Last updated 9 September 2026.
This policy describes what Florence Tourism Guide (florencetourism.org) collects, why, and what you can do about it. It describes the site as it actually operates today. Where something is planned but not yet running, it says so.
The short version
You can read every guide on this site without giving it anything. There is no account to create, no newsletter, no comment section and no login. The only personal information the site ever receives directly is what you type into the contact form. Everything else is analytics, and you can opt out of it.
Who is responsible
Florence Tourism Guide is the data controller for this website. Reach us through the contact page for any question about this policy or to exercise the rights set out below.
Information you give us
The contact form. Submitting it sends us your name, your email address, the subject category you picked, the guide you referenced if you named one, and your message. This is processed to answer you and, where you have reported an error, to correct the site. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in responding to correspondence and in keeping our published information accurate. The form is delivered by WPForms and sent onward by email; the message is retained in the site database and in the destination mailbox for as long as it is useful for that correspondence, and is deleted on request.
We do not sell this information, we do not add contact-form addresses to any mailing list, and we do not use them for anything other than replying to you.
Information collected automatically
Google Analytics 4. This site runs Google Analytics via the Site Kit plugin. It records pages viewed, approximate location derived from a truncated IP address, device and browser type, the referring site, and how you move between pages. It is used in aggregate — to see which guides are read and which are ignored — and is not used to identify individual visitors. Google acts as our processor for this and may transfer data outside the UK and EEA under its standard contractual clauses. You can prevent it entirely with Google’s opt-out browser add-on, or by blocking analytics cookies in your browser.
Google Search Console. Connected for search performance reporting. It reports aggregated search queries and click data and does not give us anything that identifies you.
Server logs. Our host records standard web-server access logs, including IP address, timestamp and requested URL. These are kept for security and troubleshooting on the host’s own retention schedule.
Cookies and similar technologies
The site sets cookies in three situations:
- Analytics cookies set by Google Analytics, which distinguish returning visitors from new ones and measure session length.
- Functional cookies set by WordPress and the WP Super Cache plugin, which handle page caching and, if you submit the contact form, keep that submission working correctly.
- A consent cookie set by the GDPR Cookie Compliance plugin, recording your response to the cookie notice so it is not shown again on every page.
- Affiliate cookies set by the hotel or tour site you land on once you click one of the booking links described in this policy, used to attribute a booking rather than to profile your reading here. Our booking partner Stay22 works differently and sets no cookie at all; the section on affiliate links below sets out what it does instead.
You can block or delete any of these through your browser settings. Nothing on this site is gated, so refusing them costs you no content.
Affiliate links and booking partners
Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. Where a guide points at somewhere to stay, that link is usually one of them. Accommodation links are handled by Stay22, a booking-link service that adds a referral tag when you click through to a hotel or booking site. If you go on to book, the booking site pays us a small commission. The price you pay is the same either way, and nothing on this site is behind a paywall or conditional on using those links.
What that means for your data: when you click one of these links, the partner receives the fact that the click came from this site, along with the standard technical details any website receives, and sets its own cookie or identifier so that a booking made afterwards can be attributed and the commission paid. Florence Tourism Guide never sees your booking, your travel dates, your name or your payment details — what comes back to us is a count of clicks and, occasionally, the fact that a booking happened.
Once you follow one of those links you are on the booking partner’s own site, under their privacy policy, and this one stops applying. If you would rather not be tracked that way, blocking third-party cookies in your browser stops the attribution the booking sites do with cookies, and the cookie settings on this site let you refuse the Stay22 script described in the next paragraph; the links still work and the price is unchanged.
One detail is worth spelling out, because a cookie notice on its own would miss it. Stay22 runs a script on this site that rewrites booking links and identifies your device so a booking can be credited to us. It does this using characteristics of your browser and device rather than a cookie, and it stores an identifier in your browser’s local storage. You can refuse it in the cookie settings, and refusing does not limit what you can read here.
Images and embedded content
Some photographs in our guides are served from Pexels, the free stock photography library, rather than from our own server. Loading a page containing one of these means your browser makes a request to Pexels, which will see your IP address and user agent in the same way any website you visit does. Guides also link out to official operator websites — museums, rail companies, the Comune di Firenze. Those sites have their own privacy policies, and this one does not cover them.
Comments
Comments are closed across this site and no comment data is collected. If you commented here in the past, that data has been deleted.
Children
This site is intended for adults planning travel. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 16. If you believe a child has sent us information through the contact form, tell us and it will be deleted.
Your rights
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to receive it in a portable form. In practice, for almost every visitor the only such data is a contact-form message, and we will delete it on request. Ask through the contact page; we will respond within one month. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Security and changes
The site is served over HTTPS and kept on current WordPress and plugin versions. No transmission over the internet is ever completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.