Who we are

Bush & Bay is a travel blog run by Wim and Sam. We write 4WD road trip guides, camping guides and itineraries for places across Australia — Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and New South Wales — and everything we publish is somewhere we’ve actually been.

The site lives at https://www.bush-and-bay.com and is operated by Bush and Bay Group Pty Ltd (ABN 93 649 263 427, ACN 649 263 427), of Queensland, Australia. Where this policy says “we”, “us” or “our”, that’s who we mean. Where it says “you”, we mean you — whoever’s reading, subscribing, commenting or just having a look around.

We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles set out in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). If you’re in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, California or another place with its own privacy laws, there are sections further down that cover the extra rights you have.

Any questions about any of this, email us at hello@bush-and-bay.com. A real person reads it.

The short version

We’re a small travel blog, not a data company. Here’s the whole thing in a few lines:

  • If you comment, we keep your comment and the details you typed in with it.
  • If you sign up for one of our maps, we keep your email address so we can send you the map and the occasional guide. You can leave whenever you like.
  • Ads on the site are managed by Mediavine, and advertising is where most of the data collection on this site happens. There’s a full section on that below.
  • We use Google Analytics to see which guides people find useful.
  • Some of our links are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
  • We don’t sell your personal information, and we never will.

The rest of this page is the detail behind those points.

What we collect, and why

Comments

When you leave a comment on the site, we collect the information you type into the comment form — your name, your email address, your website if you add one — along with your IP address and your browser’s user agent string. Those last two help us catch spam, which is a genuine problem when you run a site with an open comment section.

An anonymised string created from your email address (a hash) may be sent to the Gravatar service to check whether you have an account with them. You can read Gravatar’s privacy policy here. Once your comment is approved, your profile picture is visible to the public alongside it.

Our email list and the free maps

When you sign up for one of our Google My Maps lead magnets — the Robe map, the Eyre Peninsula map, and so on — or subscribe to our updates, we collect your email address and any name you give us. We use Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to run our email list.

Here’s what happens with it:

  • We send you the map you asked for, plus the link to our map library.
  • We tag your subscription with the region you signed up through, so that when we publish a new guide to somewhere you’re clearly interested in, we can send it to you and leave everyone else alone.
  • We send occasional trip guides and updates. Not many, and nothing else.
  • Kit records standard email engagement data, such as whether an email was opened and whether a link was clicked. We use this to work out which guides are worth writing more of.

We use double opt-in, which means you’ll get a confirmation email and nothing further happens until you click the link in it. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and unsubscribing takes one click. No hard feelings, ever.

Kit is based in the United States. Their privacy policy is here.

Contact form and emails

If you fill in our contact form or email us directly, we keep the message and your contact details so we can reply and so we’ve got a record of the conversation. We don’t add you to our email list just because you emailed us.

Photos and media

If you upload an image to this website — for example, attached to a comment — please avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) in them. Anyone visiting the website can download an image and extract that location data.

Worth knowing for your own photos too, honestly. A lot of people don’t realise their phone stamps the coordinates of their campsite into every shot.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how people find and use the site — which guides get read, how long people stay, which links get clicked, and roughly where in the world our readers are. This is aggregated, statistical information. We’re looking at patterns across thousands of visits, not at you individually.

Google Analytics sets cookies and processes data on Google’s servers. You can read Google’s privacy policy and, if you’d rather not be included at all, install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Advertising

The ads you see on Bush & Bay are managed by Mediavine, through their Journey program. Advertising is the part of this site that collects the most data, so we’ve included Mediavine’s own disclosure in full below rather than paraphrasing it.

If you’re in a region covered by consent laws — the EU, the UK and a growing list of others — you’ll see a consent pop-up the first time you visit, where you can accept or reject personalised advertising and change granular settings. You can change your choice at any time using the privacy settings link in our footer.

To be clear about one thing: rejecting personalised ads doesn’t make the ads disappear. It means you see non-personalised ones instead. Ads are what keep this site free to read and let us keep driving out to these places, so we’d rather be upfront about that than pretend otherwise.

Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.1)

The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the Website.

First party cookies are created by the website that you are visiting. A third-party cookie is frequently used in behavioral advertising and analytics and is created by a domain other than the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies, tags, pixels, beacons and other similar technologies (collectively, “Tags”) may be placed on the Website to monitor interaction with advertising content and to target and optimize advertising. Each internet browser has functionality so that you can block both first and third-party cookies and clear your browser’s cache. The “help” feature of the menu bar on most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, how to disable existing cookies and how to clear your browser’s cache. For more information about cookies and how to disable them, you can consult the information at All About Cookies.

Without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of the Website content and features. Please note that rejecting cookies does not mean that you will no longer see ads when you visit our Site. In the event you opt-out, you will still see non-personalized advertisements on the Website.

The Website collects the following data using a cookie when serving personalized ads:

  • IP Address
  • Operating System type
  • Operating System version
  • Device Type
  • Language of the website
  • Web browser type
  • Email (in hashed form)

Mediavine Partners (companies listed below with whom Mediavine shares data) may also use this data to link to other end user information the partner has independently collected to deliver targeted advertisements. Mediavine Partners may also separately collect data about end users from other sources, such as advertising IDs or pixels, and link that data to data collected from Mediavine publishers in order to provide interest-based advertising across your online experience, including devices, browsers and apps. This data includes usage data, cookie information, device information, information about interactions between users and advertisements and websites, geolocation data, traffic data, and information about a visitor’s referral source to a particular website. Mediavine Partners may also create unique IDs to create audience segments, which are used to provide targeted advertising.

If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices to opt-in or opt-out of this data collection, please visit National Advertising Initiative opt out page. You may also visit Digital Advertising Alliance website and Network Advertising Initiative website to learn more information about interest-based advertising. You may download the AppChoices app at Digital Advertising Alliance’s AppChoices app to opt out in connection with mobile apps, or use the platform controls on your mobile device to opt out.

For specific information about Mediavine Partners, the data each collects and their data collection and privacy policies, please visit Mediavine Partners.

Affiliate links

Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and go on to buy something, we may earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it doesn’t change what we recommend — we only ever link to gear we’ve used and places we’ve stayed.

When you click an affiliate link, the retailer or booking site may set a cookie to record that you arrived from us. That cookie is theirs, not ours, and it’s covered by their privacy policy rather than this one. We don’t receive your name, your payment details or anything else about your purchase — just a note that a sale came through our link.

Embedded content from other websites

Our guides include embedded content: YouTube videos of our trips, Instagram posts, Pinterest images, and Google My Maps showing campsites and tracks.

Embedded content from other websites behaves exactly as if you’d visited that other website directly. Those websites may collect data about you, set their own cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content — including tracking your interaction with it if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

The main ones we use are YouTube and Google Maps, Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest.

Server logs and hosting

Like nearly every website, our host keeps standard server logs recording IP addresses, browser types, pages requested and the time of each request. These are used for security, troubleshooting and keeping the site up.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files stored on your device. Here’s what’s set on Bush & Bay and how long each lasts:

If you leave a comment, you may opt in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience, so you don’t have to fill in your details again next time. They last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we set a temporary cookie to check whether your browser accepts cookies. It contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When we log in to run the site, several cookies save login information and screen display choices. Login cookies last two days, screen option cookies last a year, and choosing “Remember Me” extends the login to two weeks. Logging out removes them.

When we edit or publish an article, an additional cookie is saved in the browser. It contains no personal data and simply records the post ID of the article just edited. It expires after one day.

Advertising and consent cookies are set by Mediavine and their partners, as described above. Your consent choice is remembered for up to 13 months.

Analytics cookies are set by Google Analytics to distinguish one visit from another.

You can block or delete cookies through your browser settings at any time. Blocking all cookies will break some parts of this site, including the comment form.

Who we share your data with

We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t trade or rent it. We share it only with the services that make the site work:

  • Mediavine and their advertising partners, for the advertising described above. The full partner list is at mediavine.com/ad-partners.
  • Kit, which stores and sends our email list.
  • Google Analytics, for site statistics.
  • Our web host and security services, which process server logs and spam filtering on our behalf.
  • An automated spam detection service, which checks visitor comments.

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

We may also disclose information if we’re required to by law, or if it’s necessary to protect our rights, our readers or the site itself.

Where your data is sent

Several of the services above — Mediavine, Kit, Google — are based in the United States or process data on servers outside Australia. By using this site, commenting or subscribing, you accept that your information may be transferred to and stored in countries with different privacy laws to Australia’s.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

How long we keep things

Comments: comments and their metadata are kept indefinitely, so that follow-up comments from the same person can be recognised and approved automatically rather than sitting in a moderation queue.

Email subscribers: we keep your details until you unsubscribe, plus a short record afterwards so we don’t accidentally email you again. If you’d like your record removed completely, just ask.

Contact form messages: kept for as long as we might reasonably need them, then deleted.

Analytics data: retained according to Google Analytics settings, which are set to the shortest practical retention period.

Registered users (if any): for anyone who registers on the site, we store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit or delete their personal information at any time, except their username. Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Your rights over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can ask for an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including anything you have given us. You can also ask us to erase any personal data we hold about you. This doesn’t include data we’re obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security reasons.

More broadly, you can ask us to:

  • Access the personal information we hold about you
  • Correct anything that’s wrong or out of date
  • Delete your information
  • Stop sending you emails, at any time
  • Object to or restrict how we use your information

Email hello@bush-and-bay.com and we’ll sort it out. We’ll respond within 30 days, and we won’t charge you for it.

If you’re in Australia

You can complain to us first at hello@bush-and-bay.com. If you’re not happy with how we handle it, you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

If you’re in the EU, EEA or UK

Under the GDPR and UK GDPR you have the rights listed above, plus the right to data portability and the right to withdraw consent at any time. Our lawful bases for processing are your consent (for the email list and for personalised advertising), our legitimate interests (site security, spam prevention, understanding how the site is used) and, occasionally, legal obligation.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

If you’re in California or another US state with privacy laws

You have the right to know what personal information is collected, to request its deletion, to correct it, and to opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information for targeted advertising. Some US privacy laws define “sale” and “sharing” broadly enough to include the interest-based advertising described above.

You can exercise your opt-out through the privacy settings link in our footer, through the opt-out pages listed in the Mediavine section, or by emailing us. We won’t discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

Children

Bush & Bay is written for adults planning trips. The site isn’t directed at children under 16, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us their information, email us and we’ll delete it.

Security

We take reasonable steps to protect the information we hold — the site runs over HTTPS, we keep WordPress and its plugins updated, and access to our email list and dashboards is protected by strong passwords.

No website can promise perfect security, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What we can promise is that we don’t collect anything we don’t need, which is the best protection there is.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page when the way we handle data changes — a new tool, a new service, a change in the law. The date at the top always shows the last revision. If we make a significant change, we’ll say so on the site or in an email.

Get in touch

Questions, requests, or something on this page that doesn’t make sense?

Email: hello@bush-and-bay.com Contact page: https://www.bush-and-bay.com/contact-us/

Thanks for reading — and for caring enough about this stuff to get all the way down here.

Wim and Sam Bush & Bay