Privacy policy

1. What we collect when you sign in

We use Google Sign-In. When you sign in for the first time, Google shares your name, email address and profile photo with us. We never see or store your Google password. You choose your own display name and home city afterwards, separately from your Google profile.

2. What we collect when you upload a photograph

• The photograph itself. Your original file is stored privately. It is never shown to other members and cannot be downloaded by anyone but you.
• Camera details in the file (EXIF). If your photograph carries a date, camera, lens or GPS location, we read it to help fill in the upload form for you. This is kept privately in our database.
• The public copy. The version other members see is a resized copy with all camera and GPS data removed from the file.
• Location you provide. If you type a place, or use the "Use my location" button, that place — and district and state, where we can work them out — is stored against the photograph. A photograph marked "sensitive location", or of a species we have flagged as sensitive, never shows its exact place publicly: only the district and state are shown to anyone, including other members.

3. Location lookups

If you tap "Use my location" while uploading, your phone's browser asks your permission, then shares your coordinates with us for that one request. We send those coordinates to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service to work out a place name, district and state — this is a well-known open-source mapping service, not an advertising company. We cache the answer so the same spot is never looked up twice. Your coordinates are also compared against places other members have photographed nearby, so we can suggest a birding spot close to you.

4. Species suggestions (AI)

If you use the automatic species suggestion feature, the photograph you are uploading is sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate a suggested identification. The suggestion is never applied automatically — you always confirm the species yourself. Anthropic's own privacy terms govern how they handle that request.

5. What is public on the site

Visible to other signed-in members:

• Your display name, home city, profile photo and join date.
• Photographs you publish, their species, district/state (or full place if not sensitive), date, and any caption.
• Your votes, comments, badges and species checklist progress.

Visible to anyone on the internet, including search engines:

• The species checklist itself — bird names, scientific names and families. This carries no member information.
• Only those photographs whose owner chose “anyone can see it” when uploading them, shown with the photographer’s display name and the same district/state rules as above.

You choose this for every photograph, one at a time, and the choice is yours to change. A photograph set to members only is never shown to a visitor and is never indexed — opening its link while signed out gives the same “not found” page as a photograph that does not exist.

Photographs uploaded before this choice existed were all left as members only, because that is what was promised when they were shared.

Your feed, collection, profile, tours, contests and the member directory are never public, whatever you choose for a photograph. Signing in is always required to upload, vote or comment.

6. What is never shown to other members

• Your email address.
• Your original, full-resolution photograph files.
• Camera, lens and GPS data read from your photographs.
• The exact location of a sensitive sighting — only district and state are ever shown, to anyone.
• Jury scores in a contest — a juror's score is seen only by that juror and an admin.

7. Moderation and activity records

To keep the community safe, we keep a private log of account activity (such as sign-ins, uploads and moderation actions) together with the IP address the action came from. This log, and a private report on member activity levels, is visible only to moderators and admins — never to other members, and never published anywhere.

8. Cookies

We use a single cookie to keep you signed in. It is strictly necessary for the site to work, cannot be used to track you across other websites, and is not shared with any advertiser. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not use Google Analytics or any other third-party analytics service.

9. Counting visits

So that we know whether anyone is finding the site, we keep a simple count of page visits on our own server. For each visit we record the page, the website you came from if any, and any campaign tag on the link.

We do not store your IP address. Instead it is combined with the date and turned into a short code that cannot be reversed, and that changes every day — so we can tell how many people visited today, but nobody can be recognised or followed from one day to the next. No tracking cookie is set for this, none of it is sent to Google or any other company, and it is never used to build a profile of you.

10. How long we keep your information

We keep your account and photographs for as long as your account is active. If a moderator hides a photograph or comment, it is kept (not deleted) so the action can be reviewed or reversed. If you would like your account and photographs permanently deleted, contact us using the address below.

11. Your choices

• You can delete any photograph you uploaded at any time.
• You can mark a photograph's location as sensitive at the time you upload it.
• You can ask us to tell you what data we hold about you, correct it, or delete your account entirely, by emailing us.

12. Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data: contact@birdingsite.com