Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how almaty-kazakhstan.net (“we,” “us,” “the site”) handles information collected from visitors. This site is an independent, informational travel guide about Almaty and Kazakhstan. We do not sell products, process bookings, or provide any paid services. We collect only the limited information described below.

Our official website address is: https://almaty-kazakhstan.net.

When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comment form, along with the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string, to help with automated spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also referred to as an MD5 hash) may be sent to the Gravatar service to verify if you are using an avatar image. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available at https://automattic.com/privacy/. After a comment is approved, your profile picture becomes publicly visible alongside your comment.

If you upload images to the site (for example, through a comment or contact form that accepts attachments), you should avoid uploading images that contain embedded location data (EXIF GPS). Visitors to the site can download and extract location metadata from images published publicly on the web.

We use cookies sparingly to improve navigation and user experience:

• Comment convenience cookies: If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt in to saving your name, email address, and website in cookies. This is for your convenience so you don’t have to fill in your details again when leaving another comment. These cookies persist for one year.
• Temporary session cookies: If any area of the site requires administrator or contributor login, a temporary cookie is set to verify whether your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
• Login & screen cookies: Login cookies last for two days, and screen display options cookies last for one year. Selecting “Remember Me” extends your login session to two weeks. Logging out removes all login cookies.

Pages on this site may include embedded content (e.g. YouTube videos, interactive Google Maps, or external media). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same manner as if the visitor had visited the third-party website directly.

These external 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 if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

If you request a password reset (applicable strictly to site administrators or contributors, not general readers), your IP address will be included in the reset email.

We do not sell, rent, trade, or transfer visitor data to third parties under any circumstances.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its associated metadata are retained indefinitely. This enables us to recognize and automatically approve follow-up comments instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For registered users (if applicable for site authors or contributors), we store the personal information provided in their user profile for as long as the account remains active. Users can view, edit, or delete their profile information at any time (except username changes). Site administrators can also access and edit this profile data.

If you have left comments on this site, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have submitted to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you.

This does not include any data we are obligated to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service (such as Akismet), which may analyze comment text and IP metadata to prevent malicious spam submissions.

If we utilize privacy-focused analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) to understand reader navigation patterns, those services may collect aggregated metrics (such as pages visited, average session duration, and broad region derived from IP addresses). This data is evaluated strictly in aggregate and is never used to identify individual readers.

This website is an informational travel portal not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from children under the age of 13 (or applicable digital consent age in your country).

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect site improvements or regulatory updates. Any changes will be published on this page alongside an updated “Last updated” date.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your data access or deletion rights, please contact our team: