Privacy

This site is public

The map, the route, the photos and the stories can be read by anyone who visits — no account needed. Search engines may index them. Please keep that in mind before posting anything you would not want a stranger to read.

Jim & Therese's location

A phone app (OwnTracks) reports the camper's position while they travel, and those positions are drawn on the map. Jim and Therese control how precisely the current position is published — exact, rounded to roughly a kilometre, delayed by a set number of hours, or hidden entirely. Completed route history is always shown as recorded.

Only their own device reports a location. This site never asks for or records your location.

If you register

Creating an account so you can comment stores:

• Your name, as you typed it — shown publicly beside your comments.
• Your email address — never shown publicly. It is used to confirm your account, to reset your password, and, if you opt in, to let you know when there is a new post.
• Your password, stored only as a bcrypt hash. Nobody, including us, can read it back.
• The date you joined, when you last signed in, and the IP address your session was created from.

Comments and private notes

Public comments are visible to everyone, with your name attached. If you tick "send privately", only Jim and Therese see the message — but note that it is stored in the same database, and the site owner (their son-in-law, who runs the server) can technically read it. It is private from other visitors, not encrypted end-to-end. Please do not send anything genuinely sensitive.

Photos

Photos posted by Jim and Therese are resized and stored on the server. If a photo carries GPS information from the camera, that may be used to place the post on the map. The stored copies are re-encoded, which strips the original camera metadata.

Who else gets your data

We do not sell, rent, or share your information for advertising, analytics, or any commercial purpose. There is no advertising and no tracking or analytics service on this site. Two third parties are necessarily involved:

• Resend delivers our email, so it receives the address any message is sent to.
• OpenStreetMap serves the map tiles, so your browser's IP address reaches their servers when the map loads — the same as with any embedded map.

Cookies

No advertising or tracking cookies. Your sign-in token and your chosen theme are kept in your browser's own local storage and are never sent anywhere except to this site.

Where it lives, and how long

Everything is stored on a private server in Ontario, Canada, run by the family — not on a commercial cloud platform. Backups are taken regularly and kept for a limited period. Trip data is kept indefinitely, because that is the point of a travel diary.

Deleting your account

Ask and it will be done. Email jeff.brand@icloud.com and your account and comments will be removed. You can also delete any of your own comments yourself.

Children

This site is not directed at children and accounts are not knowingly created for anyone under 13.

Changes

If what we do with data changes, this page changes with it.

Last updated: September 8, 2026