This Page States Exactly What Google, Microsoft, and Meta Learn From an Ad Click to This Site

What we collect directly

The inquiry form on this site asks for your name, phone number, email address, the address or trailhead your question concerns, what kind of work or trip you're asking about, and any notes or trip specifics you want to add. A consent checkbox sits under the form. Nothing gets sent to us until you check it.

Two fields on that same form, labeled company and website, stay invisible to a person filling it out and are never given a label. They exist to catch automated form-fillers; a real visitor will never see or need to touch them. Every form on the site also carries a hidden timestamp marking the second the page rendered in your browser, used only to slow down scripts that submit a form faster than a person could type it.

The chat widget in the corner of the screen collects whatever you type into it, plus a name and a phone number or email if you choose to give one before your first message goes out. If you skip that step, the conversation still works, but a reply can only reach you inside that browser window, not by phone or email.

Why we're allowed to process it

Under the GDPR, every use of personal data needs a legal basis. Ours vary by what the data is and what we're doing with it, and the table below sets that out rather than leaving you to guess.

Advertising platforms and click IDs

Paid clicks bring most of the visitors to this site. Google Ads runs search and display campaigns pointed at jaspertrailguides.com. Microsoft Advertising runs the same kind of campaign. Meta Ads may run alongside them on Facebook and Instagram. When you click one of those ads, the destination link carries a short code in the address bar: gclid for a Google Ads click, msclkid for a Microsoft Advertising click, fbclid for a Meta Ads click.

That code tells the platform which ad, keyword, or audience sent you here, and it is how the account paying for the ad measures whether the click turned into an inquiry. Whether the code turns into a cookie tied to your browser depends on the consent choice you make on this site, not on the platform running the ad.

Read the Microsoft privacy statement for how Microsoft Advertising itself handles data once a click reaches its systems.

Consent Mode v2

This site runs Google's Consent Mode v2 on every page load, before you have made a choice. Four signals govern it: ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization, and analytics_storage. All four start at denied the instant the page loads. No advertising cookie and no analytics cookie is written to your browser until you act on the banner at the bottom of the screen.

Click Allow storage on that banner and all four signals flip to granted for this browser; the change fires immediately, with no page reload needed. Click Decline, close the tab without choosing, or come back later without a stored choice, and all four stay at, or return to, denied.

A browser that sends the Global Privacy Control signal gets read the same way as a decline: every signal is held at denied regardless of any earlier choice stored on that device.

Two supporting settings ride along with the four signals. URL passthrough stays on, so a gclid or msclkid arriving while storage is denied is not simply dropped from the page; it can still be attributed once, without a cookie, if you grant storage later in the same visit. Ads data redaction turns on whenever storage is denied, which strips identifying detail from the small amount of data that still reaches an ad platform under that state.

The full cookie-by-cookie breakdown, and how each choice on the banner maps onto these four signals, lives on the cookie policy.

Cookies and tags

This site loads a Google tag, a Microsoft Advertising tag, and, when Meta Ads is running, a Meta pixel. All three read the consent state set above before deciding whether to write a cookie. The cookie policy lists every cookie by name, who sets it, and how long it lasts.

Beyond the ad and analytics tags, the site itself sets nothing you'd call a tracking cookie. The consent choice you make is stored in your browser's local storage rather than a cookie, and the chat widget's session token works the same way.

Who else sees your data

We do not sell your data, and nobody buys it from us. Two kinds of outside party ever touch it. Google, Microsoft, and Meta act as independent controllers of the ad click identifier and, once you grant storage, the browsing signals tied to it; they set their own terms for that data once it reaches them. Our hosting provider acts only as a processor on our instructions: it stores the database that holds inquiry records and chat transcripts, and it does not use that data for its own purposes.

Nothing you type into the inquiry form or the chat widget is sent to Google, Microsoft, or Meta. Those platforms see the fact that a click happened and, if you allow storage, that a form on this site was later submitted. They do not see your name, your address, or what you wrote in the notes field. If you email or call the number below, you are writing to the company directly, not to a forwarding service.

How long we keep it

An inquiry sits in our database until the trip or contract it relates to is complete, then for a further two years, matching the window on the drainage guarantee described on the terms page, in case a rebuilt section needs to be traced back to the job that touched it. Chat transcripts are kept for ninety days and then deleted.

Your rights and data requests

What you can ask for depends on where you live, though we don't actually check before answering; we honor the fuller list either way.

If you're covered by the GDPR

You can ask for access to the personal data we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to erase it, ask us to restrict how we use it while a dispute is sorted out, object to processing based on legitimate interest, and ask for a portable copy of what you gave us directly. If you think we've handled a request badly, you can complain to your country's data protection supervisory authority; you don't need to ask us first.

If you're covered by a US state privacy law

You can ask what categories of personal data we hold and why, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct inaccurate entries, ask us to delete it, and opt out of any sale or sharing of your data for cross-context advertising. We don't sell data and we don't run the kind of ad targeting that counts as sharing under most of these laws, so an opt-out request mostly confirms there's nothing to turn off. We won't charge a different price or provide worse service because you exercised any of these rights, and if we deny a request you can appeal it by writing to the office below and asking for a second look.

The full request procedure, including exactly which categories of data we hold and how long it takes us to respond, is on the data request page.

Children

This site is built for people old enough to book a guided hike or a construction contract, not for children. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under thirteen. If we learn that we have, we delete it.

Changes to this policy

We update this policy when the ad platforms we use change, or when the law asks us to. The date at the top of this page is the date of the last change. There is no version history to dig through; the current text is the only text that applies.

Contact for privacy questions

Write, call, or send a letter. The same office handles privacy questions and trip inquiries.

+1 (898) 555-4791 · office@jaspertrailguides.com

Related reading: the cookie policy, the terms of service, and the data request page.