Privacy

Wild Watcher is a map of publicly available nature cameras. There are no accounts, no advertising, and no third-party trackers. This page describes exactly what the software does, and it is written to match the code rather than to cover us.

What we do not collect

• No name, email address or account — there is nothing to sign up for.
• No advertising or analytics cookies, and no third-party tracking scripts.
• No precise location. We never ask for the browser geolocation permission.
• No IP addresses stored anywhere.

What we do collect

We record anonymous product events so we can tell which cameras people find interesting and which are letting them down: a camera was viewed, the random button was pressed, a search term was entered, a filter was used, a camera failed to load.

Each event may carry a session id: a random string generated in your browser and held in sessionStorage. It exists only so we can tell “one person pressed random ten times” apart from “ten people pressed it once”. It is not linked to any identity, is never shared, and is destroyed when you close the tab.

Search terms are recorded as text, so please do not type anything personal into the search box. It is a search box for places and animals.

When a visit begins we also record three coarse facts about it, worked out on our server from the request your browser was already making. No script runs in your browser to collect them, and nothing is stored on your device:

• Where you arrived from — the hostname of the referring site only, such as reddit.com or google. Never the page address or anything after it, because that is where search terms and personal identifiers tend to live.
• Country — a two-letter code, so we know whether to look for more cameras in places people are actually visiting from. Our hosting provider works this out from the connection; we read the country and never the address itself.
• Mobile or desktop — two buckets, nothing finer. It tells us where to spend design effort. It is not a device fingerprint.

Together these cannot identify you: they describe a visit, not a person, and there is no identifier tying one visit to another beyond the session id that dies with the tab.

IP addresses

To stop one client overwhelming the service, requests are rate limited. Your IP address is put through a one-way hash and only the first part of that hash is held in memory for a few minutes. The address itself is never written to disk, never logged and never stored in the database. Our hosting provider will keep its own connection logs, as every web host does.

Data stored in your browser

• Saved cameras are kept in localStorage on your device. They never reach our servers. Clearing your browser data removes them.
• Session id in sessionStorage, described above.

Neither is a tracking cookie, and neither follows you to any other site. This is why you are not being shown a cookie banner.

Third parties you interact with

Wild Watcher does not host any video. When you watch a camera, you are connecting directly to whoever operates it, and their privacy policy applies to that connection:

• YouTube for most live cameras. We use the youtube-nocookie player, which avoids setting tracking cookies until playback begins, but Google still sees the connection.
• The camera operator’s own website for cameras shown in their viewer, such as the National Park Service.
• OpenFreeMap serves the map tiles.
• Open-Meteo provides weather. We request it from our server using a coordinate rounded to about 11 km, so no precise position is sent, and never anything about you.

How long we keep things

Anonymous events are kept while they remain useful for product decisions. Camera health checks are kept for 90 days in full and then reduced to a daily uptime summary per camera. None of this is about people; it is about cameras.

Children

Wild Watcher is suitable for all ages and collects nothing that could identify anyone, including children.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes with it. Questions about privacy, or about anything on this page, can go to bedisaket@gmail.com.