Last updated 5 August 2026. BirdNote is operated by Rivolu LLC.
Your account. An email address, and a display name if you set one. An account exists so your journal reaches your other devices and survives a lost phone.
Your sightings. The species, count, date and time, any notes you write, any photographs you attach, and the location where you logged them. This is the journal itself — it is the thing the app is for.
Your outings. If you record a trail, the route you walked. Trails are recorded only while a session is running and only if you turn the option on.
Usage counts. How many birds and species you log, whether each was entered by voice or by typing, and how long the app is open each day. These are counts and durations, used to understand which parts of the app are worth improving. They contain nothing about which birds you saw or where.
We do not record audio. Voice logging uses Apple's on-device speech recognition, and the recording never leaves your iPhone. We do not use advertising identifiers, and there are no third-party analytics or advertising SDKs in the app.
Location is used to place your sightings on a map, to record a trail when you ask for one, and to find birds reported near you. Precise coordinates are stored in your own journal and shown only to you.
When you choose to share an outing, the location published with it is coarsened to approximately one kilometre. Photographs are re-encoded on upload, which strips the GPS coordinates cameras embed in them. A nest site or a roost stays where you found it.
Other birders see only what you publish, and publishing is always a separate, deliberate step from writing your journal. Nothing you log is shared by default.
We use Apple (sign-in, push, App Store), Railway (hosting and database) and Cloudflare R2 (photo storage) to run the service. They process data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for anything else. We do not sell data, and there is nothing to sell it to.
Your journal is kept until you delete it. Deleting your account removes your sightings, outings, photographs and account record from our systems.
Export everything you have logged from within the app, at any time, in a form other software can read. Ask us to delete your account and we will. Location permission can be withdrawn in iOS Settings; the journal continues to work without it, with sightings simply carrying no coordinates.
BirdNote is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who sees it, we will say so in the app rather than only here.
Privacy questions and deletion requests: admin@rivolu.com. Anything else: feedback@rivolu.com.