Privacy Policy
Last Updated: August 2026 • Effective Date: January 1, 2026
At AnimalIDFinder ("we", "our", or "us"), we respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This Privacy Policy explains how your information is handled when you use our website, upload animal photos, or interact with our nature identification tools.
Ephemeral Photo Processing
Your uploaded animal photos are processed in temporary volatile memory for visual identification only. We do not permanently store or archive your personal photos on public servers.
No Sale of Personal Data
We never sell, rent, or trade your personal information, search queries, or location data to third-party data brokers.
Transparent Cookie Standards
We use standard essential cookies and privacy-compliant advertising/analytics cookies to maintain session states and support site hosting costs.
1. Information We Collect
When you visit AnimalIDFinder, we may collect the following categories of information:
- Uploaded Image Data: Photographs you upload or capture for animal, track, or bird identification. These images are transmitted securely via encrypted HTTPS to visual processing APIs and discarded following inference completion.
- Browser & Device Telemetry: Anonymized technical data such as browser type, operating system version, screen resolution, referring URLs, and approximate geographic region (country/city level, non-precise).
- Local Preferences: Search history, bookmarked species, and field passport badges stored locally on your device via HTML5 LocalStorage.
- Communications Data: Information you provide when submitting feedback, error reports, or contact inquiries (such as your email address and message contents).
2. How We Use Your Information
We process collected information strictly for legitimate operational purposes:
- To perform real-time visual species classification and return taxonomic field guides.
- To monitor application performance, prevent abusive bot requests, and maintain service uptime.
- To respond to user inquiries, correction reports, and customer support tickets.
- To serve relevant, non-intrusive advertisements that fund ongoing hosting and API infrastructure.
3. Third-Party Service Providers & AI Processing
To deliver state-of-the-art computer vision analysis, image features are analyzed using secure multimodal AI infrastructure (including Google Cloud / Gemini API endpoints). These cloud services process images under strict enterprise data-privacy contracts and do not use customer-uploaded content to train public models without consent.
4. Cookies & Advertising Disclosures (Google AdSense)
AnimalIDFinder uses cookies and web beacons to enhance site functionality and serve advertisements through Google AdSense and third-party advertising partners.
- Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this or other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to your sites and/or other sites on the Internet.
- Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting AboutAds.info or Google Ads Settings.
5. Your Data Rights (GDPR & CCPA)
Under applicable data protection laws (such as GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California), you have the right to access, rectify, or request deletion of any personal data you have provided to us. Because we do not require account registration or store photos, you can clear your locally saved history at any time directly through your browser settings or our in-app "Clear History" button.
6. Contact Our Privacy Team
If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy, please contact our data protection team via our or email us at privacy@animalidfinder.org.