Privacy Policy

What happens to information when you use this guide. We collect very little, we set no tracking cookies, and your saved trip plan stays in your browser.

Walk With Saint Francis is a free guide to the Via di Francesco pilgrimage. We earn no money from it, we carry no advertising, and we have no commercial interest in learning about you. That shapes everything below: we collect very little.

This page explains, in plain language, what happens to information when you use walkwithsaintfrancis.com.

Who is responsible for this site

This site is published and operated by ThornroseGrp, based in North Carolina, United States.

You can reach us at hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com, and a person will read it.

Under European data protection law (the GDPR), ThornroseGrp is the "data controller" for this site.

A note about who will own this guide. A nonprofit organization, Footsteps with Saint Francis, is being formed to take over this guide. That has always been the plan — it is part of why this site carries no advertising and no affiliate links. When the transfer happens, the nonprofit will become responsible for the information described on this page, and we will update this page to say so.

The short version

  • We do not use advertising, tracking, or profiling.
  • We do not set advertising or analytics cookies.
  • We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
  • In the current setup, your saved trip plan stays in your own browser.
  • The site never asks for your location.
  • We do not run a newsletter or a contact form, and pilgrim account features are not offered at this time.

If any of this changes, we will update this page before the change takes effect.

Aggregate page statistics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views. It sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser, and does not follow you to other websites. It does not use a persistent identifier and does not build a profile of you.

It records the path of the page viewed, the site you arrived from, and general technical details such as country, browser, and device type. Your IP address is used momentarily to work out the country and is not retained against you.

So we can see that a route page was read some number of times. We cannot see that you read it, and we cannot connect one page view to the next.

We do not use Google Analytics. There is no advertising or marketing technology on this site.

The site's code also contains optional custom events, such as "GPX downloaded" or "added to plan". These are switched off in the current production configuration and transmit nothing. If we ever turn them on, we will say so here first.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding which parts of the guide are useful, using a method that does not identify anyone.

Hosting, request logs, and security

This site runs on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes technical request information — including IP address, browser type, and the address requested — to deliver pages, keep the site available, and protect it from attacks and abuse. Cloudflare may set short-lived technical cookies for security and traffic management; see the Cookies and Analytics page.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in operating and protecting a public website.

Your trip plan

When you save stages, towns, or places to your plan, that list is stored in your own web browser, using a feature called local storage.

The site can also synchronise a plan to an account, but that path only runs when someone is signed in. While public sign-in and plan synchronisation are switched off, your plan stays in your browser and we do not receive a copy. If you clear your browser data, or use a different device, the plan is gone — that is the trade-off for keeping it private.

We mention this because it is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. If we later offer accounts with plans that sync between devices, that will be optional, and we will update this page before it goes live.

Maps

Map tiles come from the OpenStreetMap Foundation. When a map loads, your browser requests those tiles directly, so OpenStreetMap's servers receive technical request information — your IP address, your browser, the referring page, and the tiles requested — as they would on any site that uses their maps. They act as an independent provider under their own privacy notice, published at osmfoundation.org.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in showing pilgrims where the trail goes, using open map data rather than a commercial provider that would profile you.

Images, media, and downloads

Photographs, media, and downloadable route files are served from our own domains and from our storage providers. Requesting them involves the same technical information any web request involves.

When you follow a link to a booking platform, a transport operator, a sanctuary, or a GPS app, that site receives the request and applies its own privacy notice. We configure this site so those links pass on only our domain name, not the specific page you were reading.

What we do not do

  • No pilgrim accounts, user profiles, or personalisation at this time. There is no sign-in on the site at all — the account pages, including the sign-in form, are switched off.
  • No newsletter and no marketing email.
  • No comment system, forum, or public posting.
  • No payments — nothing on this site is for sale.
  • No request for your device location; the site is configured so that it cannot ask.
  • No social media buttons, tracking pixels, or embedded third-party widgets on the guide pages.
  • No sale of personal data, and no sharing of it for anyone else's marketing.

Information about accommodation hosts and businesses

This section is about the hostels, convents, guesthouses, and other places listed in the guide, and the people who run them.

We keep a database of places along the trail so that pilgrims can plan. For some of them we hold contact details — a phone number, an email address, sometimes a WhatsApp number or a host's name. We obtain these from the place's own website, from booking platforms and tourism directories, from other published sources, and sometimes directly from the host.

Ordinary accommodation pages on this site are designed to leave those details out. Visitors see a place's own website and booking link. Direct host-contact fields are withheld from the public data responses that build those pages, and that restriction is applied in our database as well as in the website's design — so the pages are not a bulk source of host phone numbers and email addresses.

Two honest caveats. A small number of listings still contain a contact value inside their written description, and we are correcting them. Some restricted internal and export tools can still reach these fields, and we are reviewing them. Please do not collect or reuse any contact detail you do find here for marketing, resale, or any bulk purpose.

Legal basis. We rely on our legitimate interest in maintaining an accurate, free, non-commercial guide for pilgrims walking the route, balanced against the limited and largely professional nature of the information held. We keep a record of that assessment and will provide a summary on request. Where a host has specifically asked to be listed and given us their details for that purpose, and we hold a record of it, we treat that as consent, and you may withdraw it at any time.

How long we keep it. We keep a place's record for as long as it is part of the guide, review it periodically, and remove it on request.

If you run a place listed here, you can ask us to:

  • show you what we hold about you, and where we got it;
  • correct anything that is wrong;
  • remove your contact details, or your listing entirely;
  • stop listing you at all.

Write to hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com and say which place you are asking about. We reply within one month, and there is no charge in ordinary cases.

Photographs of people

Photographs on this site come from our own photography and from licensed or openly licensed sources, with credit shown on the image credits page. Some may show identifiable people, usually incidentally.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in illustrating a cultural and religious route.

If you recognise yourself and would like a photograph taken down, write to hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com and we will remove it.

Photographers, licensors, and contributors

Where an image credit names a photographer, creator, or licensor, we publish the attribution that the licence or permission requires, and we keep a rights record so that we can show the image is used lawfully.

Legal basis: compliance with licence terms, and our legitimate interest in being able to demonstrate that every image on the site is properly cleared.

If you write to us

If you email us — a correction, a privacy request, a takedown, or a question — we process your message and your address in order to answer it, and we keep the correspondence for as long as we need it to handle the matter and to show that we handled it properly. For rights requests we may need to confirm who you are before we act.

Legal basis: compliance with our legal obligations, and our legitimate interest in running the guide.

Who else handles this information

  • Cloudflare — hosting, security, and cookieless page statistics.
  • Supabase — database and media storage.
  • OpenStreetMap Foundation — serves map tiles directly to your browser, as an independent provider.
  • Sites you choose to visit — receive your request when you follow a link, as independent providers.

We do not share personal information with anyone else, and we do not sell it.

Where your data goes

ThornroseGrp operates from North Carolina, in the United States, so information handled for this site is processed in the United States as well as wherever our providers operate.

Where personal data of people in the European Economic Area is transferred outside it, that transfer relies on the safeguards set out in our providers' data processing terms. You can ask us for details of those safeguards by writing to hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com.

How long we keep things

  • Aggregate page statistics — held by Cloudflare for a limited period and then deleted. They are never linked to you, and we keep no separate copy.
  • Request and security logs — kept by Cloudflare for a short period for security and troubleshooting.
  • Accommodation and host records — for as long as the place is part of the guide, and removed on request.
  • Images and their attribution records — for as long as the image is published, plus a record of its licence afterwards.
  • Correspondence and rights requests — for as long as we need to handle the matter and demonstrate that we handled it properly.
  • Your trip plan — in your browser until you delete it. While sign-in is switched off, we do not hold a copy.

Your rights

If the GDPR applies to our handling of your personal data, you have the right to:

  • ask what we hold about you and get a copy of it;
  • have inaccurate information corrected;
  • have information deleted;
  • restrict how we use it;
  • object to processing based on our legitimate interests — including our listing of your business or contact details;
  • receive information you gave us in a portable format, where that right applies;
  • withdraw consent, where we rely on consent;
  • complain to a supervisory authority.

To exercise any of these, email hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com.

We answer within one month. If a request is complicated we may extend that by up to two further months, and we will tell you why. Requests are free, although we may charge a reasonable fee or decline where a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

You can complain to the supervisory authority in the country where you live, where you work, or where you think the problem happened. In Italy that is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (garanteprivacy.it).

Children

This guide is written for a general adult audience, and we do not knowingly ask children for personal information. Like any website, our infrastructure processes technical request data whenever a page is visited, whoever the visitor is. We do not offer accounts or submission features to children.

Changes to this policy

If we change how this site handles information — for example, if we turn on pilgrim accounts, or enable event analytics — we will update this page and change the date at the top before the change takes effect. If the change is significant, we will say so plainly on the site rather than quietly editing this page.

Contact

ThornroseGrp North Carolina, United States hello@footstepswithstfrancis.com