Policies
What Overlanding Life stores, why, who else touches it, and how to take it back. No advertising, no analytics, no tracking.
Teton Range, Wyoming
This page describes what the site does today.
We collect what you give us, to do the thing you asked for. There is no advertising on this site, no analytics service, no tracking pixels and no social media widgets. We do not sell personal information, and we do not build profiles of visitors.
You can read almost everything here without telling us anything. You can save places without an account: they stay in your own browser.
When you ask for build quotes, ask for a business listing, write to us, send a correction, share a build, suggest a club or an event, report an accessibility problem or join the membership waiting list, we store what you typed, the page you sent it from and the time. We also store the internet address the form came from, which we use only to stop floods of automated submissions.
A copy of the message goes by email to the people who run the site, so that somebody reads it. A quote request exists to be passed on: when you send one, you are asking us to give your project details and contact details to businesses that do that kind of work, and we do that for that request only.
We do not add you to a mailing list because you wrote to us.
An account is optional and free. It holds your email address, which is how you sign in; a name and home state if you choose to give them; the vehicles you describe; the pages you saved; and your trips.
There are no passwords. We email you a link that signs you in once and expires in twenty minutes. We keep only a scrambled fingerprint of that link and of your session, so a copy of our database could not be used to sign in as you. Signing in sets one cookie, named ol_s, which keeps you signed in for up to sixty days or until you sign out. Scripts on the page cannot read it, and it is sent only to this site. We set no other cookies. Cloudflare, which protects the site from attacks, may set a short-lived security cookie of its own when it needs to tell people from robots.
With your session we store the name of your browser as it identifies itself, and with each request for a sign-in link the internet address it came from, to limit abuse.
A trip holds its name, dates, notes and waypoints: the names, coordinates and notes you gave them. Trips are private. Nobody else can see one unless you create a share link for it.
A share link contains a long random code. Anyone who has the link can see that trip’s name, dates, notes and waypoints, and your name if you gave one. It never shows your email address. The code travels in the part of the address after the # sign, which browsers do not send to servers, so it does not appear in our logs. Turning sharing off kills the link at once; turning it on again makes a different link.
A check-in records your position once, at the moment you press the button, with the time and any note you add. Nothing on this site follows your position in the background. People with your share link see your check-ins only if you ticked the box that says so, which is off until you tick it. You can remove any check-in, or all of them.
Do not skipA share link is a key. Anyone it is forwarded to can open it. Share where you are going, and especially where you are, only with people you would hand a key to, and turn the link off when the trip is over.
Saved places are kept in your browser’s storage and never leave it unless you sign in, when they are copied to your account so they follow you to your other devices. While you are signed in, your browser also keeps a one-character note saying so, which lets the save button reach your account; it identifies nobody and is removed when you sign out. The "share this view" button on the map builds a link from the map position on your own device; we store nothing when you use it.
If you allow the map to use your location, it is used in your browser to centre the map. It is sent to us only when you press "Check in here" on one of your trips.
The public land map is drawn from public mapping services, and your browser fetches the pieces directly from them. Those services see your internet address and the area of the map you are looking at, as any website you visit does. We do not send them anything else about you.
Services the maps call
The site and its database are kept with a web hosting company in the United States. Cloudflare sits in front of the site to deliver it quickly and protect it from attacks, and processes requests, including internet addresses, to do that. Email from the site, including sign-in links and the alerts that tell us a form arrived, is sent through Resend. Each of them handles the data only to provide that service to us.
We disclose personal information to others only when you ask us to, as with a quote request, or when the law requires it.
In your account you can download everything we hold about you as a file, and you can delete the account. Deleting it removes your trips, waypoints, check-ins, vehicles, saved places and sessions straight away, and any link you shared stops working. Copies in routine backups, where our host keeps them, age out on the host’s schedule.
To see, correct or remove something you sent through a form, write to us from the contact page and tell us the address you used.
This site is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
When what we store changes, this page changes with it, and the date below moves. If a change is a large one we will say so at the top of this page.
Last reviewed September 19, 2026.