1. Who we are
Geo Quest Adventures (referred to as "we", "us" or "the site") is an independent free educational website for children, parents and teachers, accessible at www.geoquestadventures.com. This Privacy Policy explains what information is collected when you visit the site, what we do with it, and what your rights are. If you have any questions, please reach us via our Contact page.
2. Information we collect directly
None that identifies you personally. Geo Quest Adventures does not require any account, sign-up or login. We do not ask for your name, email address, age, location, school, or any other personal information in order to use the games and quizzes.
The only direct information we receive from you is when you voluntarily fill in our Contact form. In that case we receive the name, email address and message you choose to send us, and we use that information solely to reply to you. We do not add you to any mailing list and we never sell or share contact-form data.
3. Information stored on your device
Your quiz progress, star ratings and best scores are saved in your browser's local storage on your own device. This information never leaves your device, is never sent to our servers, and cannot be tied back to you as a person. If you clear your browser data, your progress will be reset.
4. Cookies and analytics
We use Google Analytics (gtag.js) to understand which pages and games are most popular, so we can prioritise improvements. Google Analytics sets a small number of cookies on your device that record an anonymous identifier and basic technical information (browser, device type, country at country-level, referring page).
We have configured Google Analytics in a privacy-respecting way: IP addresses are anonymised, advertising features are turned off, and data retention is set to the minimum allowed. We do not use Google Analytics to build advertising profiles of visitors, and we do not knowingly use it to track children for marketing purposes.
5. Advertising — Google AdSense
Geo Quest Adventures is free because the site shows display advertisements served by Google AdSense. Because our site is directed at children, we have flagged the entire site as "directed to children" in Google's publisher controls. This setting instructs Google to:
- Disable personalised / behavioural advertising on all of our pages.
- Show only contextual ads, chosen based on the topic of the page rather than a profile of the visitor.
- Honour the protections of children's privacy laws including COPPA in the United States.
Google, as a third-party vendor, may use cookies (such as the DoubleClick DART cookie) to serve ads on this site. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visits to this site and other sites on the internet — except that, because we have marked our site as directed at children, this behavioural targeting is switched off for our pages.
You can review Google's advertising practices and opt out of personalised ads across all sites at google.com/policies/technologies/ads/ and aboutads.info.
We have also blocked sensitive ad categories (gambling, alcohol, dating, weapons, get-rich-quick schemes, and other categories inappropriate for children) at the publisher level. If you ever see an advertisement on our site that you believe is inappropriate for a child, please report it via our Contact page.
6. Children's privacy (COPPA, GDPR-K, UK Children's Code)
Geo Quest Adventures is intended for children. We comply with the principles of the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the EU General Data Protection Regulation as it applies to children, and the UK Age Appropriate Design Code (the "Children's Code"). Specifically:
- We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.
- We do not require any user, child or adult, to create an account.
- We do not enable behavioural-advertising profiling on any page of our site.
- We do not allow user-generated content, comments, chat or any social interaction between users.
If you are a parent or guardian and you believe we have inadvertently collected information about your child, please contact us immediately and we will delete it.
7. Data retention and security
Contact-form messages are retained only as long as needed to respond to your enquiry, and are deleted within 12 months. Server logs (which contain anonymised IP addresses and request paths) are retained for 30 days for security and debugging purposes, then deleted automatically. We use industry-standard HTTPS encryption for all traffic to and from the site.
8. Your rights
Under GDPR (in the UK and EU) and similar laws elsewhere, you have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to ask for it to be corrected or deleted, and to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. Because we collect almost no personal data in the first place, in practice such requests will usually relate to messages you've sent us via the contact form. To make a request, please use the Contact page.
9. Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes to the site or to applicable law. The "Last updated" date at the top of the page will always reflect the most recent revision. Material changes will be flagged on the home page for at least seven days.