Privacy

What you send us on purpose

When you log a sighting we store what you filled in: species, count, place name, habitat, notes, the coordinates you chose, and a photo if you attached one. This is published on a public map under an open licence, which is the whole reason to submit it. Please do not put anything private in the notes field.

The feedback form stores your message and, if you choose to give it, an email address so we can reply. It is used for nothing else.

Photographs: the GPS tag is removed

Phone cameras write the exact location into a photo's EXIF metadata. When you attach a photo it is resized in your own browser before upload, and that step discards all EXIF data, including that GPS tag.

This is deliberate and worth stating clearly: you choose which coordinates to attach to a sighting, and a photo you took at home before going out would otherwise publish where you live. The only location we ever hold is the one you picked on the map.

Your IP address is never stored

To stop automated abuse, anonymous submissions are rate-limited per network address. Doing that requires recognising a repeat sender, which does not require keeping their address.

So the address is combined with a secret salt and hashed with SHA-256, and only that hash is stored. It cannot be reversed into an address, it is not usable as a general identifier, and the log of hashes is deleted on a daily schedule. We never write the raw address to the database.

What is kept in your browser

These stay on your device. Nothing here is sent to us as a profile, and clearing your site data removes all of it:

• Your language choice.
• Your answer to the cookie banner, so you are not asked repeatedly.
• Which sightings you have already verified, so you are not asked to vote twice.
• A random identifier, generated in your browser, used only to stop the same device voting twice on one sighting. It is not linked to anything about you.

Analytics — off until you agree

We use Google Analytics to see which pages get read. It is not loaded at all until you accept it in the banner: refuse, or simply ignore the banner, and the script is never added to the page. You can change your mind by clearing this site's data.

The site also uses Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights, which our host provides to count page views and measure loading speed. These are aggregate and cookieless.

Advertising — please read this part

This site carries Google AdSense. Unlike analytics, the AdSense script is present on every page from the moment it loads, because that is how Google's own setup instructions require it to be installed.

The honest consequence: Google receives your IP address and may set advertising cookies before you have answered the banner. We would rather tell you that than imply the banner covers more than it does. If you are in the EU or UK, note that the additional consent signalling Google offers for this situation is not yet implemented here.

You can control or switch off personalised advertising in Google's own settings at myadcenter.google.com, and review how Google uses data from partner sites at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. A browser-level content blocker also works, and we do not detect or object to one.

Other services a page may contact

Some pages load material from third parties. When they do, your browser talks to that service directly and it will see your IP address as a result:

• iNaturalist — observation records, species lists and photographs.
• Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia — species photographs and summaries.
• OpenStreetMap and CARTO — the map tiles; and Nominatim, only when you search for a place by name.
• Google — advertising on every page, and analytics only with your consent.

Sharing, and what we will not do

Sighting records are published openly, by design, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. That is the dataset and it is meant to be reused.

Email addresses given in the feedback form are not published, not sold, and not added to any mailing list. We do not sell data, and we do not build advertising profiles ourselves.

Removing something

If you submitted a sighting or a photograph and want it taken down, ask us through the contact page and we will remove it. Please include enough detail to identify the record — roughly when and where you logged it.

One limitation, stated because it is easy to get wrong: records that came from iNaturalist are that platform's, not ours. We can stop showing a copy, but the original stays where it was published and has to be changed there.

Children

This site is suitable for children to read, and is written to be. It is not directed at children as an audience, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Since contributing needs no account, the only personal information a submission can contain is what someone types into it — which is why the form asks for none.