Privacy Policy

BirdsEye, Dragonfly ID and our other apps display sightings from eBird, OdonataCentral and other citizen science partner databases (Citizen Science Databases); or to record and enter sightings into those Citizen Science Databases. The Citizen Science Databases, in turn, are designed to gather and disseminate information about sightings. In general, you should be aware that the sightings you provide to the Citizen Science Databases will be made public, with a few specific exceptions.


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.


Your Contact Information

When you register for any of the BirdsEye family of apps, you provide us with contact information including your email address. By providing us with this information, you grant us permission to contact you with important information about the product(s) you own using this contact information.

Through our newsletter, we may also send you occasional product updates, news items and other information that we think may be relevant and interesting to you. You can opt-out of receiving this newsletter from Birds In The Hand at any time. We do not sell or provide your contact information to any outside parties without your permission, with the obvious exception that we do provide contact information to the Citizen Science Databases as part of the sighting submission process.

In order to send emails from within our apps, we may need to access your contact list. We do not gather or record information about your contacts, but simply use your contacts to assist you with sharing your sightings via email.


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.


Sensitive Species

Please be aware that your observations of sensitive species and their locations will be available to other users, scientists and in some cases to the public. If you are not familiar with the American Birding Association’s Principles of Birding Ethics, we encourage you to review them.

Cookies

Cookies are files that store your login and other personal information on your device so that you do not need to re-enter it every time you use the website or app. Our apps and website use cookies to provide you with a more personalized user experience by storing your personal information. As an example, cookies store your login information so that you do not need to re-register each time you use the app or website. You can choose not to allow your device to store any personal information. See you device help for more information on how to do this.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

Our privacy policy is subject to change. Updates to this policy will be posted on our website.