Strange Highways Music & Publishing

Who We Are

Our website address is https://www.strangehighways.com. This website is owned and operated by Jeff Elder.

Information We Collect

When you place an order through our store, we collect your name, email address, billing address, and shipping address to process and fulfill your order.

We do not store payment information on this website. All payment processing is handled securely by WooPayments, powered by Stripe. For more information on how WooPayments handles your data, please review Automattic’s Privacy Policy and Stripe’s Privacy Policy.

When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, along with the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help with spam detection.

Physical Product Fulfillment

Strange Highways sells both print-on-demand merchandise and other physical products.

Orders for print-on-demand merchandise, including apparel and similar items, are fulfilled by Printful, a third-party fulfillment provider. To process and ship these orders, customer information such as name, shipping address, email address, and order details may be shared with Printful solely for order fulfillment, production, shipping, and customer service purposes.

For products fulfilled directly by Strange Highways, including certain music-related items such as CDs, vinyl records, books, and other merchandise, customer information is used only for order processing, shipping, customer service, accounting, tax reporting, and legal compliance purposes.

Shipping-related information may also be shared with shipping carriers and shipping service providers as necessary to calculate shipping rates, generate shipping labels, validate addresses, track deliveries, and complete shipment of purchased products.

Printful’s Privacy Policy is available at https://www.printful.com/policies/privacy.

Digital Products

We do not sell digital products directly through this website. Digital music, audiobooks, and reading material may be available through third-party platforms including Bandcamp, Amazon, Audible, and others. Please refer to those platforms’ privacy policies for information on how they handle your data.

Amazon Affiliate Disclosure

This website participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Some links on this site are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. This comes at no additional cost to you and helps support the site.

Analytics & Tracking

This website uses Google Analytics (via Google Site Kit) to collect anonymous information about how visitors use the website, including pages viewed, time spent on the site, referral sources, and general usage patterns. This information is used to understand website performance and improve the visitor experience.

For more information, please review Google’s Privacy Policy.

This website also uses Meta Pixel (Facebook Pixel) to help measure the effectiveness of advertising and better understand how visitors interact with the website. Meta may collect information about actions taken on this site and may associate that information with your Facebook or Instagram account in accordance with its own privacy practices.

For more information, please review Meta’s Privacy Policy.

Third-Party Plugins & Services

This website uses a variety of WordPress plugins and third-party services to provide e-commerce functionality, payment processing, analytics, spam protection, shipping integration, search engine indexing, security, backups, and website performance optimization.

These services may process limited technical or personal information as necessary to provide their functionality. A current list of active plugins is available elsewhere on this website for transparency. By using this website, you acknowledge that certain information may be processed by these third-party providers in accordance with their respective privacy policies.

The plugins we currently use are:

Customer Records

Customer information associated with purchases, including name, email address, billing address, shipping address, and order history, is stored within WooCommerce for order processing, customer service, accounting, tax reporting, and legal compliance purposes. This information is not sold to third parties.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt in to saving your name, email address, and website in cookies for your convenience. These cookies will last for one year.

When you log in to your account, cookies will be set to save your login information and display preferences. Login cookies last for two days; screen option cookies last for one year. If you select “Remember Me,” your login will persist for two weeks. Logging out removes login cookies.

Embedded Content

Articles on this site may include embedded content such as videos, images, or other media from external websites. Embedded content behaves as if you have visited those websites directly and may collect data, use cookies, or track your interactions.

Data Retention

Order and customer records are retained as long as necessary for business and legal purposes. Comment data is retained indefinitely to support spam detection and moderation.

You may request deletion of your personal data at any time by contacting us, except where we are required to retain it for legal, tax, accounting, or administrative reasons.

Your Rights

You have the right to request a copy of the personal data we hold about you, request corrections to inaccurate information, or request deletion of your personal data, subject to applicable legal requirements.

To make such a request, please contact us through the contact form on this website.

Where Your Data Is Sent

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Order data may be shared with WooPayments for payment processing, Printful for product fulfillment, and shipping providers or carriers for shipment processing and delivery.

Contact

For any privacy-related questions or requests, please use the contact form at:

https://www.strangehighways.com/contact

Enter the World: Characters, Chat, and Music

Last updated: October 24, 2026

This section covers the interactive “Enter” experience at strangehighways.com/enter/, including the character chats and background music.

AI Characters

The characters you can talk to, such as Stu Starr, are fictional characters from Jeff Elder’s books, played by an AI. Their replies are generated automatically, may be inaccurate, and are not statements from Jeff or any real person.

Some characters come from fiction with mature themes. This experience is intended for adults and is not directed to children under 13.

What We Collect When You Chat

We collect the messages you type and the character’s replies. Your messages are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to generate the replies, and we store the conversations on our own server to improve the characters.

We do not ask for your name or email in the chat, and you should not share personal, financial, or sensitive information in it.

Chats are linked only to a scrambled code made from your internet address, not to your name or the address itself.

We keep chat logs for up to 12 months and then delete them.

Daily Limits and Security

To prevent abuse and control costs, we count messages per visitor each day using the same scrambled code. Those counts are deleted after a few days.

We use Cloudflare Turnstile to check that visitors are people and not automated programs. Turnstile runs in your browser and shares limited technical information with Cloudflare for that purpose, as described in Cloudflare’s Privacy Policy.

After the check, we place a small cookie in your browser, lasting approximately three hours, so the chat can confirm that you passed the verification process.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to understand how this experience is used, such as which rooms are visited, whether a chat is opened, how many messages are sent, and whether links such as “Get the Book” are clicked.

We do not send the text of your chats to Google.

Google Analytics uses cookies or similar technologies. Google’s Privacy Policy explains how Google handles this information.

Music and Your Browser

The background music saves your on/off preference in your own browser so it can remember your setting. That preference is not sent to us.

Links to Other Sites

Buttons such as “Get the Book” may take you to third-party websites, including Amazon and other retailers, which maintain their own privacy policies and practices.

Your Choices

You may turn music off using the speaker button, block or clear cookies in your browser settings, or simply choose not to use the chat feature.

Because chats are not tied to your name, we may not be able to locate your specific conversation history. If you would like messages removed, please contact us through the website contact form and provide the approximate date and time of the conversation. We will do our best to locate and delete the requested content.

This privacy policy last updated October 26th, 2026.