Privacy & Terms

The Princeton Railroad Museum ("we," "us") runs this website to share the story of the Virginian Railway and welcome visitors to Mercer County, West Virginia. We keep data collection to the minimum needed to run the site, and we do not sell your information to anyone.

The short version

• We don't sell or rent your personal information.
• The Photo Booth keeps your photo only in the page's temporary memory. It is removed when you clear, refresh, or leave the page. Nothing is uploaded unless you explicitly choose the public visitor logbook and confirm the upload.
• Children's "Junior Conductor" badges are never uploaded — they stay on the device.
• Rail Detective and Junior Dispatcher Challenge progress, plus optional keepsake names, stay in your browser and can be erased with Start over.
• Financial giving and membership collection through this website are temporarily paused while recipient and terms are confirmed. Gift-shop orders remain ordinary retail transactions.
• When you share to Facebook, you post your saved postcard yourself; we never receive it.
• Outdoor audio tours use continuous location updates only if you turn on auto-continue, and you can turn it off during the tour.

Information we collect

Information you provide

When you sign the visitor logbook, contact us, or submit a form, we store what you enter (such as a name, message, or email address) so we can respond and keep a record of visits. Staff and admin accounts store an email address and a securely hashed password.

Location (Photo Booth)

When your Photo Booth image is ready, your browser may ask permission to read your GPS position. If allowed, verification runs automatically in the background. We use it only, in your browser, to check whether you are on-site and add a badge to your postcard. Your coordinates are not sent to or stored by the museum.

Location (outdoor audio tours)

On a driving or walking tour, you may choose Auto-continue using my location. This option is off until you turn it on. While a between-stop directions card is open, tour.html asks your browser for continuous location updates, compares your position with the next stop, shows an approximate distance, and automatically continues when you reach that stop. The active watch stops when you arrive, move away from that card, turn the feature off, or close or leave the tour page. If the option remains on, the page may start a new watch for the next outdoor leg.

The tour code uses the coordinates in your browser for that distance check. It does not include them in requests to the museum or save them in local storage; local storage keeps only whether you chose to leave auto-continue on or off for future tours. Your browser or device controls the location permission. To stop the feature, use Turn off on the between-stop card, clear the checkbox before starting a tour, change the site's location permission in your browser or device, or close or leave the tour page. The tour still works with the manual I'm here button if you decline or turn off location access.

Starting location (My Trip itinerary)

The Stay & Explore itinerary wizard asks for a starting city or ZIP code. Do not enter a home address. When you choose Build my itinerary, our server sends that city or ZIP code to OpenStreetMap Nominatim to obtain approximate coordinates. The museum does not keep the search. The matched starting point, selected stops, and number of days are saved only in that browser's local storage so you can edit and share your trip. Clear all removes the selected stops; clearing this site's browser storage removes the saved starting point and trip preferences.

Basic technical data

Like most websites, our hosting provider (Microsoft Azure Static Web Apps) processes standard request logs (such as IP address and browser type) to serve pages and protect the site.

Official festival-date sources

Once a month, our server may read a small allowlist of public event pages operated by festival organizers, governments, chambers or museums to check for an explicit upcoming date. It does not use social-media, private, login or CAPTCHA pages and does not collect information about visitors. Source wording and a technical evidence hash may be retained privately for staff review and audit; public pages show only an approved date, source link and freshness note. The link is informational and does not imply museum endorsement.

Anonymous usage counts

To understand what parts of the site are helpful, we keep simple, anonymous counts of actions such as page views, audio-tour plays and tour bookings. These counts contain no cookies, no names, no IP addresses and nothing that identifies you — only the name of the action and which page it happened on. If your browser sends a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signal, we record nothing at all.

The Photo Booth

The Photo Booth creates your postcard or badge entirely in your browser. Your photo stays only in the page's temporary memory and is not uploaded to the museum. When you tap Save, Email, Share, or Facebook, your postcard is saved to your own device (or handed to your phone's share sheet) so you choose where it goes. We don't receive, store, or see it.

Leaving, refreshing, or choosing Clear my photo removes the working photo and it cannot be recovered. The Photo Booth does not write visitor photos to local storage, session storage, IndexedDB, analytics, logs, or a museum server.

The optional Share publicly to visitor logbook action is the only Photo Booth action that uploads a copy to the museum. It requires a separate confirmation that clearly says the photo will be public. Cancelling that confirmation uploads nothing.

If privacy-respecting analytics are allowed by your browser, choosing a scene adds one anonymous scene-selection count. The count contains no photo, caption, name, location, cookie, IP address, or device identifier.

Rail Detective

Rail Detective does not require an account, GPS, visitor photographs, facial recognition, or a visitor name. Mission progress and an optional certificate name stay in this browser's local storage. Start over erases them from that browser.

When you submit a museum finding code, the server checks only that code. It is not connected to your mission progress, certificate name, or identity. Short-lived, privacy-preserving attempt limits discourage automated guessing. Printing or choosing Save as PDF uses your browser's print feature; the certificate name is not uploaded.

Junior Dispatcher Challenge

Junior Dispatcher Challenge is a static educational museum game. It requires no account, camera, microphone permission, GPS, personal data, or leaderboard. The game itself sends no challenge progress or keepsake data to the server, and this page disables the site's anonymous usage counts. Like other website pages, it may make ordinary requests to load page files and shared site settings. Challenge mode, current decision, completion state, language, and an optional keepsake name are stored only in this browser under prm-junior-dispatcher-v1. Start over or Clear my Junior Dispatcher data removes that record.

Read Aloud uses the browser's built-in speech service only when a matching English or Spanish voice is available; it does not send game text or visitor data to the museum. Printing or Save as PDF uses the browser's print feature. The keepsake name is not uploaded and the keepsake does not represent training, qualification, or certification.

After completing a challenge, you may choose to share a generic completion message by your device's share sheet, email, text message, or Facebook. Those options send only the challenge length and public activity link to the service you select; they do not include the browser-local keepsake name. Add to Visitor Logbook opens a prefilled note for you to review and requires you to separately enter a public name or initials before submitting it to the museum. Logbook submissions are public and handled as described under Information we collect.

Railroad family research guide

The research guide does not search PRM, public databases, or outside archives for a person. An optional name is used only in the live page to label a printable checklist. It is not written to local or session storage, placed in a URL, uploaded, or sent to PRM or an archive. Reloading, leaving, or choosing Clear this page removes it.

If anonymous usage counts are allowed, building or printing a guide records only the generic action name and page path described above. The count never includes the entered name, selected clues, or checklist text. Outside archive links open their general guidance pages without adding entered information.

Children's privacy

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. The "Junior Conductor" badge is generated and saved on the device only and is never uploaded to the museum. If you believe a child's image was somehow sent to us, contact us and we will delete it promptly.

How we use information

• To operate the site and respond to messages, bookings, and logbook entries.
• To display content you asked us to display (such as events or logbook entries).
• To keep the site secure and prevent abuse.

We do not use your information for advertising and we do not sell it.

Sharing with others

We share information only with service providers that help us run the site (for example, Microsoft Azure for hosting and storage), or when required by law. Links to Facebook, Instagram, or other sites are governed by their privacy policies.

Data retention

• Photo Booth images: kept only in temporary page memory and removed when you clear, refresh, or leave. A copy is uploaded only if you explicitly choose and confirm the public visitor logbook.
• My Trip itinerary: starting point, stops, and day choices remain in that browser until you clear My Trip or the site's browser storage.
• Logbook, contact, and event data: kept while relevant to museum operations; ask us to remove yours anytime.
• Backups: operational backups may retain data briefly before rotation.

Your choices

You can use the whole Photo Booth without ever uploading anything. You can decline the location prompt. To access, correct, or delete information you've given us, contact us using the details below.

Terms of use

By using this website you agree to the following:

• Use the site and Photo Booth for lawful, personal, non-commercial purposes.
• When you share a postcard to Facebook or elsewhere, only share images you have the right to share and that everyone recognizable in them consents to. Don't post content that is unlawful, harmful, hateful, or infringes someone's rights.
• The Photo Booth is provided "as is." Because postcards are created and shared from your own device, we are not responsible for how third parties (such as Facebook) handle content you post there.
• Museum content, images, and branding remain the property of the Princeton Railroad Museum and its contributors.

Copyright & ownership of this website

This entire website — its design, layout, source code, text, images, audio, and structured data — is the exclusive property of the Princeton Railroad Museum and is protected by copyright. It is not open-source and is not free to reuse.

• You may view the site in a normal web browser. That's it.
• You may not copy, download, clone, scrape, republish, redistribute, modify, rebrand, host, sell, resell, or create derivative works from any part of this website or its code, in whole or in part, without the museum's prior written permission.
• Only the museum's Director, and an IT administrator formally appointed by the Director, are authorized to reproduce or modify the site's code.
• Removing or altering any copyright notice or ownership mark is prohibited.

The museum keeps private records of authorship and creation dates and embeds ownership identifiers in its pages. Unauthorized copying or resale is a violation of copyright law, and the museum reserves all rights and remedies available to it. To request permission, contact the Director using the details below.

Project origin and support

Created as a hackathon project and gifted to the Princeton Railroad Museum. The project period ends September 21, 2026. The museum owns and operates the transferred website on an as-is basis. Microsoft does not provide ongoing maintenance, technical support, warranties, or guarantees for this website after the project period.

Changes

We may update this page as the site evolves. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date above.

Contact

Princeton Railroad Museum · 99 Mercer Street, Princeton, WV 24740 · (304) 487-5060. Reach us through the Visit & Contact page for any privacy request or question.