Deep Dive
Privacy & Cookies
This is an educational, non-commercial site about whales. It has no accounts, no sign-up, no comments and no shop. This notice explains the one thing the site does collect — anonymous usage statistics — and confirms what it does not collect.
Browser permissions
This site requests no browser permissions. It never asks for your camera, microphone, location, notifications, clipboard, Bluetooth, or access to your files. If any website claiming to be this one asks for those, decline it.
Why we ask about analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which depth zones and species people actually read, so we can improve the guide. That is the only reason.
Analytics is off by default. Nothing is collected and no analytics cookies are set unless you choose “Allow analytics” in the banner. We use Google Consent Mode, so the tag stays blocked until you agree.
What is processed if you agree
- Pages and sections viewed, and how long you spend on them.
- Approximate location (country or city level), derived from your IP address.
- Device and browser type, screen size, and operating system.
- How you arrived (for example a search engine or a direct link).
- A randomly generated identifier stored in a cookie, so repeat visits are not double-counted.
Your IP address is anonymised (anonymize_ip) before storage. We do
not collect your name, email address or any other information that identifies
you personally, and we do not use this data for advertising or profiling.
Advertising, ad personalisation and ad-user-data storage are all disabled.
Cookies used
| Cookie | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|
_ga | Distinguishes visitors | 2 years |
_ga_Q3KFG7WBXB | Maintains session state | 2 years |
dd-analytics-consent |
Remembers your choice here (local storage, not sent anywhere) | Until you clear it |
The consent record is stored in your browser only. If you decline, no
_ga cookies are created at all.
Storage, sharing and retention
- Processor
- Google (for visitors in the EEA and the UK, Google Ireland Limited) processes this data on our behalf as our analytics provider. See Google’s Privacy Policy and Google’s data practices.
- Sharing
- We do not sell, rent or share your data with anyone else. It is not passed to advertisers or data brokers.
- Retention
- User- and event-level data is kept for the retention period configured in our Google Analytics property, then deleted automatically. Aggregated, non-identifying reports (such as “1,200 visits in July”) may be kept longer.
- Security
- The site is served only over HTTPS. Data in transit is encrypted, and the analytics data is held in Google’s infrastructure under their security controls.
Your choices
Analytics is entirely optional — the site works identically either way. You can:
- Allow analytics in the consent banner.
- Decline and keep reading with nothing collected.
- Change your mind at any time using “Analytics settings” in the site footer, or .
- Clear the cookies through your browser settings, per site or globally. Most browsers can also block cookies entirely or send a “Do Not Track” signal.
Legal basis
Where the GDPR applies, our legal basis for analytics is your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), which you give in the banner and may withdraw at any time without giving a reason. Withdrawing consent does not affect data already processed lawfully beforehand.
Contact
For any privacy question — including a request to access or delete data — write to privacy@whales-info.life. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
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