NYAA Privacy Policy

Last Modified May 29, 2024

Not Your Average American, LLC relies on honest communication and finding improved ways to share information between North and South America. That means sharing lots of information including photos, videos, and details about trips and tours. Here is our privacy policy in everyday language.

Information We Collect

There are two basic ways we collect information:

  • Information that you give to us.
  • Publically available information.

Here is a little more explanation of each of these.

Information that you give to us

When you interact with our website, you may choose to make an account to leave a comment or to send us information via a form or survey. We ask you for a lot of basics, especially if you are a guide or tourism business, like where you work, what your specialties are, or what your travel interests might be. Some information we require (like an email address) and other information is voluntary (like your education). We ask for lots of information, especially from guides, so that we can help better market your services.

If you have a guide or business profile on our pages and would like it amended or deleted, please contact us in writing.

Comments

When visitors and members leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, including the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. All user comments can be deleted by the user. We retain these comments for an undetermined amount of time.

Reviews

When members leave testimonials, we collect the data shown in the review form. If you would like to amend or delete a testimonial, please contact us in writing.

Published Articles

When members write blog posts, we collect the data shown in those forms. We use the information to publish blog posts.  The information given in these formats cannot be deleted after publication. If you would like a publication amended or deleted, please contact us in writing.

Media

For members who choose to participate in our blogging platform, you may upload images. If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS). Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. If you would like any media amended or deleted, please contact us in writing.

Contact forms

If you contact us using our contact form or similar form, we retain your email address and the content of the email indefinitely. We do not automatically add your name to our email lists. If you would like us to delete any past contact with our website, please let us know in writing.

Interact Quizzes

If you take one of our Interact Quizzes and choose to opt into our email list, we will keep your information on our MailChimp server. Otherwise, quiz information is not tied to an individual person.

Information that is publically available.

We collect information using Google Analytics. This tool helps us know how many visitors we have on any given day, their country of origin, how old they are, and what their likes and dislikes might be. This information is never tied to individual names or accounts. To prevent your data from being used by Google Analytics, not just on our page but on others as well, please install this opt-out browser add-on: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/

There may also be information collected about you through other automatic data collection technologies, including details of your visits to our website, location data, information about your computer and Internet connection, and your IP address. The information we collect through these means is statistical data and does not include personal information, but we may maintain it or associate it with personal information we collect in other ways or receive from third parties.

Understanding our customers is key to helping South American business owners offer a better product.

How We Use This Information

We use the information that we collect about you, or that you provide to us, to present our website and its contents to you; to provide you with information or services that you request from us; and to better connect South American tourism operators, especially the smallest business and community tourism projects, with North American clients. This is the basic mission of Not Your Average American.

If you have an account on this site or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

 

Our Plug-In Services

Few WordPress websites function well without plugins and ours is no exception. Many of these plug-ins use cookies and/or store data. Here is an alphabetical listing of current plug-ins and how we utilize them here at Not Your Average American.

Google Analytics

Tracks user website behavior (page visits, clicks, etc.) to gain insight into how our platform is being used by our visitors. Google is constantly changing its setup so rather than address their current cookie usage, we ask that you confirm their latest settings.  To prevent your data from being used by Google Analytics, not just on our page but on others as well, please install this opt-out browser add-on: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/

ConvertKit

In the past, we used Mailchimp. If you have signed up to receive our newsletter, your email address, zip code (if offered), first name, and last name were saved on the MailChimp database. Some information from Interact Quizzes, registration forms, or account updates like member role, language spoken, and travel interests may also be kept in this database. This information has been transferred to ConvertKit.

Advanced Tracking with ConvertKit includes adding a subscriber parameter that allows WordPress to sync information, UTM parameters so that Google Analytics can track traffic and activity from all URLs, and hashed subscriber email to allow third parties like ConvertKit to track subscribers without using cookies.

Word Press

If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to save your name, email address, and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies 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.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

WPML

WPML uses cookies to identify your current language, the last visited language, and the language of users who have logged in.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

If at any time you have questions about this policy, please contact us.