Privacy Policy and Legal Notices

Privacy Policy

General Provisions

On this website, A Teacher Traveling (ateachertraveling.com), I will only collect information about you that you voluntarily and directly submit for the purposes of posting a question or comment or by submitting information in order to make a purchase from my gift gift shop. Specific uses of your data are outlined in the respective sections below.

I will always respect your privacy. Any information that you provide via my website, in any form or for any use, will only be used by me and will not be released to any other party in any way, except when you make a purchase, in which case your name and shipping address will be provided to my supplier only for the purposes of fulfilling your order.

Other than this one exception, I will never sell or share any information that you provide through this site with anyone else.

I do not spam! However, unless you ask me not to, you may receive an occasional message from me to provide information directly related to the nature of our business-related relationship, such as newsletters, updates, specials, or other information that I feel would be useful and beneficial to you.

Specific Use of Collected Data

Visitor-Submitted Comments

When you leave comments anywhere on the site, be it on my blog or on a product page in my gift shop, I collect the data submitted on the comments form — generally your name, email address, comment text, and, if you include it, your IP address and browser user agent string — to help with spam detection.

If you use the Gravatar service (https://automattic.com/privacy/), after approval of your comment, your profile picture may become visible to the public in the context of your comment. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Visits to and Purchases from the Gift Shop

While you visit the shop, I track:

  • Products you’ve viewed: This will be used to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
  • Location, IP address and browser type: This is used for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping
  • Shipping address: I’ll ask you to enter this so I can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and then have my supplier(s) send you the order!

I’ll also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing the shop.

As mentioned, when you make a purchase from my shop, your name and shipping address will be provided to my trusted supplier only for the purposes of fulfilling your order. My supplier does not use this data for any purpose other than for shipping your order and does not share this information with any other party or use it for their own marketing purposes.

I will only use this information to:

  • Send you information about your account and order
  • Respond to your requests and inquiries
  • Process payments and prevent fraud
  • Set up your account for our store
  • Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
  • Improve our store offerings
  • Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

I do not ever view, collect, or store your credit card information at any point during the purchase transaction. For your protection, I only accept payments for shop purchases via PayPal for Business. You may pay using your personal PayPal account, but are not required to have a PayPal account in order to pay by credit card.

PayPal is well respected in the industry due to their highly secure payment system.

Cookies

If you leave a comment or make a purchase from my site, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and, for comments, your website address in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment or make a future purchase. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit a login page, a temporary cookie will be set to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

If you log in, additional cookies will be set up to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me,” your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Facebook Pixels

I use the standard Facebook cookie, known as a “Pixel,” in my Facebook advertisements to customize content, to provide social media features, and to analyze traffic to my shop.

This Pixel only indicates that you have previously visited my shop and does not reveal any specific personal information — your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, etc. — about you.

More information about the Pixel can be found on Facebook’s website.

Legal Notices (Affiliate Marketing)

The primary intention of this website is to serve as an information source on travel in Southeast Asia free of charge to my guests. You are in no way expected or obligated to make any purchase.

However, as a way to cover the costs of maintaining this site, as well as to defray the travel expenses associated with the site’s continued operation, in addition to my gift shop, I sometimes use affiliate links on some pages (but never on my product pages).

This means that if you click a referral link and decide to make a purchase, I will receive a small sales commission from that sale at no additional cost to you. I am paid solely by the vendor and the price of the product or service does not increase for you in order to pay my commission.

Please note that I will only recommend products and services that I have either used myself or are entirely convinced would be of value to you.