Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how we handle information at besttimeinjapan.com when you visit. We collect as little as possible — we have no user accounts, no sign-up, and no contact forms.

What we collect

We do not ask you for personal information, and we do not show ads. The information involved is:

• Theme preference — your browser’s local storage (under the key theme) remembers your theme setting (light, dark or automatic), so the website appears the way you prefer next time. It stays on your device and is not sent to us.
• Your favourites — tours you mark as favourites are stored locally in your browser (local storage). This stays on your device and is not sent to us.
• Your weather units — on the weather pages you can switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit. Your choice is remembered in your browser’s local storage (under the key btij:weather-units) so the pages read the way you prefer next time. It stays on your device and is not sent to us.
• Usage statistics — we measure how the website is used overall, such as which pages are most visited and which links people click, with Plausible Analytics, open-source software that runs on our own server in the European Union. Nothing leaves our infrastructure and no third party receives the data. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. To tell visits apart within a day it uses a one-way hash of your IP address and browser, salted with a value that changes every day and is then discarded, so the hash cannot be reversed and a visit on another day is not recognised as you. Your IP address is used only to derive your country and is never stored. The reports we see are aggregate counts, not individual visits.
• What you search for — when you use the search box, the words you typed and how many results they returned are recorded by the same analytics, on our own server. We read this to see what visitors are looking for and which searches our website cannot yet answer. It is not linked to anything else about you, and we ask that you do not type personal information into the search box.
• Basic server logs — like most websites, our hosting may record standard technical data (such as IP address and browser type) for security and reliability. We do not use this to identify you.

Cookies and local storage

Browsing the public pages sets no cookies at all — not by us and not by our analytics, which is why you see no cookie banner here. Your theme preference, your favourites and your weather units are all kept in your browser’s local storage and never leave your device. (The password-protected area we use to edit this website sets a sign-in cookie, but browsing the public pages never does.) We use no advertising cookies and no tracking across other websites.

You can clear local storage at any time through your browser settings. Browser extensions that block analytics work here too; the website behaves the same without it.

Affiliate partners

When you click an affiliate link and visit a partner’s website, that partner may set its own cookies and collect data under its own privacy policy. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, third-party practices. See our Affiliate Disclosure.

Weather data

The forecasts on our weather pages come from MET Norway (the Norwegian Meteorological Institute), whose data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. We fetch it from our own server, once per prefecture and shared between all visitors — your browser never contacts them, so no information about you, your device or your IP address is sent to MET Norway. They embed nothing in our pages and set no cookies. We convert the figures into your chosen units and summarise them into hourly and daily values.

Children

Our website is intended for a general audience and is not directed at children.

Your choices

Because we hold no data that identifies you — our analytics keeps only aggregate counts — there is nothing for us to delete on request. You control your theme preference, your favourites and your weather units directly in your browser: clearing this website’s local storage removes all of them.

Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. The latest version will always be available on this page.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Contact us at besttimeinjapan@gmail.com.