Last updated: 29 August 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
Status as of 29 August 2026: advertising has not yet gone live on this site. This section describes how it will work and takes effect when the first ad is served. This page will be dated again at that point.
Shanghai Tourism Guide is funded by advertising rather than commissions, which is why there are no affiliate links in the guides. Advertising will be served by Google AdSense.
- Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.
- Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and other sites on the internet.
- You can opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings.
- You can opt out of personalised advertising from many other vendors at aboutads.info/choices or youronlinechoices.com.
- Third-party vendors set their own cookies under their own privacy policies, which we do not control. Google’s is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
Advertisers have no involvement in what our guides say and no advance sight of them. Nothing in an advertisement is an endorsement by us, and no advertiser 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.
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 or share personal information, and never have.
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 — the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, or your member state’s supervisory authority in the EU.
International transfers
This website is hosted in the United States, and Google Analytics and Google AdSense are 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.