Privacy policy
Last updated 11 September 2026
WildList is made by Benjamin Isaac Mager, an individual developer in the United States. This page describes what the app collects, who else receives it, how long it is kept, and what happens when you delete your account. It is written from an inventory of the app's actual code rather than from a template, so if something is not listed here, the app does not do it. WildList is offered in the United States only, and this page is written for people in the United States; the rights section near the end says what you can ask us to do.
To create an account you give us an email address and a password, a display name, and a username. The email and password are held by our sign-in provider (Firebase Authentication) and are not written into the app's database. The display name and username are visible to every signed-in user and are indexed so people can find you by typing the first letters. There is no Google, Apple, or anonymous sign-in.
Optionally you can add a profile photo and customise your Nature Card (theme, featured stats, badges, favourite species, a "top four", and a trophy case). Your list of friends is stored on your profile and is visible to other signed-in users, as are your badges and your paid-tier flag.
Each sighting stores the species and its scientific name, the category, your notes, the observation date, a rarity grade, whether it was captive, the photo, and the location (see below). When the AI identified the photo, we also keep a short description the AI wrote of what it saw, the list of candidate species it considered, and the place name and date that were sent with the request, so you can reopen that reasoning later. Likes and comments on sightings are stored with the account that made them, and comments carry your display name. They are not limited to friends: any signed-in user can read the likes and comments on a sighting whose ID they hold, and any signed-in user can query the list of likes across the whole app, which shows which account liked which sighting and when.
Sighting records are readable by you and by the people you have accepted as friends. Sighting photos are described in the Photos section below.
When you log a sighting, WildList records where you were, using your device's location, and stores the exact coordinates on the sighting record along with a place name. When you import a photo from your library or a camera-roll batch, the coordinates and the date recorded in the photo's own metadata become the sighting's location and date instead. You can turn location off in iOS Settings, and sightings logged without it, or from a photo with no location metadata, simply have no place attached. Sightings saved while offline keep their exact coordinates on your phone until they upload.
Your sightings are not public. Only you and the people you have accepted as friends can see them. You see the exact coordinates and the full place name; friends see a coarser, neighbourhood-level name.
Place names come from your phone's operating system geocoder. On iOS that is Apple's geocoding service, so Apple receives the coordinates being turned into a name. WildList sends your coordinates to no other mapping service.
WildList never posts your sightings to iNaturalist or anywhere else. The observations under Spotted Nearby come from iNaturalist's public data and belong to other people. Yours never travel the other way.
Photos you attach to a sighting are reduced in size and stripped of camera metadata on your phone, then stored on Google's servers and served over a private link. When you ask for an identification, one reduced-size copy is made on your phone, and that same copy is sent first to Google Cloud Vision for a safety screen and then to Anthropic for the identification; neither receives the original file or its metadata.
That link matters. It is a long, unguessable web address. It is not listed anywhere public and search engines do not index it, but anyone holding it can open the image in a browser without signing in to WildList. If you share a sighting or a card, the image link travels with it. Changing who can see a sighting, or removing someone as a friend, does not switch off a link that has already been shared.
Deleting a sighting removes its photo from our storage before the sighting itself is removed, and deleting your account removes all of your photos from our storage. Until a photo is deleted, anyone who has its link can open it.
WildList runs on Google Firebase (sign-in, database, file storage, and the server functions that power AI, friends, reports, and deletion). Beyond that, these services receive data, each for a specific purpose:
None of these are advertising or analytics services.
The app uses your account ID (assigned at sign-up). It does not read the advertising identifier (IDFA), does not ask for tracking permission, and includes no analytics, advertising, or attribution software. We do not sell your personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
To enforce daily limits and monitor cost, the server keeps a per-day count of your AI requests, with token counts and an estimated cost. If the AI safety screen blocks an image or detects misuse, a strike may be recorded on your account. Strike records are kept for the life of your account and are not pruned; deleting your account removes them. A strike only affects how the app treats you for 30 days after it is recorded, and the first offence in any 30-day window is not recorded at all. Whenever the app looks up the rarity of a species name that is not in its built-in reference, it records that name (with no account attached) so we can add it. That covers names you type, names the AI returns, names in files you import, and names in other people's iNaturalist observations shown in Discover. Feedback you send from Settings is stored with your account ID, app version, and platform.
Sightings saved while offline, including their precise location, wait in local storage until they upload. Photos being uploaded, camera-roll import copies, cached species text and thumbnails, and any collection export you create are also kept on the device. Signing out does not clear these; deleting the app does.
Everything is kept until you delete it or delete your account. There are no automatic expiry jobs. Reports about content are retained indefinitely, including after the reported account is deleted; moderation strikes last as long as the account. Administrative audit records outlive the account, as described below.
Go to Settings, then Delete account. Deletion runs on our servers and removes: your profile and username, your sightings (with the likes and comments other people left on them), your species cards and badges, your milestone posts in friends' feeds, your photos (including copies of iNaturalist photos we stored for imported sightings), the likes you placed and the comments you wrote on other people's sightings, friend requests you sent or received, notifications addressed to you, reports you filed, feedback you sent us from Settings, your AI usage records, your AI credit balance, your AI chat sessions, our copy of your subscription state, blocked-user list, moderation strikes and settings, and your sign-in. Your account is also removed from your friends' friend lists, and the like counts on other people's sightings go down by the likes you had placed.
What deletion leaves behind:
If you need any of these removed, contact us at the address below and we will do it by hand.
WildList is offered in the United States. If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act gives you rights that we extend to everyone who uses the app, wherever in the United States you live:
We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. To exercise a right, email [email protected] from the address on your account; we will confirm the request came from you and respond within 45 days.
WildList asks for your date of birth at sign-up to confirm you are at least 13, and does not store it. It is not designed for children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13; if you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.
When the app's behaviour changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated.
Questions, deletion requests, or anything else: [email protected].