Cultured Routes is built on a simple idea: readers deserve to be treated like readers, not products. This policy describes the small amount of information we handle and the many things we deliberately don’t do.
Who we are
Cultured Routes is published at culturedroutes.com. For anything related to this policy — questions, corrections, or requests about your data — write to editorial@culturedroutes.com.
What we collect
- Aggregate page-view counts. When you read an article, we increment a counter for that article. We do not store your IP address, user agent, referrer, or any identifier tied to you personally alongside that count.
- Newsletter email, if you subscribe. The subscribe form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which shows a lightweight challenge to filter bots. If you submit your email, we store it solely to send you the newsletter. You can unsubscribe from any issue, and we’ll delete the record on request.
- Comments, if they’re enabled on a given article. If you leave a comment, the name and email you provide are stored with the comment. Email addresses are never displayed publicly.
- A session cookie, only if your browser needs one for a form submission. We don’t set tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or persistent identifiers.
What we don’t do
- No ad networks. No programmatic advertising. No ad personalization.
- No third-party analytics scripts (no Google Analytics, no Meta Pixel, no Segment).
- No selling, renting, or sharing of reader data with anyone, ever.
- No behavioral profiling or audience-building across sessions.
- No retargeting, no fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking.
- No “data enrichment” of your email against third-party databases.
Third parties we rely on
A handful of infrastructure providers touch requests to this site. We chose each one because it is narrowly scoped and reputable:
- Cloudflare — DNS and the Turnstile bot challenge on forms. Cloudflare may log standard edge request metadata (IP, timestamp) as part of delivering the site securely. See Cloudflare’s own privacy policy for details.
- AWS SES — transactional email delivery (newsletter issues, comment notifications). Amazon processes the outgoing message so it can be delivered; it does not receive reader behavioral data from us.
- Pexels and Unsplash — public image libraries used during our editorial process. Images are downloaded server-side at build time and served from culturedroutes.com. Your browser does not contact Pexels or Unsplash while you read.
Your rights
You can ask us what we have on file for you, correct anything that’s wrong, or have it deleted. Email editorial@culturedroutes.com and we’ll respond within a reasonable window. If you’re in a jurisdiction with specific privacy rights (GDPR, CCPA, and similar), those rights apply here regardless of where we’re based.
Children
This site is not directed at children under 13. We don’t knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has submitted information, email us and we’ll delete it.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle data, we’ll update this page and move the date below. Significant changes will be noted at the top for at least a month.
Last updated: 2026-04-20