Birderlands privacy

Who runs Birderlands

Birderlands is run by Snix, S.A. de C.V., of El Salvador, which is responsible for your data. Our Terms of Use are part of this page.

Listening

Your phone listens for birds. Human voices are deleted on the phone; it only keeps a count of voices it removed.

Passive listening never saves or sends audio. What leaves the phone is a short bird report: which bird, when, and an area of about 5 km².

Recordings you keep

Audio is saved only when you press Record or start a Bird walk and choose to keep a clip. Kept clips stay on your phone.

If you accept the Library Terms, kept clips can go to the Birderlands bird library. Voices are removed on your phone first, and a clip in which a voice is still detected is never sent. It goes with the bird, its quality and an area of about 5 km² or larger, never your position.

Location

Your exact position never leaves your phone. It only centres your map.

The server gets areas of about 5 km² at most. Protected and critically endangered birds are shown more coarsely, and activity near your home Wi-Fi shows at town level only.

Your account

Joining needs no email or password. Your phone makes its own key when you join, and that key is your account.

We keep your invite code, who invited you, the age range you gave (the beta is for adults only), your town and your game progress.

Your record by email

When you join we ask if you want your whole profile emailed to you, weekly or monthly. We never email you unless you say yes. We first send a code to check the address is yours, and we use it only for your record, its codes, and moving your account to a new phone. You can change or stop it at any time.

Each record is one signed file, locked with a password you choose. The password stays on your phone; we never see it, and without it nobody can open the record, not even us. The record shows areas, never your exact position. Recordings stay on your phone; the record only lists their fingerprints. We keep the record's fingerprint, not the file.

With that email and your password you can move your account to a new phone. The old phone then stops working for your account, and we let your email know.

Friends and names

You can choose a player name. Other adults can find it by searching only if you allow it, and you can turn that off.

A friend has to accept. There is no chat. Friends see your score, your birds and your city, a day late.

You choose, for each friend, if they may see more: your neighbourhood, your recent hex (an area of about 150 m, an hour late), your home hex, or a live hex for 15 minutes to 8 hours that stops by itself. All of this is for adults only, either of you can stop it at any time, and we keep no history of live positions.

Leaderboards

On public boards other players are anonymous ("Birder 3F2A") unless they are your friends. Neighbourhood teams show only once they have at least 5 players, and never who is in them.

Streaming your birds

If you show your birds on a live stream, your phone sends us each bird's name, its bird type, its card tier and how many times you've found it, plus your points, world rank and counts of species and cards. It never sends your position. It sends your country once when you go live, so we can judge which birds are safe to name. We keep the birds named on your streams for 90 days for that check, and your overlay link only as a fingerprint.

On a stream, birds your phone found in the past 7 days can be shown as live, without the time or the place (see the Terms of Use).

A viewer's display name and vote in the stream game stay in memory for that stream only, then they are gone. We never store chat.

HONE and Hone

HONE is earned for real listening on Hone's network, outside the game. Game points never turn into HONE. If you connect a Hone account, Hone's own privacy notice also applies to what Hone receives.

What we never do

We don't sell your data, show ads, or share your data for advertising. Nothing in the beta writes your personal data to a blockchain.

Where it's stored and for how long

Game data is kept on servers we run. Backups are kept in MEGA S4 object storage in the EU for up to 30 days.

You can delete your account in the app (You › Delete my account) or by writing to us. Everything about you is deleted: account, name, email, friends, places and invites. The birds you reported and recordings you gave the library stay in the community bird record, like a post in a group, with nothing left that ties them to you.

Contact

Questions, corrections or deletion requests: ornigo@honemesh.net. We will update this page as the beta changes.