Privacy Policy

Information we handle

• Account details: username, email address, optional country, a salted password hash, policy version and acceptance time. While an account is suspended, we also store its suspension status, reason, time and the moderator account that applied it; these fields are cleared when the account is restored. We never store your plain-text password.
• Community activity: posts, replies, votes and reports. Posts and replies are public and may be indexed or copied by other visitors.
• Trip planner: the city, duration and selected interests are kept with an anonymous service record. Free-text notes are sent to DeepSeek to draft a route, but Roam China does not save those notes in its planner log. Do not enter passport, health, payment or other sensitive information.
• Essential technical data: the session cookie, IP address and request details may appear in security and web-server logs used to protect and operate the service.

Why and with whom

We use this information to provide accounts, publish discussions, prevent abuse, respond to reports and create requested itineraries. The production application and MySQL database are hosted on Tencent Cloud in the United States (North America — Silicon Valley). If you ask for an AI itinerary, the city, interests and notes you submit are sent to DeepSeek's API; that provider processes them under its own terms and privacy notice. We do not sell personal information or use it for advertising.

Public posts are visible to anyone. We may disclose other information when required by law or necessary to protect users, the service or our rights.

Cookies, security and retention

The sign-in cookie is necessary to keep you signed in. It is HttpOnly, marked Secure on the production site, and expires after 30 days. Passwords are hashed; session tokens are stored in hashed form. We use access controls and encrypted HTTPS in transit, but no online service can promise absolute security.

Session records expire after 30 days. Public posts and replies are intended to remain available for the life of the service; we do not currently plan to run a routine purge of forum content. They may still be deleted by their author, removed through account deletion or moderation, or removed where required by law. Backups and copies made by third parties or search engines may persist after deletion.

The site's Nginx access and error logs are checked for daily rotation, with at most 14 rotated files and an age limit of 14 days applied when rotation runs. This is not a guarantee that every record is erased exactly 14 days after collection. Service/system logs, moderation reports and backups are separate; their retention and any legal preservation requirements must be confirmed before general public launch.

Destination photographs and embedded films

Destination photographs are served from our own website when locally cached. Otherwise your browser requests the attributed image from Wikimedia's image servers, which can receive your IP address and ordinary connection information. Photograph requests omit the referring page address. Clicking an external source link opens that provider's website.

Official films load a YouTube privacy-enhanced embedded player only after you press play. Loading or using the player sends connection and playback information to YouTube, which handles it under its own privacy notice. You may read all destination guides without playing a video. See our photo and video credits for the media sources.

Your choices and requests

You can browse without an account. You may delete your own posts and replies, and use Delete account while signed in to remove the account, its posts, replies, votes and submitted reports. In-place editing is not currently available. An account deletion cannot be undone. A suspended user who cannot sign in may request deletion or appeal a suspension by contacting fengyindaqiang@gmail.com.

Children and changes

Roam China is intended for adults planning travel, not for children. We do not knowingly collect information from children. We may update this notice when the service changes; material changes will be shown here with a new version date.