Privacy Policy

Submitted Information

Personal Information is voluntarily supplied by you when you register and submit data to the Citizen Science Databases. By registering, you grant us permission to associate your observations with unique identifiers (login name, your email, other contact information and/or your name) and transmit this information to our servers and to the the Citizen Science Databases servers. Your sightings, including your username, submitted to the Citizen Science Databases will be available to the public and/or registered users for a variety of purposes including Rare Bird Alerts, Needs Alerts, Year List Top 100’s, Life Lists, Patch Totals, etc.

By using our apps to transmit your sightings to the Citizen Science Databases, you agree to make your sighting data public, including but not limited to the name you use to register with the Citizen Science Databases, your comments and the exact location of the sighting. The apps and the Citizen Science Databases may also use or display aggregated information about your sightings, such as your life list, patch totals, year list, etc. A few specific pieces of information that you provide, most notably your email address, will not be made public as described below, but otherwise you should assume that all data you submit to the Citizen Science Databases will be made public.

When you transmit bird sighting data to the Citizen Science Databases, your sighting data is publicly available. You should not transmit any sensitive, confidential or private bird, dragonfly, butterfly or other information via the apps. For those types of sightings, such as sightings of endangered or sensitive species, you should enter them directly into the Citizen Science Databases and utilize whatever mechanism they have set up to “hide” them. See the Citizen Science Databases respective websites for more information about this process.

Our apps provides data to users that was publicly available at the time we received it. Note that we synchronize our database on an occasional basis and it is our policy not to display sightings that have been marked private. However, we receive information from the Citizen Science Databases on an occasional basis (generally about hourly for recent sightings and every 3 months for sightings older than about 1 month), so it is possible that you could mark a sighting private in the Citizen Science Databases and it would continue to appear in the apps for some period of time.

Debugging Information

In order to provide you with the highest-quality products possible, we record information about how our users navigate our website and apps. We also record unusual events such as bugs and crashes for the purpose of debugging and improving our website and apps. This data is sent to our servers and is used only for the purposes of helping us fix those bugs and crashes and to provide a better website and app experience in the future. In general, this information is not recorded in a way that would allow us to tie it back to an individual user.