Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-10-07

1. Who we are

Monaco Editorial publishes the website monacoeditorial.com and the forthcoming MyMonaco mobile app — a curated editorial guide to the Principality of Monaco. Monaco Editorial is operated by Shmanmon OÜ, a company registered in Estonia, which acts as the data controller responsible for processing personal data under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

For any privacy question, or to exercise your rights under this policy, contact us at privacy@shmanmon.com.

2. The short version

• We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any cookie-based tracking script.
• We do use Plausible Analytics — a cookieless, EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant analytics service — to count page views and aggregate engagement signals like "people opened the map". No cookies set, no IPs stored, no personal data leaves the EU. See section 3.2.
• We set no cookies for marketing, personalisation, or cross-site tracking.
• We collect nothing about you by default. Reading the site asks you for nothing. The only personal data we ever hold is what a person deliberately hands us: an email you write to us, or an admin's own edits in the admin console. We never ask for your name or location, and we build no profiles.
• One thing is collected passively, on every page you read: our hosting platform writes a request log carrying your IP address and request metadata, kept in our own Google Cloud project where its owner can read it, retained 30 days and used only to operate and secure the site. See section 3.1.
• We self-host all fonts. No request goes to Google for typography.
• When you open the interactive map, your IP is sent to Cloudflare-hosted OpenFreeMap servers to fetch map tiles. We don't see this; OpenFreeMap discloses it under its own privacy policy.
• When you tap a place photo, your IP is sent to whichever CDN hosts the bytes (almost always our own Firebase Storage bucket on Google Cloud EU; rarely a venue CDN). Same for affiliate links to Booking.com, GetYourGuide or restaurant reservations (Booking.com links first pass through CJ, Booking.com's affiliate network — see 3.5).

3. What data we process — and why

3.1 Browsing the website

Reading any page on monacoeditorial.com does not require an account. The site is statically served from Firebase Hosting (Google Cloud, EU region). The platform writes a request log for every request — IP address, user agent, URL, timestamp, response status and similar metadata. Our site code does not produce these logs and cannot switch them off, but they are kept inside ourGoogle Cloud project, and we should be straightforward about what that means: the person who owns the project can open them in the cloud console and read them, IP addresses included. We use them only to operate and secure the site — diagnosing errors, investigating abuse or unusual traffic. We do not use them to build profiles, we do not combine them with anything else we hold, and we do not export them anywhere. They are retained for 30 days, the retention configured on our project's log storage, and then deleted. Legal basis: legitimate interest in operating and securing a public website (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

3.2 Analytics — Plausible

We measure aggregate site usage with Plausible Analytics, hosted in Germany on Hetzner infrastructure (EU). Plausible is engineered specifically to be cookieless and GDPR-compliant: no cookies are set, no localStorage entries are written, and your IP address is hashed together with a daily-rotating salt only long enough to compute "unique visitors" — the hash is then discarded the next day. No identifying data is stored.

The events we send to Plausible are aggregate signals like "the /map page was opened" or "a Book a Stay button was clicked on hotel X". Plausible cannot link these events to you specifically; they roll up into counts in our dashboard. Legal basis: legitimate interest in understanding which content is useful to visitors (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

When you use the Concierge we count that it was opened, which option was tapped, and that a question was typed — whether it matched a ready answer or went to the guide's search, and which kind of answer it got — never the words you typed, which do not leave your browser. We also count opening a place, an event or a guide from one of its answers (with which kind of page, never which one).

A consent banner is not required because no terminal-equipment storage is involved (ePrivacy Directive Art. 5(3)). You can verify by opening browser DevTools → Application → Cookies and Storage while browsing this site.

Plausible's own privacy policy: https://plausible.io/privacy. Their data processing agreement (which covers us): https://plausible.io/dpa.

Our embeddable events widget (/embed/whats-on/) deliberately loads no analytics script at all, so placing our widget on another website does not expose that site's visitors to our analytics.

3.3 Map tiles

When you open /map/, your browser fetches vector map tiles from OpenFreeMap(served via Cloudflare). The recipient receives your IP address, the requested tile coordinates, and a default browser User-Agent string. OpenFreeMap states it does not retain identifying logs. We chose this provider specifically because they do not require an API key and do not impose tracking. If you use the map's locate-me button, your coordinates are used only locally by the map library to centre the view and show your position — we never receive them, and they are never added to the page URL or analytics, or stored by us. Recentring the map still requests tiles for the displayed area, as described above.

3.4 Place and event imagery

Place and event photos are served from our own Firebase Storage bucket mytownbackend.firebasestorage.app at storage.googleapis.com (Google Cloud, EU region). Photo origin: most are sourced from Google Places and rehosted on our bucket so the URLs are permanent and served from an EU edge. When your browser loads these images, Google Cloud sees the request (we do not). A small number of event photos remain on the venue's own CDN (e.g. montecarlosbm.com, grimaldiforum.com) when no rehosted copy exists. If you'd prefer not to load these images, browser extensions that block third-party media (e.g. uBlock Origin) work without breaking the rest of the site.

Google Places photo attribution: when the source photo was supplied by a Google Maps contributor, we display their attribution next to the image per Google's terms.

3.5 Outbound booking links

"Book a Stay", "Book a Table", and "Reserve" buttons on place pages (and the matching short chips on the map) open third-party booking or reservation systems — for example Booking.com, TheFork, SevenRooms, a Monte-Carlo SBM booking page, or the venue's own site. On the website, Booking.com buttons are affiliate links, marked "affiliate": Booking.com may pay us a commission if you book a stay, at no extra cost to you. Booking.com runs its programme through CJ (Commission Junction), so a click on one of these links passes through CJ's servers (dpbolvw.net, cj.dotomi.com and emjcd.com) before landing on Booking.com. CJ receives what any website receives when you open it — your IP address, browser and device details and the time — plus that you came from our site, which of our buttons you used, and the Booking.com page you are heading to, including the dates and the number of adults and children from our search box (it starts at two adults) — never children's ages, which Booking.com asks for on its own page. On the way, CJ's servers set their own cookies on their own domains, some lasting about 13 months; they are CJ's, not ours. If you book, Booking.com reports the booking to CJ so the commission can be credited. CJ handles all of this under its own privacy policy, which lists its cookies and explains your choices, your rights with CJ and its transfers outside the EU. We never load CJ scripts, pixels or banners on this site, and nothing reaches CJ unless you click. Other links marked as affiliate links go to GetYourGuide, which may pay us a commission if you book: GetYourGuide recognises the referral from an identifier in the link, and its own site then sets its own cookies under its own privacy policy. We never load GetYourGuide scripts, widgets or images on this site — nothing reaches GetYourGuide unless you click. These are outbound links you click intentionally, not tracking pixels — nothing about the booking destination fires before you click (we may record a cookieless Plausible event that a booking button was clicked, without the full URL, and whether you had set dates in the search box above the hotels — never which dates). For a GetYourGuide link, that event records only which product and whether the click came from a place page, a guide or the Concierge — never who you are. Once on the booking site, that site's privacy policy applies, not ours. The same applies to "Order online" buttons and the Food Delivery directory page, which open Monaco's food-delivery platforms (Delovery, Mr Room Service): outbound links you click intentionally, no affiliate relationship, and the destination's own privacy policy once you are there.

3.6 Email correspondence

If you email privacy@shmanmon.com, your message and email address land in our inbox. Retention: up to 24 months for correspondence history, then deleted. Legal basis: legitimate interest in handling support requests (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

3.7 The MyMonaco mobile app

The app works fully offline and ships its content inside the download. What you set in it — language, theme, whether you described yourself as a resident or a visitor, your favourites and your in-app search history — is stored only on your device and is never transmitted to us. It disappears when you uninstall the app or clear its data, and the app's Privacy & Data screen can erase it at any time.

Location. The app can ask for your position — to centre the map on you, or to start walking directions from where you are. It is used on the device for that purpose and never sent to us or to anyone else. You can refuse, and everything except those two conveniences still works.

Usage analytics, only if you agree. On first launch the app asks, once, whether it may collect usage analytics and crash reports. These are two separate questions and you can accept one, both, or neither; choosing Only essential — or simply dismissing the prompt — means neither. Whatever you choose, you can change it at any time in Privacy & Data, and erasing your data resets the answer.

If you agree to usage analytics, the app reports to Plausible Analytics, hosted in the EU, on a site kept separate from this website's. In full, what it sends is:

• Which screen you are looking at, as the in-app path — which includes the item's own name when you are on one, as in /place/brasserie-de-monaco. That names the content, never you.
• A fixed list of actions:opening a guide, a collection, a walk or the map; opening search, and tapping a result; asking for directions; tapping a venue's phone number; opening a food-delivery platform; using the share sheet; tapping a ticket link (together with the name of the ticketing service it opens); filtering events or What's On by category, filtering the places list, filtering the map by category, and showing or hiding lifts and stairs on the map (each with the category, filter or layer chosen, and for What's On whether the choice came from a link or a tap); tapping a lift or stairway on the map (with whether it was a lift or a stairway, and whether we could show where it leads); showing an event's text in its original language; and changing the app language.
• The Concierge:opening the Concierge; tapping one of its options (with which option); typing a question to it — we count that a question was typed, whether it matched a ready answer or went to the app's search, and which kind of answer it got, never the words themselves, which stay on your phone; opening a place, an event or a guide from one of its answers (with which kind of page, never which one); and, from one of its answers, tapping a hotel booking link, a table booking link, another reservation link, a venue's website link or the official pharmacy-on-duty page. Directions, phone and ticket taps made from a Concierge answer are counted as above, marked as coming from the Concierge.
• Three technical details with each of those: the platform (Android or iOS), the app version, and the interface language you are reading in.

There are no cookies, no account, no advertising identifier and no device identifier of any kind: Plausible derives a visitor count from a daily-rotating hash of your IP address and browser identification, and discards the inputs. We never receive your location, your contacts, or the contents of your favourites or your searches — only that a search happened. Legal basis: consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)), withdrawable at any time.

Crash reports are not yet active. The app records your answer so it does not have to ask again, but no crash-reporting service is switched on in the published app, and nothing is sent. This page will be updated before that changes.

On iPhone and iPad, nothing is collected at all— whatever you answer, and in every version published so far. Usage analytics are switched off for iOS in the app's own code, and the app's Apple privacy manifest declares no collected data types. That ordering is deliberate: the manifest can only change in a new App Store build, never in an over-the-air update, so iOS stays silent until a release whose manifest declares analytics. This page will be updated before that happens.

4. Cookies

We do not set any first-party cookies. The browser-level technologies present on this site are limited to:

• localStorage used by MapLibre (the map library) to cache vector tiles for the current session, so re-opening the map doesn't re-download tiles. Purely functional, contains no identifying data, can be cleared in your browser at any time.

See our Cookies page for the full audit + how to disable.

5. Your rights (GDPR)

We hold very little personal data, because we ask for almost none. What we can hold is: correspondence you send to our inbox (section 3.6) and the platform request logs described in section 3.1, which are tied to nothing but an IP address and expire on their own after 30 days. For that data, you can:

• Access what we have about you (Art. 15).
• Correct inaccurate data (Art. 16).
• Delete your data (Art. 17 — "right to be forgotten").
• Object to processing (Art. 21).
• Lodge a complaint with your national Data Protection Authority — in Monaco, the CCIN; in France, the CNIL; in Italy, the Garante; in Germany, the BfDI; etc.

Email privacy@shmanmon.com. We respond within 30 days per GDPR Art. 12(3).

6. International transfers

Firebase Hosting is configured to the europe-west1 region — your site requests stay within the European Economic Area. Google's underlying infrastructure may transfer technical operational data to the United States under EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification. For map tiles, OpenFreeMap uses Cloudflare's global network and may route through any Cloudflare PoP geographically near you.

7. Children

This site does not knowingly process data from children under 16. We do not require sign-up to read content.

8. Changes

When this policy changes materially we update the "Last updated" date at the top and post a notice on the homepage for seven days.

9. Governing law

Where the GDPR applies — for visitors in the European Economic Area — this policy is read in accordance with it. EU and EEA residents retain their statutory GDPR rights regardless of where the publisher is established.