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Privacy Policy

This policy describes what Stockholm Tourism Guide (www.stockholmtourism.org) does with information about the people who visit it. It describes the site as it works today; if that changes, this page is updated before the change goes live.

Last updated: 21 September 2026

The short version

This site has no accounts, no logins, no shopping basket, no newsletter and no comment section. There is nothing here to sign up for. For most visitors what is involved is analytics about which guides get read and a booking partner that credits bookings made through links here. In the EU, the UK and several other countries, neither runs until you have said yes. If you send a message through the contact form, we get the address you typed in and nothing more.

Analytics

Google Analytics 4 is used to understand which guides people read and how they arrive. It records the pages viewed, approximate location derived from a truncated IP address, browser and device type, and the referring site. IP addresses are shortened by Google before storage and are not used to identify individual visitors.

Google Search Console is also connected. It reports which search queries lead to this site in aggregate and does not give us information about individual visitors.

No profile is built about you, no data is sold, and analytics data is not combined with anything else to identify you.

Advertising

This site does not currently display ads. No display-advertising network is running on it. It does carry affiliate booking links, which are a different arrangement and are described in the next section.

The intention is to fund the site through Google AdSense. Because that has not been activated yet, the following describes what will apply once it is — and this page will be revised at that point rather than left to describe a hypothetical:

  • Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on partner sites.
  • Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on your visits to this and other sites.
  • You can opt out of personalised advertising at any time in Google’s Ads Settings, or opt out of third-party vendors’ use of cookies at aboutads.info.
  • Visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland will be asked for consent through a Google-certified consent management platform before any advertising or personalisation cookies are set. A consent dialog already runs on this site, for the analytics and booking-partner scripts described below.

Some links on this site earn a commission. Links to hotels, apartments and booking sites are handled by Stay22, a booking-link partner whose script turns them into commission-tracking links as the page loads. If you book after following one, the booking site pays us a commission; the price you pay is the same either way. Every guide says so at the top, and the affiliate disclosure sets out the arrangement in full.

What that means for your data needs spelling out, because it is not what a cookie notice usually describes. Stay22 does not set a cookie. It recognises your device from the characteristics of your browser — fonts, screen, language and similar details — and keeps an identifier in your browser’s local storage under the names visitor_id_id22 and cache_id22, so that a booking made later can be credited here. Like any service your browser connects to, it also receives your IP address and browser details when it loads, and it processes data outside the EU. Blocking third-party cookies does not stop any of this; the cookie settings on this site do.

Stay22 sits in the Advertising group of those settings and does not load at all until that group is allowed. We never see your name, your travel dates or your payment details — what comes back is a count of clicks and, sometimes, the fact that a booking happened. Once you are on a booking site you are under its privacy policy, not this one. Refusing it costs you nothing: the links still work, at the same price.

Cookies and similar technology

The site sets two cookies of its own: once you answer the consent dialog or bar, your choice is stored in cookie_consent_ba61fe so that you are not asked again on every page, and cookie_consent_ba61fe_loc remembers for a day which country you are reading from, so the right rules apply without looking it up again. What else may be set:

  • Google Analytics sets cookies to distinguish one visit from another, once it is allowed to run (see below). These expire on their own and can be blocked in your browser without breaking anything on the site.
  • Page caching may set a short-lived technical cookie so that a page is served correctly. It carries no information about you.
  • Advertising — no cookies from display advertising, which is not running. Stay22, the booking partner, sets no cookie either: once it is allowed, it keeps an identifier in your browser’s local storage, as described above, and the booking sites it links to set identifiers of their own if you follow one of its links.

Every current browser lets you block or delete cookies, and none of this site’s content is behind one. Guides will read perfectly well with cookies switched off. The cookie policy lists every cookie and every item of browser storage in use, generated from the services actually running here.

Your choices, and what runs before you make them

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, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Türkiye and Vietnam, nothing beyond the strictly necessary runs until you answer the dialog on your first visit — not analytics, not Stay22 — 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_ba61fe 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 and what they stored on your device is cleared, including visitor_id_id22, cache_id22 and the thumbmark_* keys.

Refusing costs you nothing. Every guide here is readable in full either way, nothing is paywalled, and no part of Stockholm 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, Stockholm 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. The button switches off everything except the strictly necessary — Stay22 and any ad partner included — and clears what Stay22 stored on your device if you had let it run; the link reopens the full choice at any time.

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.

The contact form

The contact form collects your name, your email address and your message, and sends them to the site’s own mailbox. That is all it does. The submission is not stored in a database on this site, it is not added to any mailing list, and it is not passed to anyone else. Messages are kept only as long as needed to deal with what you asked about, and correspondence older than two years is deleted.

The lawful basis for handling this is our legitimate interest in answering people who write in — you supplied the address for that purpose.

Comments

Comments are closed across the site and there is no comment form on any page. No commenter names, addresses or IP addresses are being collected.

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted by DreamHost. As with any web server, requests are recorded in standard access logs containing the IP address, timestamp, page requested and browser identifier. These are used for security and to diagnose faults, are rotated automatically by the host, and are not used to profile visitors.

Images

Photographs on this site are licensed stock images, sourced principally from Pexels. They are served from this site’s own server, so viewing one does not report anything back to the image provider.

Where data goes

Google Analytics and Search Console are operated by Google, which processes data in the United States under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. DreamHost hosting is US-based. Stay22, the booking partner described above, receives your IP address and browser details when its script loads — which, where the law requires your permission first, happens only once you have given it — and processes data outside the EU. Cloudflare, which delivers the site, handles each request on its way through. No other third party receives data from this site.

Your rights

If you are in the UK, the EU or another jurisdiction with comparable law, you have the right to ask what personal data is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to processing, and to receive a copy. Given how little is held — in most cases nothing at all that identifies you — these requests are usually straightforward to answer. Write in through the contact page and we will respond within one month.

You can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.

Children

This site is aimed at adults planning travel and does not knowingly collect any information from children under 13.

Changes

Material changes will be reflected here with a new date at the top. Enabling advertising will be one such change, and this page will be updated before any ad code goes live.

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