How Does This Site Collect and Protect Visitor Data?

Last updated: 12 February 2025

Introduction

RefugeeCamp.org publishes field-informed material on shelter planning, water and sanitation, nutrition logistics, and displacement case studies. Most of our readers are practitioners, students, and researchers who arrive looking for a specific technical reference and leave once they have it.

This policy exists to tell you, without legal fog, what happens to data while you read. It covers the automatic records our servers keep, the details you choose to hand over through a form, and the third parties that touch any of it. If something here is unclear, the Contact page is the fastest route to a human answer.

We have written this to be read, not skimmed past. Where the law gives you a right, we say so plainly.

Purposes of Processing

We process visitor data for three narrow reasons.

The first is keeping the site working. Server logs help us spot broken links, pages that fail to load, and the occasional bot trying to hammer a form. Without those records, a fault on a heavily used WASH article could sit unnoticed for weeks.

The second is understanding which material earns its place. Analytics tell us, in aggregate, that a particular shelter-site-planning piece gets read for around eight minutes while another is abandoned in roughly twenty seconds. That shapes what we revise next.

The third is straightforward correspondence. When you email us or submit a form, we use the details you provide to reply. That is the whole purpose, and the data goes no further.

External Services

A handful of outside providers make this site run, and honesty means naming the categories rather than pretending we host everything ourselves.

Our hosting and content-delivery layer stores the site files and serves them quickly to readers across different regions. By design, a CDN sees request data — the IP address and the file being fetched, because that is how it routes a page to you.

We use a web analytics platform to measure traffic patterns. Advertising networks are a planned addition rather than a current one; at the time of writing, no ad personalization runs on these pages. When that changes, this section and the Cookie Policy will be updated before any ad cookies are set, not after.

Information Collected

Two kinds of data reach us: the automatic and the volunteered.

Technical logs

Every web server records requests. Ours capture your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you visit, and the time of the request. This is standard infrastructure data, not a profile we build about you by name.

Contact submissions

If you write to us through a form, we receive whatever you typed — typically a name, an email address, and your message. You decide how much to share. A question about a nutrition-logistics figure needs far less than a partnership proposal.

Subscription inputs

Where the site offers a subscription, we hold the email address you enter so we can send what you asked for. Nothing more is required, and we do not pad that record with data you never gave us.

Cookies and Tracking

Cookies are small files a site stores in your browser. We group ours by what they do.

Strictly necessary cookies

These keep the basics functioning — remembering your consent choice and maintaining a session as you move between pages. The site cannot work properly without them, so they are not optional.

Analytics cookies

These record visit patterns and performance so we can see which articles hold attention and which load slowly. They are tied to aggregate measurement, not to identifying you personally.

Advertising cookies

Reserved for future use. If we introduce ad personalization, advertising cookies would support it — but only after we update this notice and ask for the consent the law requires.

You stay in control. Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies through its settings, and you can clear ours at any time without losing access to the articles themselves. The full breakdown lives in our Cookie Policy.

Data Subject Rights

If you are in a jurisdiction with data-protection law — and most readers are, you hold rights over your information that we are obliged to honor.

• Access: ask what personal data we hold about you, and we will tell you.
• Deletion: request removal of your data, and we will erase it unless a legal duty forces us to keep a record.
• Opt-out: decline analytics tracking through our consent controls or your browser, with no penalty to your reading.

To exercise any of these, reach us through the Contact page. We do not require you to justify the request — the right is yours to use.

Storage and Deletion

Technical logs are kept only as long as they stay useful for security and troubleshooting, then rotated out. Contact and subscription details remain until the correspondence is resolved or you ask us to remove them, whichever comes first.

When data reaches the end of its retention window, or when you request deletion, we remove it from our active systems. One honest caveat specific to a small editorial site: log data may briefly persist in routine backups before those backups cycle through, so erasure is prompt rather than instantaneous.

Policy Updates

This policy will change as the site grows — particularly once advertising integration moves from planned to live. When we make a substantive change, we update the date at the top of this page and, where the change affects how we handle your data, surface a clear notice rather than burying it.

Checking the revision date now and then is the simplest way to stay current. If a future version expands what we collect, we will explain the difference rather than expecting you to compare versions line by line.