Privacy Policy

What we collect

Only what is necessary to provide the service and respond to you.

• Email addresses you give us through a form — business inquiries, property management inquiries, partner inquiries, and field guide ideas (name and email are optional there). Used only to follow up about the thing you submitted them for.
• Anonymous usage data through Google Analytics, aggregated and not identifying individual visitors. We use it to understand which pages and features are useful.
• Conversations with our guides. These are processed by the AI service described below, and we log them to our own systems for service quality and to spot patterns we should fix. We note an approximate location — a general city or region inferred from your network connection, never precise GPS — to understand which parts of the Hill Country people are asking about. Logs carry no name, email or identity, and are grouped only by an anonymous browser session.
• Your conversation, kept on your own device. The chat is stored in your browser for two hours so it is still there if you follow a link and come back. It never leaves your machine and it clears itself.

Recommendations from our community and guests

Some of what our guides say, and our most recommended map, draws on these: recommendations people share in our Texas Hill Country Community group and on our Facebook page, and the reviews guests leave after staying in a home we manage. We look for the places people consistently recommend and why, and keep only that: the place, the reason in our own words, and how many people said it.

We don't keep names, profiles, photos or quotes, and nothing on this site shows who said what. Local businesses people mention count toward their town but are not named. If you'd like something you shared left out, call See our phone number and we will take it out.

What we don't do

• We don't sell your information to third parties.
• We don't run third-party advertising trackers or behavioural profiling.
• We don't share your email with other businesses or partners beyond what is needed to answer you.
• We don't authorise AI providers to train their models on conversations from this site.

Third-party services

• Anthropic processes the guide conversations. Messages are sent to their API to generate a reply.
• Google Analytics for aggregate traffic measurement, configured with privacy-respecting defaults.
• Web3Forms delivers form submissions to our email and does not retain them beyond delivery.
• Netlify hosts the network. Standard server-level logs apply.

What our guides are and aren't for

They offer travel and area information for the Texas Hill Country. They are not a substitute for emergency services, professional medical or legal advice, real-time conditions, or guaranteed bookings. Verify anything time-sensitive — hours, prices, event schedules, water conditions — with the business or the gauge directly before relying on it.

Cookies

This site does not use tracking cookies. Anything set is strictly functional and carries nothing that identifies you.

Your choices

If you have given us your email and want it removed from our records, call See our phone number and we will remove it.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from children, including through the chat.

Updates to this policy

We may update this as the network changes — new features, new town sites, a change of AI provider, or a change in how we handle data. The effective date above moves when it does, and material changes are noted here.

13 October 2026: added how we use recommendations from our community group and guest reviews.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: call See our phone number.