privacy
your sightings are stored on your own account, not ours. this page explains what that means, who else sees what, and the small amount we do keep.
last updated: 31 july 2026
what is public
every sighting you log — the species, the notes, when and roughly where you saw it, and any photo, video or recording you attach — is written to your own AT Protocol account as a public record. anyone can read it, with or without an account, using birds.place or any other app on the network. this is how the protocol works, and it is the point: your sightings are yours and they outlive us.
it also means a sighting is not private and cannot be made private. deleting one removes it from your account, but copies may already exist elsewhere on the network.
where you saw it
a sighting can carry coordinates. we round them to three decimal places, about 110 metres, which names the pond or the tree line without pointing at a specific nest. the location is optional — you can clear it before you log, or edit it out afterwards.
when a photo or video already knows where it was taken, we read that from the file on your device and offer it as a starting point. the app asks for your photos and your location only for this, and only while you are logging a bird.
what we keep
no copies of your sightings and no copies of your media — those live on your account. what we do keep is the little that signing in and moderation require:
- your sign-in. birds.place is the app your account authorises, so the access it granted us is held on our server rather than on your device. your device holds only a random string that points at it. we never see your password: the sign-in happens on your own account's server.
- who you have muted, so we can hide them from you. this is private and is never shown to the person muted.
- reports you send us, including what you wrote and who you are, so we can act on them and answer you. reports are private and are never shown to the person reported.
blocks are different: a block is a public record on your own account, so it travels with you and works in other apps. anyone can see who you have blocked, the same as on the rest of the network.
signing out deletes the session, and once no session of yours is left we tell your account to revoke our access.
who else is involved
to show you anything, your device or our renderer talks to a few services. each of them sees the request, including your IP address, in the ordinary way any web service does:
- Cloudflare — serves birds.place and stores what is listed above
- microcosm — finds who has logged a bird, and where their account lives
- typeahead — looks up handles, display names and avatars
- Photon — searches for a place by name
- OpenStreetMap — draws the map on a sighting that has a place. it loads only on those pages, and it receives the rounded coordinates, never an exact one
- Wikipedia — supplies the link to read about a species. never a photograph: the only pictures here are ones the observer took
- your PDS, and the PDS of anyone whose sighting you are looking at, which hold the records and the media
apple provides TestFlight, which reports crashes and install counts to us while birds.place is in testing.
your account is yours
your records live wherever your account is hosted — bsky.social, your own server, somewhere else — and that host's policy governs them. you can revoke birds.place's access at any time from your account, and take your sightings with you.
children
birds.place is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
changes
if this changes materially, the date above changes and the new version appears here.
contact
questions, or something that looks wrong: hello@birds.place.