Anonymous browsing
RiverUpdate has no accounts and no login. You can read every page on this site without telling us who you are, and we are not building a profile of who reads which river. We do use Google Analytics to measure how the site is used in aggregate, which sets cookies in your browser — the next section explains exactly what that involves.
Our hosting provider (Vercel) records standard server access logs as part of their platform operation. Beyond the aggregate analytics described below, we do not correlate those logs with any other data source.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used in aggregate — which rivers people visit, roughly how many readers stop by, and which pages are popular. To do this, Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser and collects standard usage data, such as the pages you view and general device and approximate location information. We use this only to improve the site; we do not use it to identify you personally.
Google processes this data on our behalf. For details on what Google collects and how to control it, see Google's privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy). Most browsers and ad blockers can block analytics scripts if you would rather not be measured.
Affiliate cookies on retailer domains
When you click a "Buy from Amazon" button, the redirect lands on amazon.com. Amazon (through the Associates program) may set cookies on their own domain to track the referral and credit RiverUpdate for the sale. Those cookies live on Amazon's domain, not ours; we have no control over what they store or how long they keep it. Refer to Amazon's privacy notice for details on what they collect.
Affiliate redirector logging
We log anonymous click events with a per-click random identifier. We do not log your IP address or any browser fingerprint. The log lets us see "a click happened on this fly, from this river page, at this timestamp" — that is all. Nothing in the log identifies you as an individual.
One detail worth being explicit about: Amazon credits the referral using an Associates tag we add to the redirect URL — not the Referer header — so we do not rely on Referer for attribution. Your browser may still send a Referer to amazon.com when you click a Buy button; that Referer is sent by your browser directly and is not stored by us, and we do not override your browser's default. If you prefer your browser not send a Referer header, most browsers let you control that in their privacy settings.
The redirect itself uses HTTP status 302 (not 301) so we can rotate retailers or attribution parameters without browsers and CDNs caching an outdated destination.
USGS data attribution
Flow and temperature data come from the U.S. Geological Survey's public Water Data API. The data is provisional and may be revised by USGS in subsequent updates; we cite USGS as the source on every river page per their citation policy (waterdata.usgs.gov/citation). USGS does not know which users visit our site.
No advertising
We do not run display advertising on this site. Our only revenue source is affiliate commissions when readers buy through the Buy buttons on the fly recommendations widget. See the affiliate disclosures section of the terms of use for the FTC-required disclosure language.