changes every day, so two visits on different days cannot be linked back together through it. Records are deleted after 26 months. If you want to see or delete the entries tied to your browser, ask through the contact form.
Legal bases (UK and EU visitors)
- Contact form — your consent, given by choosing to send the message, and our legitimate interest in replying to it.
- Server logs — our legitimate interest in operating a secure, functioning website.
- Analytics and advertising cookies — your consent, collected through the consent mechanism described above.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to or restrict how it is used, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to withdraw consent at any time. Californian residents additionally have the right to know what is collected and to opt out of any sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell personal information. Because our affiliate network receives information about your visit, the site treats that as potential “sharing” and offers a Do not sell or share control, described under “If you are reading this in the United States”.
Exercise any of these through the contact page. We will respond within one month. In practice, unless you have written to us before, the honest answer will usually be that we hold nothing about you at all.
If you believe we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority.
International transfers
This website is hosted in the United States, and Google Analytics is operated by Google LLC. If you visit from outside the United States, the limited data described above is processed there under Google’s standard contractual clauses and equivalent safeguards.
Links to other sites
Our guides link out to government portals, museums, transport operators and other sources so you can verify what we have written. Those sites have their own privacy policies and we are not responsible for them. Follow the link and you have left ours.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes materially — and enabling advertising will be one such change — we update the date at the top of this page and revise the text to describe what is actually happening, not what we intend to happen.