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Guides Nepal

Privacy policy

Controller

The publisher of Guides Nepal (Cause We Are Young). Contact for any question or request: [email protected].

What is collected, and why

  • Account: you log in with the shared Cause We Are Young account (same publisher, its privacy policy), which manages your email address, password and Google sign-in. This site keeps a copy: display name, email address, language, whether the address is verified, date you accepted the terms and of your last login, and your role here (traveller, guide or agency); no password and no Google identifier. Purpose: recognising you on this site (performance of the service).
  • Guide or agency listing: everything you enter (presentation, languages, treks or places, rates, photos, contact details). It is public once approved, on this site and in the boxes of the Cause We Are Young sister sites (Trek Nepal…): name, type, photo, badge, rating and languages; when you comment on Trek Nepal, Visa Nepal or Visit Nepal with your account, the listing’s type (“Trekking guide”…), its photo and a link to it are shown next to your comments (box to untick in “My account”); the phone number is never shown, WhatsApp only if the site enables it. Purpose: the directory.
  • Supporting document (certificate of an agency without a TAAN listing; a guide’s licence once these checks are in place): number, expiry date and date of the check. The document you send (photo or PDF) is only seen by the administrator and is deleted as soon as it has been checked. Purpose: the “Registered agency” and “Licence verified” badges.
  • Agency team: name, role, languages and photo of the members an agency adds, published on its listing; the agency undertakes to have their consent.
  • Agencies: to verify an agency, the site looks it up in the public TAAN directory (Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal) and keeps the name, registration number, email address and phone number listed there; a confirmation link is sent to that address. Purpose: the “Registered agency” badge.
  • Messages between travellers and guides, and reviews (published with your first name and the initial of your last name). A review can be left without an account: we then keep the name and email address given in the form (the address is never shown and is only used to confirm the review and to tell you when it is published or when the guide replies); if you ever sign in to Guides Nepal with a Cause We Are Young account at the same, verified address, your reviews are attached to it. Purpose: putting people in touch and informing travellers. The site administrator may read a conversation for moderation and safety (a reported message, soliciting, scams, abuse): they may then block it or delete a message, and each reading is recorded in their log (legitimate interest: protecting travellers and guides). To help, each message is checked automatically (phone number, email address, link, payment request, the same text sent to several guides): a message spotted this way is only pointed out to the administrator, it is neither blocked nor changed, and no decision is made without them. Messages are used for nothing else and are never published. With each review we also keep the country it was sent from, derived from your IP address by Cloudflare (the address itself is not kept): only the administrator sees it. Purpose: spotting fake reviews (legitimate interest).
  • Account activity: a log of actions taken with your account (logins — those refused for a wrong password are logged by the shared account —, listing changes with the names of the fields changed, sending a message or a review — never their content), with the date and, for logins and when posting a review, an encrypted fingerprint of the IP address that changes every day. Purpose: legitimate interest (account security, detecting fake reviews, monitoring and improving the service). Visible to the administrator only.
  • Security: to limit abuse (sending messages, reviews, emails, repeated calls), the site keeps a counter tied to a fingerprint of your IP address (computed with a secret key, never the address itself) or to your account number, for 48 hours at most. Purpose: legitimate interest (security).

No data is sold or used for advertising.

Cookies

Two cookies, needed for the site to work (so they do not require consent): the session cookie __Host-gn_sess, set as soon as a login page or a form is opened; and, after you log in, __Host-gn_remember, which keeps you logged in for 30 days on this browser (a random token of which the server only keeps a hash, renewed regularly, 90 days at most; set unless you untick “Stay logged in on this device” (ticked by default) on the shared account’s sign-in page; erased when you log out, which applies to all your devices and all Cause We Are Young sites, and when you change your password). No advertising cookie or third-party tracker. Any audience measurement (Cloudflare Web Analytics) works without cookies.

Service providers

  • IONOS (France / European Union): hosting of the site and database, sending of emails.
  • Cloudflare (USA): delivery and protection of the site against attacks; sees requests, including your IP address.
  • The shared Cause We Are Young account (account.causeweareyoung.com, same publisher, hosted by IONOS): it identifies you and passes this site your name, email address, language and whether your address is verified; it is the one that calls on Google (USA) if you choose “Continue with Google”. When you are not logged in here, your browser asks it once per tab whether you are logged in there (to recognise you without a click): it only receives the request (IP address, browser), no data from this site, and only answers yes or no.
  • Automatic translation of listings: the headline, presentation and “what is included” of a listing, including before it is published, are sent to Anthropic (Claude, USA) or DeepL (Germany) to be translated. The “Improve my text” proofreading, at the guide’s request, sends the same texts to Anthropic. Reviews (title and text) and guides’ replies are sent the same way to Anthropic or DeepL as soon as they are submitted (after the email address is confirmed, where required), even before publication, to be translated into English and French. Neither receives the email address, name or phone number.

Transfers outside the European Union rely on the safeguards provided by the GDPR (standard contractual clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework).

Retention

  • Account, listing, messages and reviews: as long as the account exists; they are erased with it.
  • Review left without an account: like an account’s review, as long as it exists on the site (online, or kept by moderation after being rejected or removed), or until you ask for it to be erased; never confirmed, it is erased 30 days after it was sent (once its link has expired), along with your name and address if you have no other review left.
  • Supporting document (certificate, licence): until the administrator has checked it (a few days at most).
  • Links sent by email by this site (confirming a review or an agency): 7 days, then deleted; password and email address links belong to the shared account.
  • Security counters: 48 hours at most.
  • Account activity log: 12 months (erased with the account).
  • Log of moderation decisions: 3 years.
  • Log of emails sent by the site (recipient, type, date, result; never the content): 90 days.
  • Address an email bounced from as “does not exist”: kept so it is no longer written to automatically, until unblocked (then 90 days).
  • Database backups: 14 days, then overwritten.
  • TAAN directory pages cached to verify agencies: 24 hours.
  • Technical logs (site errors, IONOS server logs, which contain IP addresses): a few weeks.

Emails: preferences, news and outreach

  • Your preferences (“My emails” page): new messages, reviews, reminders, news. Every email of a category has a link to stop it. We keep the history of your choices (category, date, where the change came from) to be able to prove your consent or refusal; it is deleted with your account. Emails about your account are always sent.
  • News: a few emails a year to accounts that accept them; you can stop them at any time.
  • Introducing the directory to guides and agencies: the publisher writes to tourism professionals in Nepal whose address is public (TAAN directory, public pages) to introduce this free directory. Legal basis: legitimate interest (business-to-business outreach). These contacts are kept in a tool on the publisher’s computer, never published or shared. Every email has a “stop receiving our emails” link.
  • Do-not-email list: an address that asked to stop receiving our emails is kept (address, date, origin of the request) for as long as the site exists, even after an account is deleted: this is what lets us never write to it again.

Your rights

You can access your data, correct it (“My listing”; name, email and password in your Cause We Are Young account), receive it in a readable format, object to processing or ask for it to be erased. Deleting your account is immediate and permanent from your Cause We Are Young account (“My account” → “Manage my account”); it also erases your listings, messages and reviews, which disappear from backups within 14 days. For any other request: [email protected]. You may also complain to your data protection authority (in France, the CNIL: www.cnil.fr).

Updates

Policy updated on 24 October 2026.