Browsing OddWay needs no account. There are no tracking pixels and no analytics service watching you read. Fonts and images are served from our own domain, so loading a page does not report anything to a third party.
Advertising
Some slots on the site are paid for. They are labelled Advertisement and they are not an ad network: there is no third-party script, no cookie, no pixel and no page view reported to anybody. A sponsor slot is a name, a sentence and a link, written into the site the same way a trip is.
That means an advertiser learns nothing about you unless you click their advert, at which point you are on their website and their privacy policy applies rather than ours. We do not tell them who clicked, because we do not know.
Advertisers pay through Stripe and give us a business name, a website, a description and an image. If you are the advertiser rather than the reader, that is the data we hold about you, and you can have it removed by asking.
If OddWay ever moves to a real advertising network this page will change first, and say so plainly, because that would be a different arrangement entirely.
If you make an account
An account does two things: it lets you post photos of places you have been, and it keeps a bucket list of places you mean to get to. Nothing else on the site requires one.
We store:
- Your email address, so you can sign in and reset your password. It is not shown to anyone and not added to any mailing list.
- Your password, hashed by our authentication provider. We never see it and cannot recover it.
- A display name, which is public and appears next to your photos. It is set once and cannot be changed afterwards, so pick something you are content to be credited as.
- A bio and a profile picture, if you add them. Both are public.
- Your bucket list — which stops you have saved, and when. This is private. There is no sharing, no public view and no count shown anywhere; the database will not return another account’s list even if asked.
Photos you upload
Photos are public, credited to your display name, and shown on the page of the place they were taken as well as in the gallery.
Location and camera data are stripped before the file leaves your device. A photo from a phone normally carries the exact coordinates it was taken at, the time, and often a device identifier. We remove all of it in your browser by redrawing the image, so none of it ever reaches our servers. The photo is also resized, which is why it uploads faster than you might expect.
You can delete your own photos at any time. We can also remove a photo or block an account, which hides everything that account has posted.
Suggestions
If you send a correction or suggest a place, we store what you wrote. Including an email address is optional and it is used only to ask a follow-up question about that suggestion. Suggestions are never published and cannot be read by anyone but us.
Your location
When you ask for what is near you, your browser hands the page your coordinates and the distances are worked out on your device. They are not sent to us and not stored.
Route planning
Places you type into the route search are sent to OpenRouteService to be turned into coordinates and a route. Map tiles come from OpenFreeMap. Neither receives an account or an identifier from us, but both see the request, which means they see the places you asked about.
Who else handles it
We do not run our own servers. These companies process data on our behalf. Most are in the United States; the two mapping services are not, and that is worth knowing because a routing request carries where you are going:
- Supabase — the database, sign-in and photo storage.
- Vercel — hosting. Serves the pages and keeps short-lived request logs.
- Resend — sends us an email when a suggestion arrives, and sends advertisers the link they need after paying.
- Stripe — takes payment for advertising, and only for that. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own pages and never touch ours; we hold an email address, a customer reference and a subscription reference, which is what tells us whether an advertisement is still paid for. Nobody browsing the site is sent to Stripe or known to them.
- OpenRouteService — works out the route between the two places you type in, so it necessarily receives them. Run by HeiGIT, a non-profit attached to Heidelberg University, in Germany. Requests leave the United States to reach it.
- OpenFreeMap — the map tiles. Run by one person on dedicated servers in Europe, served through a content network. It takes no registration, sets no cookies and keeps no user database, which is a large part of why we chose it over the commercial alternatives.
The shop
Shop the OddWay is our shop, and it runs on Shopify rather than here. If you buy something, your name, address and payment details go to Shopify and to the printers who make and post the goods. None of it reaches this site, and we could not look it up here if we wanted to.
That means the shop has its own privacy policy, which is the one that applies once you follow the link. This page covers taketheoddway.com and nothing else.
Stopping abuse
The suggestion form and the address search are open to anybody, which makes them worth flooding. To count how often one person uses them, we keep a scrambled version of your network address against a counter for up to a day.
It cannot be turned back into an address, nobody reads it, and it is deleted after a day. It exists so that one visitor cannot spoil either of those things for everybody else.
We do not sell data to anyone, and there is nothing here worth selling.
Getting rid of it
You can delete any photo you have posted from your account page.
You can also delete the whole account, from the bottom of the same page. That removes your profile, your bucket list, every photo you have posted and the image files themselves. It asks once to be sure and then does it immediately — no email, no waiting on us, and no undo.
If something goes wrong partway through, the page says so and nothing is deleted. Write in through the suggestion box if that happens.
Children
Accounts are for people aged 13 and over. Signing up asks for your date of birth to check that.
We do not store it. The date is checked in your browser and discarded — keeping a database of children’s birthdays in order to keep children out would be a strange way to protect them.
Browsing needs no account and no age.
This page describes what the site actually does. If you find something here that does not match how OddWay behaves, that is a bug and we would like to know about it.