Privacy
This is a small site run by one household. It has no accounts, no comments, no shop and no newsletter sign-up. What follows is the whole of what happens to you when you visit, written plainly rather than in the usual language.
Who we are
The Earthway, Șomartin, Sibiu County, Romania, operated by Earthway Retreats SRL. If you want anything on this page explained, changed, or acted on, write to info@theearthway.com.
What we collect when you simply read
Nothing, unless you agree to analytics. There is no login, no profile, no advertising network, and no third-party tracker embedded in these pages. The photographs, the essays and the styling are all served from this domain.
Analytics, and the cookies that come with it
If you click Allow on the small bar at the bottom of the screen, this site loads Google Analytics 4. It tells us how many people visit, which pages they read, roughly what part of the world they are in, and how they found us. We use it to know whether the writing is reaching anyone. We never see your name, your address, or who you are.
Google Analytics sets two cookies in your browser:
Nothing is set before you choose. If you click No thanks, no analytics
script is loaded at all and neither cookie is created. Your answer is remembered in your own
browser's local storage, under earthway-analytics — that is a note to
itself, not a cookie, and it never leaves your machine.
Your IP address reaches Google as part of any web request. Google uses it to work out the approximate city or country a visit came from and then discards it; for visitors in the EU, the UK and Switzerland, Google states that it drops IP addresses before logging the data at all. IP addresses are not shown to us and are not stored in our reports.
You can change your mind at any moment:
The contact form
The form on the front page does not send anything to a server — this site has no server to send it to. It assembles what you typed and opens your own email program with the message ready to go, addressed to info@theearthway.com. Nothing leaves your computer until you press send yourself, and you keep a copy in your own sent mail.
When you do write, we hold your email the way anybody holds a letter: to read it, to answer it, and to remember the conversation if you write again. We do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not pass your address to anyone. Ask us to delete it and we will.
What this site does not do
No advertising and no advertising cookies. No social media pixels or embedded trackers — the Instagram link is an ordinary link, and following it takes you to Instagram, where their rules apply, not ours. No profiling, no automated decisions, and nothing sold or rented to anybody, ever.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you may ask what personal data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, object to how it is used, or ask for a copy. Since the only personal data we are likely to hold is an email you sent us, that is usually a short conversation. Write to info@theearthway.com.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Romanian supervisory authority, the Autoritatea Națională de Supraveghere a Prelucrării Datelor cu Caracter Personal (ANSPDCP), at dataprotection.ro.
Changes
If this changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. There is no archive of earlier versions; the site is small enough that the current one is the whole story.