Privacy & disclosure

Cookies: none

This site sets no cookies, first-party or third-party, and writes nothing to your device. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

The one measurement script

Our host, Netlify, serves a small script from this domain at /.netlify/scripts/rum, switched on 21 August 2026. It counts page views and measures loading speed. We read the file rather than trust a summary of it. As of 22 August 2026 it collects the path you are on, your screen's available width and height, your browser's user-agent string, and six page-speed timings the browser measures itself.

It stores nothing on your device, and it does not read the page you came from.

Where that goes. The script is served from shellsanibel.com, but what it collects is posted to ingesteer.services-prod.nsvcs.net, Netlify's measurement endpoint on another domain, and that request carries your IP address like any other. Netlify can therefore see that a browser loaded a particular page and how fast it rendered. We see only totals. Nothing ties one visit to the next. We would rather write that out than tell you nothing leaves the site.

Block ingesteer.services-prod.nsvcs.net if you would rather it did not run. Nothing on this site depends on it.

Google Fonts, which is a real third party

The type on this site — Newsreader for headings and shell names, Inter for everything else — is served by Google from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com. Your browser requests those files on every page, so Google receives your IP address and user-agent for every visit here, whether or not you click anything.

That is a trade we made for typography and it is the largest privacy cost on this site. It is named here rather than left for someone to find in the page source. Google's handling of those requests is governed by their policy, not ours.

What else the pages load

Beyond the two above: nothing. No third-party analytics, no advertising, no retargeting, no data brokers, no chat widget, no social embeds, no iframes, no maps, and no images from any other domain. Every page was fetched and checked. Tides, wind and red tide are read at build time on our server and baked into the page, so your browser never contacts NOAA, FWC or the National Weather Service — which is also why the site works with JavaScript off.

Affiliate links

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The gear page carries links to Amazon under our own Associates tag, shellsanibel-20. If you buy something after following one, Amazon pays us a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Practically, that means:

• Following one takes you to Amazon, which places or recognises cookies in your browser so it can attribute a later purchase to this site. That is Amazon's activity on Amazon's site, governed by their privacy notice.
• The attribution window is short — Amazon measures it as a single session, generally ending 24 hours after the click.
• Amazon tells us how many items sold and how much was earned. We are never told who you are or what you personally bought.
• Every paid link on this site is marked rel="sponsored" in the markup, and the disclosure appears above the first one on the page rather than below the last.

What commission does not do

It does not decide what is recommended. The gear page ranks things by whether they help on a Sanibel beach, and the advice on it was written before any link was attached to it. No brand has paid for placement, no item is there because it pays more than another, and nothing on this site is sponsored.

Where we have picked a specific product — 16 of 21 items so far — the reason it was chosen is on the gear page beside it, and it was chosen for whether it works on this beach before anyone looked at what it pays. The remaining 5 are still Amazon searches rather than picks.

Every other outbound link here — beaches, the shell museum, FWC, the City of Sanibel, the sister sites — is editorial and earns nothing.

Hosting and server logs

Hosted by Netlify. Like any host, their servers record standard request information — IP address, timestamp, page requested, user agent — for delivery, security and abuse prevention. We build no profiles from it.

Your choices

• Cookies. We set none, so there is nothing to opt out of. Amazon's cookies can be blocked or cleared in your browser.
• Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. There is no cross-site tracking here to switch off, so these signals change nothing about how the site behaves.
• Affiliate attribution. If you would rather not be attributed, search Amazon directly instead of following a link here.
• Access or deletion. We hold no personal data, so there is nothing to retrieve or erase. If you think otherwise, write and we will look.

Children

This site is aimed at adults walking a beach. It is not directed at children and knowingly collects information from nobody.

When this changes

If what the site does changes — a form, a mailing list, another affiliate programme, a sponsored placement — this page is updated before it goes live and the date below changes with it. A privacy page that quietly falls out of date is worse than none, and that has already happened once on a sister site.

Contact

mike@sancap365.com.

Claims on this page were last checked against the served script and the live pages on 22 August 2026.