Privacy Policy
The short version: we collect very little, we do not sell it, and there are no third-party ad trackers on this site. The long version is below.
1. What this policy covers
This policy explains how Paralight (paralight.fun) collects, uses, stores, shares and protects your personal information, and what rights you have over it. It applies to this website and the services we offer through it.
We have written it primarily against China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL). If you are in the European Economic Area, the UK or elsewhere, we handle the rights you have under your local law — GDPR included — in the way described in section 10.
We never need your ID document, passport number, home address or travel documents. Please do not put that kind of information into corrections, comments or emails to us — we do not want to be holding it.
2. Who processes your data
The personal information handler (controller) is Shanghai ParaLight Information Technology Co., Ltd., registered at Room 302-59, 3F, Building 1, No. 1107 Yuyuan Road, Changning District, Shanghai, China.
For anything privacy-related: hello@paralight.fun.
3. What we collect
a. Things you give us
- Account: your email address. If you sign in with Google, we receive your email, name and avatar URL from Google — those three fields only. We do not read your contacts, files or anything else.
- Profile: display name, avatar (if you upload one), and anything else you choose to fill in.
- Content you submit: corrections, first-hand notes, the body of emails you send us.
- Email requests: the address you give us when you ask for something like the China Survival Pack.
b. Things that come from using the site
- Saves and “want to go”: which places you save and which you mark. Note that “want to go” is a public social action — the number of people who marked a place is shown publicly, and your avatar appears on that place only if you have set your profile visibility to public. Saves are private.
- Trips and preferences: the itineraries you generate and keep in the trip planner.
- Searches and questions: the natural-language queries you type into AI search.
- Interface preferences: such as your language choice, kept in a cookie.
c. Technical data recorded automatically
- Server access logs: IP address, timestamp, request path, HTTP status, user agent, referrer — for security, debugging and abuse detection.
- Outbound affiliate clicks: when you click a third-party booking link in a trip plan we log which slot, which partner and when. Not who. See section 8 of the Terms.
- Analytics (first-party, built by us): there is no Google Analytics, no third-party analytics and no ad SDK on this site. We run analytics we built ourselves, on our own servers, recording: page views and time on page, scroll depth, the on-site elements you click (only explicitly tagged buttons and outbound links), arrival/departure times, and the search terms you submit to site search (shown only in aggregate). To group repeat visits under one visitor we set a cookie with a randomly generated anonymous ID (pl_anon); once you sign in, analytics records are linked to your account. Your IP address is resolved on our server to country and province (geo attribution, based on the MaxMind GeoLite2 open database) and then discarded — the IP address itself is never written to the analytics database; operating system and browser are inferred from your user agent and stored as categories only, never the raw string. No cross-site tracking, no ad targeting, no sharing with third parties, and the data never leaves our servers. Raw event-level records are deleted after 180 days — only aggregated, non-individual numbers survive. Our operations team sees aggregate dashboards; a small number of authorized admins can view per-visitor journey timelines to debug product issues — this is internal data and we never hand it to outside parties.
d. Payment data
Online payment is live (the Paralight Pass is sold through the payment provider’s hosted checkout). Card details and other payment credentials are collected and processed directly by the payment provider and never touch our servers; we only receive an order reference, amount, status and the identifiers needed for reconciliation. Passes granted manually by our admins involve no payment data at all.
4. Why we process it, and on what basis
- Running the service: signing you in, keeping your saves and trips, serving the right language, generating PDFs and pocket cards. Basis: necessary to perform our contract with you.
- Membership: recognising whether you hold a Paralight Pass. Basis: contract.
- Moderation and safety: reviewing contributions before publication, detecting abuse and scraping, preventing paywall circumvention. Basis: legal obligation and our legitimate interests.
- Talking to you: sign-in links and codes, things you asked us to send, and notices about material service or policy changes. Basis: contract and legal obligation.
- Improving the product: aggregate usage and failure analysis. Basis: our legitimate interests, in a form that does not identify individuals.
- AI search and trip generation: passing your query to a model provider and returning the result. Basis: providing a service at your request (consent).
Where separate consent is required — marketing email, non-essential analytics, any future use of location — we ask for it separately and record which version you agreed to and when. You can withdraw consent at any time; withdrawal does not affect processing carried out before it.
6. What we never do
- We do not sell your personal information, and we do not sell it under another name such as “sharing” or “partnering”.
- No third-party ad networks, no cross-site behavioural tracking, no profiling for ad targeting.
- We do not hand your email address to anyone for marketing.
- We do not collect your precise location without asking you separately.
- We do not train models on, or publish, your private content — unpublished trips, saves, or the text of your emails.
7. Third-party processors and sharing
These third parties process data so the service can run. We give each of them only what is necessary:
- Alibaba Cloud — servers, database and object storage. Processes: all service data (see section 8 for where).
- Alibaba Cloud DirectMail (Singapore node) — delivering sign-in links, verification codes and anything you asked us to email. Processes: your email address and the message.
- Google LLC — “Sign in with Google”. Processes: the email, name and avatar URL you authorise Google to return. Using it is entirely your choice.
- Zhipu AI (bigmodel.cn) and DeepSeek (deepseek.com) — intent parsing and explanation for AI search, embeddings for semantic retrieval, and generation of the English guides. Both are model providers registered and operating in mainland China; this step does not involve any cross-border transfer. Processes: the query text you type, without your account identity attached. Please do not type sensitive personal details into the search box. Query text is kept only for as long as needed to process your request and deleted as soon as possible afterwards; it is not used to train our models or third-party models, and anything shown in aggregate on the site is stripped of personally identifiable details.
- QWeather — live weather on place pages. Processes: the coordinates of the place you are reading about, not your location.
- Tianditu (Chinese site) and OpenFreeMap (English site) — base map tiles. Your browser requests tiles directly from them, so they can see your IP address and which map area you are viewing.
- Trip.com and Klook (via the Involve Asia redirect domain) — only when you actively click an outbound booking link. Processes: the referral identifier carried in the link; what you do on their site afterwards is covered by their own privacy policy.
Otherwise we disclose information only: (a) with your consent; (b) in response to a lawful request from a competent judicial or administrative authority; (c) where necessary to protect the vital and lawful interests of the site, our users or the public; or (d) in a merger, acquisition or asset transfer — in which case we will tell you beforehand and the recipient must maintain protection no weaker than this policy.
8. Where data is stored, and cross-border transfers
Our servers, database and image storage sit on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure in Hong Kong SAR; sign-in email is delivered through an Alibaba Cloud node in Singapore. In other words, your data is not stored in mainland China.
That creates cross-border questions in both directions, and we would rather be straight about both:
- If you are in mainland China: your personal information is transferred outside the mainland (to the Hong Kong SAR, and to Singapore for email delivery). That is a cross-border provision under PIPL. We handle it by transferring only the minimum necessary and requiring our processors to meet a standard no lower than PIPL.
- If you are in the EEA, the UK or elsewhere: your information is likewise processed on servers in the Hong Kong SAR and Singapore. We rely on data processing terms with each processor, a strictly limited processing purpose, and minimised transfers as safeguards.
If we ever add a mainland China node (which would also trigger ICP filing requirements), we will update the storage location here and obtain any consent required.
9. How long we keep it
- Account and profile: for as long as the account exists; after closure, as described in section 10.
- Saves, want-to-go, trips: kept with your account; you can delete them yourself at any time.
- Sign-in links and codes: short-lived, typically minutes; expired records are cleared soon after.
- Server access logs: normally no more than 6 months, for security and debugging.
- Published, accepted contributions: kept long-term as part of the sourced-fact chain, but anonymised as described in section 10.
- Transaction and reconciliation records (once payment is live): for the period required by applicable accounting and tax rules.
10. Your rights and how to use them
In relation to the personal information we hold about you, you can:
- Be informed and get access — know what we hold and receive a copy;
- Correct and complete — fix anything inaccurate (name, avatar and email can be changed yourself in your account);
- Erase — ask us to delete your personal information, including closing your account;
- Withdraw consent — for anything you previously consented to, such as email subscriptions;
- Restrict or object — ask us to restrict a kind of processing, or object to processing based on legitimate interests;
- Port — receive the information you gave us in a common machine-readable format;
- Ask for an explanation — of this policy and of how we handle personal information;
- Next-of-kin rights — under PIPL, close relatives may exercise these rights for their own lawful interests after a user’s death.
How to ask
Write to hello@paralight.fun with your request and your registered email address. To stop someone impersonating you, we may verify you through that address. We reply within 15 working days, and will explain any extension if a request is complex. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or repetitive. If you are in the European Economic Area or the UK, you can exercise your GDPR rights through the same address; and where we process based on legitimate interests, you may object at any time under Article 21 GDPR.
What happens when you close your account
- Account, sign-in identifiers, email, display name, avatar, saves, want-to-go marks and trips — deleted (copies in backups age out on the backup rotation cycle).
- Contributions that were accepted and published — kept, but anonymised and detached from you, because the provenance of other facts depends on them. Unaccepted contributions are deleted with the account.
- Transaction and compliance records we are legally required to keep — retained for the statutory period, then deleted.
11. Security
We use technical and organisational measures proportionate to the risk: HTTPS everywhere, HttpOnly signed session cookies, least-privilege admin accounts, no direct public exposure of the database or object storage, centralised secret management, and audit logging of administrative actions.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that could harm you, we will notify you and the relevant authority as the law requires, and tell you what we have done about it and what you can do to protect yourself.
12. Children
The site is not intended for children under 14 and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 14 has given us personal information, contact hello@paralight.fun and we will delete it promptly.
13. Changes to this policy
This policy will change as the product does — when payment goes live, or if we switch on aggregate analytics, for example. We update the “last updated” date at the top of this page, and for material changes to purposes, methods or sharing we notify you on the site or by email, and ask for renewed consent where that is required.
14. Complaints and contact
If you have a question or a complaint about how we handle personal information, please write to hello@paralight.fun first — we take it seriously. If our answer does not satisfy you, you have the right to complain to your local personal information protection authority or data protection regulator. Other ways to reach us are on the contact page.