Privacy policy
Updated 27 October 2026
Tyuee is a free app for birders. It tells you about fresh observations of birds you have not seen yet near a place you choose. The observations come from the open data of iNaturalist and eBird. The app has no ads, no analytics and no trackers, and we never sell or trade your data.
Tyuee is made and run by a private individual, the app's developer (the name is shown on Tyuee's App Store and Google Play pages), not a company. For any question about your data, write to support@tyuee.com.
What we keep and why
Email address
You enter it to sign in. Your sign-in code is sent to it, and it tells your account apart. Tyuee has no passwords.
Monitoring point and radius
The coordinates of one point, its name (such as a town) and a radius. You pick the point on the map or from the phone's location. The radar looks for observations around it. The location is used once, to suggest the point: we keep only the point you chose, never your movements, and the app does not track your location in the background. Without location access you can pick the point on the map.
Species list (life list)
Which species you have seen and where that comes from: your eBird or Merlin archive, your iNaturalist profile, or your own “Seen” mark. It lets the app show only species new to you. From the eBird archive we keep the list of species only: the file is read on the server and not stored, and the dates and places of your observations in it are not kept. We also keep when you last uploaded an archive, and your “not seen” answers in the picture quick fill, so those species do not come up again.
iNaturalist username
If you linked an iNaturalist profile: its username and number. With them the server reads the species list of your public profile once a day. We never ask for and do not know your iNaturalist password.
Settings and findings
Your settings in the app (sources, observation age, notifications, quiet hours) and the phone's time zone, so that quiet hours follow your clock. Findings: which species turned up in observations near your point, and when. This is the Today screen and future notifications.
Push notification token
Once Tyuee has push notifications: the push address of your device that Apple or Google issue. A notification cannot be delivered without it. The app does not collect it yet.
Technical logs
The sign-in service keeps your active sessions: IP address and the name of the app you signed in with. A session is deleted when you sign out, and all of them with the account.
The server keeps operation logs. The API log has the time, request path and response code, with no IP address. The sign-in service log has the IP address and email: it uses them to limit how often codes are requested and to stop guessing. Logs are overwritten in a loop: at most 50 MB per service.
We do not collect your name, phone number, contacts, photos or files from the phone, location history or advertising identifiers. The app sends its interface language with every request, so that bird names are in that language, and the server does not store it.
Where the data lives
On a single Tyuee server rented from a commercial hosting provider. The app talks to the server over HTTPS only. Only the developer has access to the server. Nightly copies of the database (backups) are kept in separate storage.
Third-party services
The app does not work without these services. Each one gets only what it needs:
- iNaturalist: the server requests public observations by the cells of a shared grid (half a degree, about 50 km) around all users' points, and the species of your profile by its username. Your email and exact point are not sent. The phone loads bird photos straight from iNaturalist's servers, so they see the phone's IP address.
- eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology): the server requests fresh observations by the same cells. Nothing about you is sent. “Open in eBird” and Merlin links open their site or app.
- The email service that sends sign-in codes: gets your address and the letter.
- OpenStreetMap: the phone loads the map from OpenStreetMap's servers, which see the IP address and the part of the map shown.
- The phone's geocoder (Apple on iPhone, Google on Android): the phone's system names the place at your point's coordinates.
- Sentry, when error reporting is on: technical reports about server and app failures with the account number, without your email, coordinates or sign-in tokens.
- Expo, Apple and Google, once there are push notifications: the device token and the notification text, to deliver it.
How long we keep it and how to delete it
Data is kept while the account exists. You can delete your account in the app itself: Settings → Delete account. Your email, point, life list, marks, iNaturalist profile, settings and findings are deleted at once. The sign-in account is deleted at the same time, or, if the sign-in service was unavailable, automatically within 15 minutes. After that only the deleted account's number, without the email, is kept for one day, so that an old sign-in token cannot create the account again.
Nightly database copies are kept for up to 8 weeks and then deleted. They are used only to recover from a failure.
Inactive accounts are not deleted automatically. If you cannot sign in to the app, write to support@tyuee.com from that address and we will delete the account by hand.
What you can do
- See and change your data: everything we keep is shown in the app (point, list, settings, email).
- Delete parts of it: unlink the iNaturalist profile, remove “Seen” marks, upload a new eBird archive in place of the old one.
- Delete everything: Settings → Delete account.
- Ask about your data: support@tyuee.com.
Children
Tyuee is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Changes
If anything changes, we will update this page and the date at the top.