Privacy Policy

This page explains the limited data the site uses and discloses its current commercial relationships. Plain English throughout — no legal boilerplate.

SoCal Whales currently has no advertising provider and does not display paid advertisements. If that changes, this policy will be updated before advertising technology is enabled, including any required consent controls.

This site does not currently earn commission from booking links. Operator links go directly to each operator's own booking page.

If paid links are introduced, each will carry a clear nearby disclosure and this page and the Disclosure page will be updated before it goes live.

SoCal Whales is a static website — there are no accounts, no sign-up forms, and no comment sections. We do not collect your name, email address, or any personally identifiable information directly.

Standard web server logs may record your IP address, browser type, referring URL, and the pages you visit. These logs are held by Cloudflare (our hosting provider) and are used solely for security and traffic analysis. Cloudflare's privacy policy is at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy.

We use privacy-conscious, aggregate analytics to understand which pages are useful and when a visitor chooses a link to a whale-watching operator. For those link clicks, our reports record the page on SoCal Whales and the operator's website domain. We do not use this measurement to identify you personally, add tracking parameters to booking links, sell personal information, or follow what you do after you leave this site.

Page-view statistics come from Cloudflare Web Analytics, a Cloudflare service covered by the Cloudflare policy linked above. Our fonts are served from this site, so loading them does not contact any other company.

Tap the star (☆) next to a harbor in the sightings table and this site will remember it, so the table opens to that harbor next time you visit. This is stored in your browser's local storage under the key scw:harbor — not a cookie, and it is never sent to us or to anyone else. It only ever leaves your device if you clear it yourself.

To clear it, tap the star again, or use the "Clear" button that appears next to the sightings table once a harbor is remembered. Clearing your browser's site data does the same thing.

If you have questions about this privacy policy or how this site operates, you can reach us through the About page.