Privacy and disclosure

Ethics

Ok, let’s get the elephant in the room, snugly back in the zoo. Gastronomic Salt Lake City is as unbiased as any small news outlet can be in such a modest marketplace. This ain’t NYC and we don’t have a six figure expense account.

We do get invited to restaurants, attend press and media events, often at no cost. I know, its a hard life. This is true of every food writer in Salt Lake City. If we write about one of these invites, it means we genuinely like that dish/chef/restaurant – regardless of the freebie. Seriously you should see the pile of invites we turn down, and the meals we haven’t written about. That would be another website unto itself…

SLC isn’t a large town and the dining scene is even smaller. We try to be as open, honest and transparent as possible. Without our readers trust, we may as well pack up our bags now.

We do of course promote local businesses and they in turn pay us for our time. Our sponsorship program offers trusted businesses a channel through which to to communicate their message with our readers. This program is only open to businesses we trust, respect and enjoy ourselves. Again, the site is nothing without our readers trust and respect.

We also offer a sponsored content option to businesses. These are one of articles on a business, product or news item – as dictated by the advertiser. You can read more about that here.

Privacy

The web server that runs this web site keeps log files for web analytic purposes. We also use externally hosted tracking tools like Google Analytics and WordPress Jetpack stats. We use this data to see where our visitors are coming from and what type of information catches their interest – but we don’t try to link it to specific users. Hey, we’re simply glad you’re here to enjoy reading about the food scene in SLC, we’re not snooping on who you are. But if you do want to say hi, get in touch!

Registration to the site is not necessary. If you do signup to our email list, we will keep that information as safe and secure as we possibly can. We don’t share that with any advertisers – period. Our email newsletter service is handled by Intuit’s Mailchimp, one of the most respected providers out there. Again, we share your details with them only, never our sponsors or advertisers.

Please note that from time to time we may deploy tools to the site to identify user demographics and segmentation, such as Facebook Pixel.

Advertisements and third party websites

Advertisements may appear on our site, these are generally delivered by third parties on an automated basis. These third party sites may deliver a cookie to your computer to track your activity across pages and sites, they may log your request activity in their server log files or track you using some other web technology. Opt out instructions for the major ad services we use:

Google Adwords: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en

This website also links to hundreds if not thousands of other external websites such as other local blogs – be sure to review the privacy policy of those third party sites directly. In choosing advertising and affiliate partners we aim to use only well respected, trusted companies.

Disclosure

This website is owned by A Matter Of Taste LLC, and we do try to make a trickle of money from the website. We accept site sponsors, paid advertisements, run affiliate links and also work to promote trusted local businesses. For a list of all our parent relationships and timelines, please see our historical partnerships page.

To be clear, our first and foremost goal is in providing trusted, accurate information on the food and beverage scene in Salt Lake City. That said, it takes a lot of time and energy to run the site, and we do try to make a modicum of cash while we’re at it. And seriously, we ain’t making enough to buy a Caribbean island here, more like a few cheeseburgers. Maybe if we have a good month we can order fries too!

In regards to our sponsors and connect clients we only ever focus on companies we really like and trust. We want you to trust the website and in turn the companies we write about. For every company we work with or write about, we’ve ignored or refused five others. If we don’t have your trust we ain’t got squat.

This policy applies to: gastronomicslc.com and slcmenu.com.