This is the privacy policy for the app Who’s That Feathered Friend?
What the app collects
The app does not collect any data whatsoever. It operates entirely offline with no telemetry, analytics, crash reporting, advertising or tracking code, and no third-party dependencies.
In particular, if the app doesn’t work well for you, I will have no way to know that. Feel free to reach out at feathered-friend@ericphanson.com!
Photos
Your photos never leave your device unless you share them, and the app does not ask for access to the photo library. Once you select a photo, it is sent to the app for offline processing (on your phone), and the results shown to you. Photos are not retained in the app.
Location
If the photos you provide to the app have GPS coordinates, it will use them to find which state/province the photo was taken in, to help identify which birds are likely to occur there. The location never leaves your device, and the app does not ask for location permission or use Location Services. It only reads the metadata from the photos you give it.
You can configure the app to ignore location metadata by turning off “Use location” in the About screen.
What is stored on the phone
Only your settings are stored on the phone, in the app’s own settings storage. These include the last 5 manually selected location regions. No photos, coordinates, or bird identification history is stored. Deleting the app removes all of the stored settings.
Sharing
You can tap “Share” to share a photo and identification results with someone else.
Share sends the photo, re-encoded as a JPEG with its location, camera details and capture time removed, and a message naming the species, to wherever you choose in the iOS share sheet.
Developer mode (hidden; tap Version on About four times) adds “Share timings” and “Copy timings” buttons. That report holds the app version, build number and commit, device model identifier, iOS version, thermal state, whether Low Power Mode is on, which model answered, and per-photo file size, pixel size, file types, timings and answer (plus a second model’s answer when comparing two models). It holds no image, coordinates or region.
Network
The app is entirely offline and makes no network requests.
Changes and contact
Contact: feathered-friend@ericphanson.com, or the support page.
Changes to this policy show as the “Last modified” date above.