Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

Information You Provide

• •Account information — your email address and password when you create an account
• •Profile information — your username (derived from your email address by default), bio, home country, and avatar
• •Bird sightings — species, location, date, notes, and any other details you log during a session
• •Session content — session titles, notes, GPS route data, and any photos you upload
• •Game activity — your scores, results, and emoji performance summaries from Spotted and other games

Information We Collect Automatically

• •Location data — collected when you log a birding session and when you open the feed to find nearby sightings. Location is not tracked in the background.
• •Device and usage information — how you interact with the app, for analytics and improvement purposes
• •Cookies and session tokens — used to keep you signed in. See Section 6 for details.
• •Cached location data — stored locally on your device to reduce repeat location lookups. This data is never transmitted to our servers.

Information From Third Parties

• •GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) — we use publicly available bird occurrence data from GBIF to populate curated birding sessions. No personal data is shared with GBIF.
• •Komoot Photon — we send GPS coordinates to this open-source geocoding service to convert location data into human-readable place names. No account information or personal identifiers are sent.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• •Provide, operate, and improve the Waydle Services
• •Show you bird sightings and sessions near you
• •Display your sessions, life list, and game results
• •Enable social features such as following other users and reacting to sessions
• •Send transactional emails (account setup, password reset). We do not send marketing emails.
• •Analyze usage to improve the app and develop new features
• •Aggregate and anonymize contributed data for research and commercial purposes as described in Section 4

3. How We Share Your Information

Visible to Other Users

Waydle is a social app. The following information is visible to other logged-in users:

• •Your username and avatar
• •Bird sessions you post to the feed
• •Your life list and profile
• •Your game results when posted to the feed
• •Users you follow and who follow you

Your email address is never visible to other users.

Your username is derived from the portion of your email address before the @ symbol by default. You can change your username at any time in your profile settings.

Public Session Pages

If you share a session link, that session page is publicly accessible to anyone with the link, including non-logged-in visitors. Search engines may index and cache public session pages. We do not control search engine caching.

Service Providers

We share information with the following third-party services to operate Waydle:

• •Supabase — Database and authentication
• •Vercel — Hosting and analytics
• •Cloudflare — Content delivery network and analytics
• •Komoot Photon — Geocoding (coordinates only, no personal identifiers)

These providers only receive information necessary to perform their services and are required to protect your data.

Legal Requirements

We may disclose your information if required by law, court order, or to protect the safety and rights of our users or the public.

Business Transfers

If Waydle is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction.

4. Data Licensing and Commercial Use

Bird sighting data and other content you contribute to Waydle has scientific, conservation, and commercial value. By using Waydle, you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, aggregate, anonymize, and commercially license your contributed data for any purpose, including:

• •Wildlife research and conservation initiatives
• •Academic and university research partnerships
• •City planning and transportation analysis
• •Government and public agency partnerships
• •Commercial data licensing arrangements

Your personal information — including your name, email address, and account details — is never included in any data we share or license externally. Only anonymized contributed data is used for these purposes.

This license survives account deletion. If you delete your account, anonymized data you contributed may continue to be used as described above.

5. Account Deletion

You can delete your account at any time from within the app under your profile settings.

When you delete your account:

• •Your profile, email address, and personal information will be permanently removed
• •Your followers, follows, reactions, and game results will be permanently deleted
• •Bird sighting data and session content you contributed will be retained in anonymized form, with all personal identifiers removed, and may be used as described in Section 4

We cannot recover your account or data after deletion. Public session pages you shared may remain cached in search engine results until those caches refresh.

6. Cookies and Local Storage

Cookies — Waydle uses authentication cookies set by Supabase to keep you signed in. These are functional cookies required for the app to work. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

Local storage — your device stores the following data locally to improve performance:

• •Your last known GPS coordinates and timestamp, to avoid repeat location requests
• •Human-readable location labels for recent coordinates
• •Country codes for recent coordinates

This data never leaves your device and is used only to reduce repeat calls to our geocoding service.

7. Analytics

We may use analytics tools provided by Vercel, Cloudflare, or other services to understand how the app is used and improve the Services. If we introduce additional analytics tools in the future, we will update this policy accordingly.

8. How We Protect Your Information

We implement administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect your information from unauthorized access, disclosure, or misuse. Your data is stored on Supabase with row-level security controls that restrict access to your own data.

No method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure. We encourage you to use a strong, unique password for your account.

9. Children

Waydle is intended for users 13 years of age and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us at [email protected].

10. Your Rights

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data at any time by contacting us at [email protected] or by using the account deletion feature in the app. Please note that we may ask you to verify your identity before fulfilling any request.

California residents and residents of other US states with applicable privacy laws may have additional rights. Contact us at [email protected] for more information.

11. Data Retention

We retain your personal data for as long as your account is active. Upon account deletion, personal data is removed as described in Section 5. Anonymized contributed data may be retained indefinitely.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or through the app before the changes take effect. Continued use of Waydle after changes take effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.

13. Contact Us

For questions about this policy or your data:

Email: [email protected]