Privacy Policy

This privacy policy describes what data Arizona Backcountry Explorers and AZBackroads.com collects on you while visiting our website. This privacy policy also describes how we use that data to better serve our customers and readers.

Arizona Backcountry Explorers takes pride in safeguarding your personal information. Although, because of the inherit nature on the internet, we can not guarantee hackers do not breach our servers. Regardless, we try our hardest to ensure our website is safe and secure by following the latest industry standards, making frequent security patches, and using proven, opensource software with little to no third party intervention.

Our servers are housed next to the greatest minds in independent journalism, in highly secure, censor free, data centers located in retired underground military bunkers, that are free of government intervention.

Some information you share on the AZBackroads.com website including in the comments section, public profile, or any other place on this site, is owned and controlled by Arizona Backcountry Explorers. This includes the analytical data we collect on your visit, the photos, videos, other content you share, or other applicable aspects of your membership.

We determine, in good faith, what content is available on our platform. Doing so, we intend to keep our site free from dangerous web trackers that collect your personal data and intrude on your personal privacy.

We give you the option to opt out of our analytical data collection. Although this hurts the overall user experience of our website, we recognize the need for internet privacy.

If you ever cancel your account, we can promptly send you a copy of your content and delete all your content and personal information upon your request. Contact Us 

In this Privacy Policy, “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to AZBackroads.com.

This privacy policy sets out how Arizona Backcountry Explorers uses and protects any information you provide whilst using Arizona Backcountry Explorers products and services. This only includes Arizona Backcountry Explorers ( www.azbackroads.com ). Arizona Backcountry Explorers may change this policy as and when necessary. We will provide a prominent notice (including email notification) of privacy policy changes.

1 What information we collect about you, and how we use this information.

1.1 Profile Information

1.1.1 You don’t have to create an account to use this site, such as searching and viewing public member profiles, and public written articles. If you choose to create an account, you must provide us with some personal data to provide our services to you. This includes a display name (for example, “John Doe”), a nickname (for example, @john-doe), a username (for example, johnxdoe), a password, and an email address. Your display name and nickname are always public, but you can use either your real name or a pseudonym. After the registration, your account display name, nickname, and username are the same. We recommend changing the display name and nickname to keep the username private and secure. You can change those on your account editing page.

1.2 Once you registered and created an account, you also have the option of adding the following information to your public profile:

1.2.1

• Member Title
• Avatar
• Biography (About Me)
• Website
• Occupation
• Signature
• Social Network Account addresses
• Location (Country)
• Timezone
• And other details to your profile information to be displayed in our community.

1.2.2 Public profile information can be set to public or private.

1.3 Additionally, whilst using the Arizona Backcountry Explorers, the following information may be collected (not public):

1.3.1

• Internet Protocol (IP) address
• Browser type and version
• Device type
• Operating system
• Referral source
• Length of visit, page views, website navigation, and any other related browsing activity.

1.3.2 Most activity on Arizona Backcountry Explorers is public, including your profile information mentioned in 1.2.1 unless set to private in your edit profile page. You also may choose to publish your location in your profile. The information posted about you by other people who use our website may also be public. For example, other people may mention you using @nickname in posts.

You are responsible for the comments, and other information you provide through our services. You should think carefully about what you make public, especially if it is sensitive information.

If your personal information appears anywhere on our website, you may request that your personal information be removed by simply contacting us.

1.4 Contact Information

1.4.1 We use your contact information, such as your email address, to authenticate your account and keep it – and our services – secure and help prevent spam, fraud, and abuse. We also use contact information to personalize our services, enabling certain account features, such as login verification, resetting your password, sending you information about our community, and notifying you of new replies to your subscribed topics. You can also unsubscribe from any email notifications.

If you email us, we will keep the content of your message, your email address, and your contact information to respond to your request.

1.4.2 Email Petitions

In some instances, personal information such as phone, address, full name, or other information may be requested to petition governments for the redress of grievances. In such cases, the information you voluntarily submit will become part of the public record and available upon FOIA requests by entities outside of our control. Therefore, we only ask for the bare minimum.

Our petition system uses a PHP script to forge email headers. This allows our system to send an email on your behalf, that appears as if you sent the message yourself. Whoever is on the receiving end of a particular petition will receive an email from your email address. The email will include all information you voluntarily submitted in the petition.

Email petitions may be pre-written letters, comments, correspondences, or personal comments from you.

Depending on the particular subject of the petition, your voluntarily submitted information may be submitted to:

1. Politicians in federal, state, county, government to encourage action and involvement in National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures or policy.
2. NEPA procedures such as Travel Management Planning.
3. County Sheriff to encourage intervention of illegal activity and protection of fundamental freedoms.

1.6 Cookies

1.6.1 A cookie is a small piece of data that is stored on your computer or mobile device. Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and operate our community. Cookies are not required for many parts of our community, such as searching and looking at public profiles. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, many browsers’ settings can be set to decline cookies or alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer. However, some of our community features may not function properly if you disable cookies. We do not support the Do Not Track browser option. You can learn more about how we use cookies and similar technologies here.

We use cookies for the following purposes.

1.6.2 Authentication – We use cookies to identify you when you visit our community. We use this information to detect current visitor content (topics, posts) and display it to you even if it is under moderation (not approved by moderators). Also, we store your name and email in cookies to keep these fields filled when you post a new reply or create a new topic (you don’t have to fill in this information every time you post content). We recommend not using the guest posting option on non-personal devices or at least deleting browser cookies when you leave it.

1.6.3 Status – we use cookies to help us to determine if you are logged into our website.

1.6.4 Security – We use cookies as an element of the security measures used to protect user accounts, including preventing fraudulent use of login credentials and generally protecting our website and services.

1.6.5 Push notifications – We use cookies to detect if you have subscribed to push notifications or reject push notifications. This helps us determine if we should prompt you to subscribe. When you interact with the prompt, a cookie is stored on your device to remember your selection.

1.6.6 Progressive Web Application – We use cookies to detect if you have downloaded our Progressive Web App. This helps us determine if we should prompt you to download the application. When you interact with the prompt, a cookie is stored on your device to remember your selection.

1.6.8 We’ll also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.

1.7 Log Data

1.7.1 We receive information when you view content or otherwise interact with our community, which we refer to as “Log Data,” even if you have not created an account. For example, when you visit our websites, sign in to our community, interact with our email notifications, we may receive information about you. This Log Data includes information such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, city and state, cookie information, and device information such as the screen size, make and model, page load time, and operating system. We use Log Data to operate our services and ensure their secure, reliable, and robust performance. This allows us to maximize the user experience on our website and better understand what our viewers like to see.

1.8 Membership Information

1.8.2 While you visit our site, we’ll track:

• Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
• Location, IP address, and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping
• Shipping address: we’ll ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and send you the order!

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details, and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as, to:

• Send you information about your account and order
• Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
• Process payments and prevent fraud
• Set up your account for our store
• Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
• Improve our store offerings
• Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them
• If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for XXX years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address, and billing and shipping addresses.

We will also store comments or reviews if you choose to leave them.

1.9 Payment Information

1.9.1 Data Collected to Manage Your Membership

We store limited information concerning your payment credentials. You have the ability to change, add, or delete payment information at any time.

At checkout, we will collect your name, email address, username, and password. This information is used to set up your account for our site. If you are redirected to an offsite payment gateway such as Apple Pay or Google Pay to complete your payment, we may store this information in a temporary session variable to set up your account when you return to our site.

At checkout, we may also collect your billing address and phone number. This information is used to confirm your credit card. The billing address and phone number are saved by our site to prepopulate the checkout form for future purchases, and so we can get in touch with you if needed to discuss your order.

At checkout, for the purposes of processing recurring subscription payments, we may also collect your credit card number, expiration date, and security code. This information is securely passed to our payment gateway to process your purchase. The last 4 digits of your credit card number and the expiration date are saved by our site to use for reference and to send you an email if your credit card will expire before the next recurring payment.

We use Stripe and WooCommerce Payments to safely and securely process payments. Your credit/debit card and personal information will be shared with these third parties and are subject to their applicable terms of service agreement.

2 Information We Share and Disclose

2.1 How we share information we collect

2.1.1 You should be aware that any information you provide on our community – including profile information associated with the account you use to post the information – may be read, collected, and used by any public member who accesses this website. Certain profile information may remain even after you terminate your account. We urge you to consider the sensitivity of any information you input into these Services. To request the removal of your information from this website, please contact us. In some cases, we may not be able to remove your information, in which case we will let you know if we are unable to and why.

2.2 Sharing with third parties

2.2.1 Arizona Backcountry Explorers reserves the right, in good faith, to share some user data but only within the stipulations of this privacy policy. We share data with third parties for several reasons but only to meet our goals and get solid results.

2.2.2 Petitions: In most cases, a petition may only require a name and phone number. However, there are some instances where more detailed information may be necessary to meet the needs of the petition. This information may be shared when collecting information on behalf of our partners. We also share personal information collected by petitions with the respective government agency, official, or organization. 

Petitions sent through our website may become part of the public record once submitted to a politician of government agency.

2.2.3 Marketing: We share non-personal numerical data such as monthly page views, returning visitors, trending articles, subscriber count, and other numerical data with potential advertisers. This data is used to determine the cost and negotiate deals for monthly advertising.

2.2.4 Links to Third Party Sites: Our community may include links that direct you to other websites or services whose privacy practices may differ from ours. If you submit information to any of those third-party sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies, not this one. We encourage you to read the privacy policy of any website you visit carefully.

2.2.5 Payment Gateway: We use Stripe to process all payments on our website. Your payment information is stored with our payment gateway and referenced using an encrypted token on our system to securely process your payments.

2.3 Legal

2.3.1 Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Privacy Policy or controls we may otherwise offer to you, we may preserve, use, or disclose your personal data if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law provided that there is a valid search warrant or reasonable suspicion from another member of our staff; to protect the safety of any person; to protect the safety or integrity of our platform, including to help prevent spam, abuse, or malicious actors on our services, or to explain why we have removed content or accounts from our services; to address fraud, security, or technical issues; or to protect our rights or property or the rights or property of those who use our services.

However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party’s, including a government’s, request to disclose your personal data.

2.4 Non-Personal Information

2.4.1 We may share or disclose non-personal data, such as aggregated information like the community statistic (online users, visitors, current viewers of a topic, etc…), the number of people who clicked on a particular link (number of topic views), or voted on a poll in a topic (even if only one did).

3 How to access and control your information

3.1 Accessing or Rectifying Your Personal Data

3.1.1 You have the right to request a copy of your information and to object to our use of your information. If you have registered an account in our community, we provide you with tools and account settings to access, correct, delete, or modify the personal data you provided to us and associated with your account. You can request a download of your account information. You also can request the correction, deletion, or modification of your personal data.

3.1.2 Your request and choices may be limited in certain cases: for example, if fulfilling your request would reveal information about another person, or if you ask to delete information which your administrator or we are permitted by law or have compelling legitimate interests to keep. Where you have asked us to share data with third parties, for example, by petition for the redress of grievances, you will need to contact those third-party service providers directly to have your information deleted or otherwise restricted.

3.2 Deletion of Your Personal Data

3.2.1 You can request your account deletion. This will include personal data, profile data, created content, logs, etc… Cookies should be deleted from your side. Almost all browsers have an option to delete cookies.

3.2.2 Keep in mind that search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your profile information, even after we/you have deleted the information from our community.

3.3 Restrict Processing

3.3.1 Request that we stop using your information: In some cases, you may ask us to stop accessing, storing, using, and otherwise processing your information where you believe we don’t have the appropriate rights to do so. For example, if you believe a community account was created for you without your permission or you are no longer an active user, you can request that we delete your account (contact us). Where you gave us consent to use your information for a limited purpose, you can contact us to withdraw that consent, but this will not affect any processing that has already taken place at the time. You can also opt-out of our use of your information for marketing purposes by contacting us. When you make such requests, we may need time to investigate and facilitate your request. If there is a delay or dispute about whether we have the right to continue using your information, we will restrict any further use of your information until the request is honored or the dispute is resolved, provided your administrator does not object (where applicable). 

3.3.2 Opt-out of communications: You may opt-out of receiving email notifications related to posts or promotional communications from us by using the unsubscribe link within each email, or by contacting us as provided below to have your contact information removed from our promotional email list or registration database.

3.4 Data portability

3.4.1 Data portability is the ability to obtain some of your information in a format you can keep on your devices or share with other communities. Depending on the context, this applies to some of your information, but not to all of your information. Should you request it, we will provide you with an electronic file of your basic account information and the information you create on the spaces under your sole control.

4 How we store and secure the information we collect

4.1.1 We use data hosting service providers to host the information we collect, and we use technical measures to secure your data. While we implement safeguards designed to protect your information, no security system is impenetrable, and due to the inherent nature of the Internet, we cannot guarantee that data, during transmission through the Internet or while stored on our systems or otherwise in our care, is absolutely safe from intrusion by others.

6 Online Privacy Policy Only

6.1.1 This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline or through third parties.

7 Your Consent To This Privacy Policy

7.1 By using our site, you:

7.1.1 Consent to our Privacy Policy and fully understand how we use your data.

7.1.2 Understand the rights of Arizona Backcountry Explorers and our users.

7.1.3 Agree to hold Arizona Backcountry Explorers, our users, and partners free from liability of data branches or damages of any type.

7.1.4 Understand you are fully responsible for the content and information you share on the Arizona Backcountry Explorers website.

8 Changes To This Privacy Policy

8.1.1 We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page.

8.1.2 We will let you know via email and/or a prominent notice 30 days before the change becomes effective and update the “effective date” at the top of this Privacy Policy.

8.1.3 You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

9 Contact Us

9.1.1 If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us.

Rufund & Return Policy & Warranty

This Return Policy governs how AZBackroads.com handles exchanges, returns, refunds, and warranty on goods ordered on our online store.

1) Digital Goods

All sales on digital goods, memberships, and subscriptions are final upon completion of payment.

Memberships and subscription sales are final and are charged on a reoccurring basis depending on the subscription you choose.

For example, if you sign up with a monthly subscription on June 10th, your next payments will be July 10th, August 10th, September 10th, and so on. Your payment information will be securely stored and the reoccurring payment will continue on a monthly basis until you cancel your subscription.

Memberships can be canceled and payment information can be removed or changed at any time by visiting the Membership Dashboard.

If you choose to cancel your membership, you will continue to have access to our site for the duration of your membership. For example; if you purchase a yearly subscription on June 1, 2022, and cancel your membership on August 1, 2022, you will continue to have access to the site until your membership ends in June of 2023. In this example, your card would not be charged at the end of your subscription.

All membership accounts are deleted after 15 days of delinquent payment.

2) Shirts, hoodies, hats, posters and other items.

All items are guaranteed to be free from manufacturing defects. If you feel that your item is defective, please contact us at contact@azbackroads.com. Please include your order number and photographs of the item and faults in question.

All defective items must be returned within 15 days of purchase. Refunds will not be issued until we receive the items.

For clothing items, please be sure to review the size chart for measurements before ordering.

Arizona Backcountry Explorers and AZBackroads.com reserve the right to refuse the return of items for any reason.