Privacy

Pocket Wild is built to respect you. This policy explains, in plain language, what the app does with your information — what stays on your device, the little that leaves it, and the rights you have. It covers the Pocket Wild iOS app and this website.

What stays on your device

Almost everything Pocket Wild creates lives only on your device, under your control:

• Your sightings, names, notes, and collection.
• The photos you take — kept on your device, and saved to your Photos library if you ask.
• No account, no profile, nothing to sign up for.

What leaves your device — only what's needed

A few features need to reach the internet. Each sends only what that feature requires:

• To identify a species, the photo of your sighting is sent — through a small proxy server we operate (on Cloudflare) — to iNaturalist's computer vision to suggest what it is. It's sent without your name or location, and we don't keep a copy.
• To stamp an entry with the weather, your coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo. Coordinates only — no photo, no name.
• On first launch, before you grant location, your approximate area (from your IP address at our proxy's edge network) is used once to show what's nearby. It isn't stored.
• When you scan an area on the map for nearby wildlife, that map region is sent to iNaturalist. It's a bounding box, not you.

iNaturalist and Open-Meteo handle the data they receive under their own privacy practices.

What we never do

• No ads, no ad networks, no analytics, no third-party tracking.
• No accounts, so there's nothing to leak.
• We never sell or rent your information, and we never share it beyond the services above — which receive only what they need to do their job.

How long we keep your data

Because your sightings, photos, and notes live on your device, they last as long as you keep them — and they're gone when you delete them or remove the app. Pocket Wild runs no server that stores your personal data, so there is no central copy of your journal for us to keep or lose. The data sent to iNaturalist and Open-Meteo answers a single request and is handled under their own retention policies.

Children's privacy

Pocket Wild is a general-audience app that families are welcome to enjoy, but it is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Because the app needs no account and keeps its journal on the device, a child using a family device keeps their sightings local, just as any user does. If you believe a child has provided information you'd like addressed, email us and we'll help.

Your choices and rights

You stay in control:

• You can grant or revoke camera, photo, and location access anytime in iOS Settings.
• You can delete any sighting in the app, or remove all of it by deleting the app.
• You can use Pocket Wild offline; identification and weather simply pause until you're back online.

If you live in California (CCPA/CPRA), the EU or UK (GDPR), or a similar place, you have rights to access, correct, or delete your personal information. In practice your data is on your device and under your control — we hold no account or server copy to retrieve or erase — but you're welcome to contact us with any request and we'll do what we can to help.

Security

Your journal is protected by your device's own security. Anything that does leave the app travels over encrypted (HTTPS) connections. Because we keep no central database of your information, there is no server-side trove to breach.

Changes to this policy

If we change how Pocket Wild handles information, we'll update this page and the "last updated" date above. Meaningful changes will appear here before they take effect.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns? Email hello@pocketwild.app. Pocket Wild is built quietly in Northwest Arkansas.