Collecting and Using Your Personal Data
Types of Data Collected
What You give Us when You use the app
We have kept this list specific rather than generic, because You are entitled to know exactly what an app that asks for Your location does with it.
Your phone number. It is how You sign in, and the only piece of information that identifies You as a person. There is no email, password or social login.
Up to five places, stored as geohashes. Where You are, plus the places You choose to save (home, work, and two favourites). A geohash is a short code for an area rather than a street address. They exist for a single purpose: deciding which nearby alerts concern You. They are never shown to other users.
Your notification preferences and a notification token for Your device, so an alert can reach Your phone.
The reports You publish: the photos You choose, Your description, the species, and the place and date You give. Only the photos You pick reach Us; the app uses Your system photo picker and never browses Your library.
The contact details You choose to publish on a report, such as a phone number, an email address or an Instagram handle. You decide which, if any.
Your pet profiles and their emergency card: the pet's details and photos, an optional care note, Your vet's name and phone number, and a home location only if You switch that on.
Your saved reports, Your places and Your app settings.
Information about other people that You give Us
The emergency card lets You record trusted people who could look after Your animal if something happened to You: their name, phone number, and how they relate to You. We never contacted them, You did. Please ask them first, tell them their details appear on that card, and remove them whenever they ask, either by editing the card or by writing to us.
Technical data collected automatically
Crash reports (Firebase Crashlytics): the device model, the operating system version, and where in the app something broke. No report content and no contact details are attached.
Usage measurement (Firebase Analytics): which screens are opened and which kinds of report are created, read in aggregate to understand what needs fixing.
Anti-abuse checks (Firebase App Check), which confirm a request really comes from the app and not from a script.
Usage Data as described below, when You browse this website.
Who can see what, and when
Every report is read by one of our human moderators before it becomes visible to anyone. Nothing You submit is published unreviewed.
Once a report is approved, its photos, description, species, the area concerned and any contact details You chose to publish are visible to other users. Your own position is not.
An emergency card is readable only by someone who opens the link or scans the code on that specific pet's card, and every opening is logged so the owner can see it happened.
Contact details on a report are not shown until someone asks to see them. When they do, We record that they asked, and We show it to the person who published the report. We keep that record for as long as the report exists, because its whole purpose is to let You see who reached for Your number. The app tells the person this will happen before they continue.
Where it is stored
The app runs on Google Firebase (Authentication, Firestore, Storage, Cloud Functions, Messaging, Analytics, Crashlytics and App Check), acting as our processor. Our database is hosted in the European Union. Google may nonetheless process some data outside the EU, under the standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission.
Usage Data
Usage Data is collected automatically when using the Service.
Usage Data may include information such as Your Device's Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that You visit, the time and date of Your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.
When You access the Service by or through a mobile device, We may collect certain information automatically, including, but not limited to, the type of mobile device You use, Your mobile device unique ID, the IP address of Your mobile device, Your mobile operating system, the type of mobile Internet browser You use, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.
Use of Your Personal Data
The Company may use Personal Data for the following purposes:
To provide and maintain our Service, including to monitor the usage of our Service.
To manage Your Account: to manage Your registration as a user of the Service. The Personal Data You provide can give You access to different functionalities of the Service that are available to You as a registered user.
For the performance of a contract: the development, compliance and undertaking of the purchase contract for the products, items or services You have purchased or of any other contract with Us through the Service.
To contact You: To contact You by email, telephone calls, SMS, or other equivalent forms of electronic communication, such as a mobile application's push notifications regarding updates or informative communications related to the functionalities, products or contracted services, including the security updates, when necessary or reasonable for their implementation.
To provide You with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless You have opted not to receive such information.
To manage Your requests: To attend and manage Your requests to Us.
For business transfers: We may use Your information to evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which Personal Data held by Us about our Service users is among the assets transferred.
For other purposes: We may use Your information for other purposes, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and to evaluate and improve our Service, products, services, marketing and your experience.
We may share Your personal information in the following situations:
- With Service Providers: We may share Your personal information with Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service, to contact You.
- For business transfers: We may share or transfer Your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of Company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of Our business to another company.
- With Affiliates: We may share Your information with Our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include Our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that We control or that are under common control with Us.
- With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.
- With other users: when You share personal information or otherwise interact in the public areas with other users, such information may be viewed by all users and may be publicly distributed outside.
- With partner organisations, for a deceased animal: a report for an animal found dead is not published to other users. It goes to our own team and to the organisation concerned, which is a municipal service, a shelter or a similar body, so the animal can be collected and, where we can manage it, the family told. What they receive is the report itself: the place, the date, the photos and description, and the contact details You chose to give so they can reach You about it.
- With Your consent: We may disclose Your personal information for any other purpose with Your consent.
Retention of Your Personal Data
The Company will retain Your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use Your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.
The Company will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of Our Service, or We are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.
Transfer of Your Personal Data
Your information, including Personal Data, is processed at the Company's operating offices and in any other places where the parties involved in the processing are located. It means that this information may be transferred to, and maintained on, computers located outside of Your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from Your jurisdiction.
Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by Your submission of such information represents Your agreement to that transfer.
The Company will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that Your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and no transfer of Your Personal Data will take place to an organization or a country unless there are adequate controls in place including the security of Your data and other personal information.
Delete Your Personal Data
You have the right to delete the Personal Data We hold about You, and You can do it Yourself from inside the app: Settings → Delete my account. You will be asked to type a confirmation word, because the deletion is immediate and cannot be undone.
If You cannot sign in any more, You can ask us instead. See our
account deletion page for how that works: we verify that You control the phone number on the account before deleting anything, since otherwise anyone could request the deletion of someone else's account.
Deleting Your account immediately and permanently removes: Your reports (ongoing and finished) together with their photos, Your pet profiles, their emergency cards and the contacts listed on them, Your saved reports, Your places and Your contact details, and the account itself with the phone number attached to it. If one of Your animals was being searched for, that alert stops at the same moment.
Two things are kept, and only these. First, for twelve months, a keyed one-way hash of the phone number together with the number of reports left on the account. It contains no phone number and no account identifier, it cannot be read back into a phone number, and its only purpose is to stop the same number creating an account, using up its reports, deleting it and starting again. After twelve months it is erased automatically. Second, internal records that no longer identify You: anonymous monthly donation totals, aggregate statistics, and operational history kept by partner organisations for the stray-animal registry, where the account identifier no longer resolves to anyone once the account is gone.
Separately from this, donations are handled by HelloAsso as an independent data controller. We never send them anything identifying the donor, and their own retention obligations apply to their records rather than to ours.
Disclosure of Your Personal Data
Business Transactions
If the Company is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, Your Personal Data may be transferred. We will provide notice before Your Personal Data is transferred and becomes subject to a different Privacy Policy.
Law enforcement
Under certain circumstances, the Company may be required to disclose Your Personal Data if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g. a court or a government agency).
Other legal requirements
The Company may disclose Your Personal Data in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to:
- Comply with a legal obligation
- Protect and defend the rights or property of the Company
- Prevent or investigate possible wrongdoing in connection with the Service
- Protect the personal safety of Users of the Service or the public
- Protect against legal liability
Security of Your Personal Data
The security of Your Personal Data is important to Us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While We strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect Your Personal Data, We cannot guarantee its absolute security.