Privacy summary

Who is responsible

Simo Parviainen (Polkuopas), hei@polkuopas.fi. Polkuopas is a service run from Finland.

What the English pages collect

The English pages have no sign-in and do not ask you for personal details. We count visits with the analytics service PostHog (EU Cloud, Frankfurt), which processes the data on our behalf. It works in two ways, depending on your choice in the cookie banner.

Before you choose, or if you decline cookies

We record page views and a few other events as counts. Each event stores the page path, the website you came from (the domain only), your device type, and your country and approximate locality, which are worked out from your IP address. Your IP address itself is not stored in the event data. We also record counts of the actions you select. Each event gets its own random identifier that is never reused, so two events cannot be linked to the same visitor and you are not recognised as a returning visitor. No analytics cookies are used in this mode. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in aggregate usage data without identifiers, to improve the service (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)).

If you accept cookies

An analytics cookie is stored in your browser so that we can recognise returning visitors on the same device. It expires after about 12 months. The legal basis is your consent (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). We also collect technical error reports, such as the error message, the stack trace, the page address and the browser type, so that we can fix faults. They are stored in the EU, and no session recording is involved.

Your choice

We store your choice in one cookie named phog_consent. It is a technical cookie that remembers whether you accepted or declined. It is not used to track you, and it lasts about 12 months. You can change your choice at any time under Cookie settings below. Withdrawing consent is as easy as giving it, and it does not affect processing done before.

The map and saved places

If you use the map, which is in Finnish, we record the zoom level, a size class for the visible area, whether the view showed no places, which filter groups you changed and how many filters are on. These events do not include the position on the map, any extra detail from the page address, your country or your locality. They get their own random identifier even if you have accepted cookies, and they are not linked to each other or to you. When you open a place, or save a place or route to your own list, the event records the identifier and type of the place or route and, when you open a place, its area name. If you have not accepted cookies, that event is not linked to you.

What we do not record

We do not record mouse movements or screen recordings. The one exception is an invitation-only beta test page, which is not part of the English pages and records sessions only if you have accepted cookies.

How long data is kept

PostHog keeps analytics events and error reports for up to 7 years under our current plan. This period cannot be shortened in PostHog's settings. Map events contain no identifier that could link them to you and do not show who moved on the map, so their long storage does not concern you as an individual. We stop collecting these map events by 31 October 2027. Events already collected are kept for the period stated above.

Who receives data

We do not pass your data to outside parties and do not use it for marketing. Our service providers act as processors on our behalf. They include PostHog (analytics, EU Cloud), Vercel (hosting, our functions run in Frankfurt) and Supabase (database). They are US-owned companies. Any transfer outside the EU rests on each provider's data processing agreement, which includes standard contractual clauses or relies on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

Your rights

You have the right to see the data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to restrict its processing, to object to processing based on legitimate interest (Article 21), and to withdraw consent at any time. You can complain to the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuoja.fi, +358 29 566 6700). To use any of these rights, email hei@polkuopas.fi. We reply within one month. Events that carry a random one-time identifier cannot be traced back to you, so we cannot look them up.

Cookie settings

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