Effective date: August 30, 2026 · Last updated: August 30, 2026
This policy covers allaboutticks.com, an educational site about ticks and tick-borne disease published by Phillip George (see About the Team). It describes what the site collects, what third parties collect through it, and what you can do about that. It describes only what is actually in place today.
What we collect ourselves
Nothing, directly. Every page on this site is a plain HTML file served as-is. There is no database, no server-side code, and no first-party cookie set by us. We do not ask for your name, your email address, your location, or your health information, and there is nowhere on the site to enter them.
The one exception is local to your own device. The site's interactive pages, such as the tick identifier and quiz tools, keep your progress in your browser's session storage so that a page refresh does not lose your place. That data never leaves your computer, is not transmitted to us or to anyone else, and your browser discards it when you close the tab.
Two consequences follow from that, and both are worth stating plainly. First, we hold no profile of you and cannot recognise you between visits. Second, because we hold nothing, a request from you to see, export, or delete "your data" has no data to act on. If you would like that confirmed in writing, ask and we will confirm it.
Server logs held by our host
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes the technical information your browser sends with each request in order to deliver the page and to protect the service from attack and abuse. That typically includes your IP address, the date and time of the request, the URL requested, the HTTP status returned, the referring URL if your browser sent one, and your browser's user-agent string.
Those records are handled by Cloudflare as our service provider, under their own retention and security practices. We do not export them, join them to anything else, or use them to build audience profiles. Cloudflare's handling of this data is described in the Cloudflare privacy policy.
Advertising and cookies
This site carries advertising served by Google AdSense, which is how hosting and research time are paid for. See the Advertising Disclosure for how ads are kept separate from editorial content.
- Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
- Google uses the DoubleClick DART cookie to serve ads based on your visits to this site and other sites on the internet. This is a cookie set in your browser by Google's ad-serving domain, not by us, and we cannot read it.
- You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. Opting out stops ads being personalised; it does not remove advertising from the site.
- For vendors other than Google, you can opt out of personalised advertising from participating companies at aboutads.info/choices.
- The vendors that may serve advertising here are listed on Google's ad technology providers page.
- How Google handles data when you use a site that uses its advertising products is described in Google's privacy and terms for partner sites.
We have no access to the data Google's advertising cookies collect, no ability to read them, and no ability to delete them on your behalf. Your browser's own cookie controls and the opt-out links above are the effective levers. Where consent is legally required for advertising cookies, Google's consent mechanism for publishers presents that choice to readers in the relevant regions before personalised ads are served.
Embedded and third-party resources
A few resources on this site are loaded from other domains. Requesting them reveals your IP address and browser details to those domains, and some of them can set their own cookies:
- YouTube. The tick removal guide embeds one instructional video from YouTube. Loading that page requests the player from Google's servers, and YouTube may set cookies as a result. Pages without the embed do not contact YouTube.
- jsDelivr. The Bootstrap CSS and JavaScript used for the site's layout are loaded from the jsDelivr content delivery network on every page. jsDelivr receives the request needed to serve those files.
- DuckDuckGo. The site has no internal search index. The box on the search page hands your query to DuckDuckGo restricted to this domain, so the words you type there are sent to DuckDuckGo rather than processed here.
- Outbound links. The site links heavily to public health agencies and journals. Once you follow a link, that organisation's own privacy policy governs what happens next.
Email you send us
If you email the address on the Contact page, we receive whatever you put in the message and keep it in an ordinary email mailbox so that we can reply and keep a record of corrections. We do not add senders to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list, and we do not pass messages to advertisers or anyone else. Please do not send medical details: we cannot advise on an individual case, and we would rather not hold that information.
Children's privacy
All About Ticks is written for a general adult audience, including parents and caregivers looking for information on behalf of a child. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. As set out above, the site provides no mechanism for any reader to submit personal information to us. If you believe a child has sent us personal information by email, write to the address below and we will delete the message.
Your rights
Data protection law gives readers in several jurisdictions rights over personal data held about them. Those rights apply to whoever holds the data, so for this site they largely point at Google and Cloudflare rather than at us.
- EEA and UK. Under the GDPR and the UK GDPR you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, and portability. We hold no personal data about you, so there is nothing here to access, correct, or erase. For advertising data, use the Google Ads Settings link above and Google's own privacy tools; for server logs, Cloudflare acts as our processor.
- Canada. Under PIPEDA you may ask an organisation what personal information it holds about you and request access or correction. Our answer for this site is that we hold none. Complaints about a Canadian organisation's handling of personal information can be taken to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
- California. Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, California residents have rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share personal information, and we hold none to disclose or delete. Cross-context behavioural advertising served by Google is controlled through Google Ads Settings and your browser's cookie settings.
We do not set any first-party tracking cookie, so there is no first-party profile for a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off here. How third-party advertising vendors respond to those signals is set by their own policies.
Security
The site is served over HTTPS. Because there is no account system, no payment processing, and no database, there is no store of reader data on this site to breach. Email we receive is protected by the ordinary security of the mailbox it arrives in.
Changes to this policy
If what the site does changes, this page changes with it. Any revision is published here with a new "Last updated" date at the top, and the effective date is the date shown. If a change materially affects readers, such as adding analytics, a form, or a newsletter, we will describe what changed on this page rather than quietly editing a sentence. Because this is a static site with no accounts, we have no way to notify you directly; checking this page is the reliable method.
Contact us about privacy
Privacy questions, or a request to confirm in writing that we hold nothing about you, go to [email protected]. See the Contact page for what else that address is used for and how quickly we reply.