Privacy Policy

Effective 2026-09-04 · Version 2026-10-02.2

The short version

Birdbrainz contains no advertising, no analytics SDKs, no crash-reporting SDKs, and no tracking identifiers. We don’t track you across apps or sell data.
Your photos are sent to Google’s Gemini API to suggest bird species — as a reduced-size copy with camera metadata removed.
When you use the map or location search, your device talks directly to our map providers (Mapbox) and geocoding provider (Geoapify).
Adding a location to a post is optional. When you add one, you pick a named place; exact coordinates are public only when you place them yourself with the picker — never from your photos’ embedded GPS.
Approved posts are public on the open web: anyone can view them on the Birdbrainz website without an account, and search engines can index them, including their photos.
You can delete your account and its data at any time, in the app or via our deletion page.

What we collect

Account. Your email address, sign-in method (Google, Apple, or an access code), and the account records needed to keep you signed in. We never see your Google or Apple password. Access codes are issued by us to invited reviewers and testers; an access code is a password that your device sends directly to our authentication provider, Google Identity Platform, which holds it. Birdbrainz’s own servers never receive or store it.

Profile. Display name, handle, bio, and profile photo. Your profile photo is re-encoded before storage; the uploaded original is not kept.

Content you post. Photos, captions, species tags, the date a photo was taken, and comments.

Photo metadata. When you add a photo, we extract and privately retain a snapshot of its embedded metadata: capture time, camera and lens details, exposure settings, authorship and copyright fields, content-authenticity (C2PA) identifiers, and — if present — the photo’s GPS coordinates. We read this only from the photos you choose to post; we never request access to your photo library. Publicly served copies of your photos are stripped of all embedded metadata except your authorship and copyright fields, which are preserved on your behalf. (HEIC photos are converted to JPEG on your device before upload; that conversion keeps the metadata above but cannot preserve C2PA identifiers.)

Location. Three distinct kinds:

Public post location — optional; you can post without one. When you add a location you pick a named place, and the post shows that place or a broader area label assigned by our display rules. Exact coordinates are public only when you explicitly place them with the location picker; coordinates from photo metadata are never made public.
Private photo coordinates — GPS from your photos is read only from the photos you choose to post; on Android the system photo picker asks whether to include location info, and you can change that choice in the picker; we never request access to your photo library. Whatever GPS arrives is retained privately (see above), never shown to other users, and never placed on a public post unless you place a pin yourself.
Device location — used only by the composer’s location picker, with your permission, to center the map.

Push notifications. If you enable them, your device’s push token and a random per-install identifier, used to tell you when your post is ready.

What we don’t collect: usage analytics, advertising identifiers, diagnostics profiles, contacts, or anything from your photo library beyond the photos you choose to post.

How we use information

To run Birdbrainz: showing your profile and posts, suggesting species identifications, placing sightings at the locations you added to posts, sending the notifications you asked for, moderating content, responding to support requests, and keeping accounts secure. That’s the whole list — we have no advertising or data-monetization uses.

What is public

Approved posts are public by design: the photo (metadata-stripped except authorship), caption, species tags, taken-on date, the post’s location label if you added one, approved comments, and your profile name, handle, bio, and photo. Your email address is never public.

Public on the web, not just in the app. Once a post is approved it also appears as a page on the Birdbrainz website (www.birdbrainz.co/posts/…), where anyone can see it without a Birdbrainz account and without signing in. Those pages are built to be found: search engines may index them, including the photos in image search, and messaging apps and social networks show a preview (photo, title, caption) when someone shares the link. The location shown on the web is the same as in the app — the place or broader area label you chose, with exact coordinates only if you placed them yourself with the location picker; coordinates from your photos’ embedded GPS are never shown anywhere.

If you delete a post, delete your account, or we remove content, the page stops being served by us right away and returns “not found”; copies held by content-delivery caches expire within about fifteen minutes, and search engines drop the page the next time they revisit it, which can take days. A preview that a messaging app or social network already fetched is kept under that service’s own rules.

We share data only with the service providers below, only as needed to run Birdbrainz:

Google Gemini API (species identification and content screening). For species identification: a reduced-size, metadata-free copy of your photo, the capture date, and — when a location is available — a place label and coordinates rounded to roughly 110 m (from your picked location, or otherwise from the photo’s embedded GPS). For content screening, which checks new posts and comments against our community rules before they are approved: the same reduced-size photo, and the text of your captions and comments. Your name and email are never sent.
Geoapify (location search): when you use the location picker, your device sends the map-pin coordinates and any place names you type directly to Geoapify.
Mapbox (maps): while you browse a map, your device requests tiles for the area you’re viewing, which reveals the viewed coordinates to Mapbox.
Firebase Cloud Messaging (notifications): your push token and generic notification payloads (“Your post is ready”).
Google Cloud Platform hosts our infrastructure; Google and Apple handle sign-in under their own privacy policies. Access-code sign-in is handled by Google Identity Platform, part of Google Cloud.

We do not sell data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Moderation and staff access

New posts and comments are screened automatically before they are approved (by the Google Gemini API, described above); anything the screen rejects is queued for review by staff.

To operate moderation and support, authorized Birdbrainz staff can view account details (including email), full profiles, and post details including the privately retained photo metadata described above. Staff can also open a time-limited, read-only view of the app as your account to investigate problems; every such access is logged. Administrative actions are recorded in an audit log that is minimized to avoid storing personal details.

Data stored on your device

Your session is kept in your device’s secure storage (or browser storage on the web) and cleared when you sign out. While you compose a post, a crash-recovery draft — including photo copies and their metadata — is kept on your device until you publish or discard the post; discard drafts you don’t want kept. A random installation identifier and your theme preference also remain on the device.

Retention and deletion

You can delete your account at any time in the app (Profile → Settings → Delete account) or by following our deletion page. Deletion is immediate and permanent: your profile, posts, photos, comments, species-identification records, notification registrations, sessions, and sign-in identity are all hard-deleted, and your personal details are scrubbed from the administrative audit log.

A few things can outlive deletion, and we want to be explicit about them:

Ban records. If an account was banned for abuse, we keep a minimal record — a one-way hash of the sign-in identity, a timestamp, and a reason code; no name, email, or content — so the ban remains effective. Deleting an account in good standing writes no such record.
Server logs. Routine infrastructure logs referencing internal identifiers are retained for a limited period under our cloud provider’s default retention, then deleted.
In-flight processing. A species-identification job already queued at deletion time may finish shortly afterward; its output is orphaned and not linked to any account.
Your device. Anything stored on your own device (see above) is under your control and is not removed by server-side deletion.
Copies on the open web. Because approved posts are public web pages (see What is public), search-engine indexes, caches, and link previews made by other services can outlive deletion until those services refresh them.

Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit. Refresh credentials are stored only as one-way hashes, direct database access from apps is disabled, and access to production data is limited to authorized operators.

Children

Birdbrainz is not directed to children under 13 (or the applicable minimum age of digital consent in your region), and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child is using Birdbrainz, contact us and we will delete the account.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this policy when our practices change, and each version is identified by its date. Material changes will be announced in the app or by other reasonable means.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests: support@birdbrainz.co, or see Support.