Frequently asked questions

Wildlife Alert works with Ring cameras and video doorbells that send motion events and snapshots through your linked Ring account. That includes battery and wired video doorbells, Stick Up Cams, Spotlight Cams, and Floodlight Cams.

If a device can record a motion clip and a snapshot in the Ring app, it can feed Wildlife Alert. Cameras must be online and have motion detection enabled. The number of cameras you can connect depends on your plan — see the pricing page for the per-plan camera limits.

When a confirmed animal is identified, Wildlife Alert sends an instant push notification — to your phone or your computer, with no extra app to install.

• On a computer or Android phone, turn on push from your dashboard and it works in the browser right away.
• On an iPhone or iPad, first add Wildlife Alert to your Home Screen (Share → Add to Home Screen), open it from that icon, then enable push.

You can turn push on or off at any time from your dashboard. Turning it off pauses notifications without unlinking your account.

Billing is handled entirely by Ring. You subscribe, pay, upgrade, downgrade, and cancel your Wildlife Alert plan directly through your Ring account. There is no separate checkout with us, and we never collect, process, or store your payment details.

Charges, renewals, taxes, and refunds are governed by Ring's billing terms and the plan you selected through Ring. Because Ring manages billing, any questions about a charge, renewal, or refund should be directed to Ring through your Ring account. To cancel, unlink Wildlife Alert or remove it from the Ring Appstore.

See the pricing page for plan details.

We collect only what we need to detect wildlife and notify you: your Ring account link, your device names and IDs, the motion snapshots we analyse, the resulting detection metadata, and the push subscription for the device you enabled alerts on. Snapshots are sent to Google Gemini, our image-analysis sub-processor, to identify animals.

We keep detection history only for the retention window of your plan, and you can request access to or deletion of your data and unlink at any time. This is a short summary — read the full Privacy Policy for the complete list of data collected, sub-processors, retention by tier, security measures, and your rights.

It is an optional, opt-in daily "weather report" of animal activity for the town or city where your Ring cameras are — for example, "10 coyotes detected in Altadena this morning." It is informational only, not a public-safety or neighborhood-watch tool, and it is off by default. You can opt in (and withdraw consent again) at any time from your account preferences or the feature's welcome screen.

It is reciprocal: you must share your own detections to view other users' aggregated detections. If you are not opted in, you will not see the neighborhood data, and none of your detections are contributed.

No videos and no precise location are ever shared. Shared records cover animals only and contain just the species, the town/city, and the time — no Ring video or images, no human-detection data, no street address, and no location more precise than the city. These records are de-identified and not linked to your account. See the Privacy Policy for the full details, including how aggregated, de-identified trend data may be sold.

You set your own town or city — it does not come from Ring. When you opt in, you tell us the town/city for your cameras by entering a US ZIP code or typing a city name and picking the match (the lookup is United States only for now). That ZIP is used only to find the city and is never stored — we keep just the town/city. You can set a different town/city for each camera using the pencil edit icon next to it in your camera list.

You can leave at any time, and doing so is straightforward:

• Cancel the subscription. Because billing is handled by Ring, open your Ring account's subscriptions and cancel the Wildlife Alert plan there. Cancelling stops future charges.
• Unlink your Ring account. From your Wildlife Alert dashboard choose to unlink, or remove Wildlife Alert's access from the authorised apps list in your Ring account. Unlinking stops all new motion events from reaching us.

When you unlink or uninstall, we stop processing new events immediately and purge your stored detection data per the Privacy Policy. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is deleted and when.

Wildlife Alert runs several AI checks on each event to cut false alerts — filtering out non-animal motion like cars, shadows, and people, identifying the likely species, and weighing additional context before deciding whether to alert you. No automated system is perfect, so you may still see the occasional miss or mislabel, especially in poor light or at long range.

You can help: the optional 👍 / 👎 on each event (and the "Is this your pet?" question) teach Wildlife Alert what your cameras actually see, which improves the accuracy of your own future detections on that camera. This feedback stays on your account and is never shared with other users.

Wildlife Alert is an informational tool, not a security or safety system, and should not be relied on as one. Tuning camera placement, motion zones, and sensitivity in the Ring app improves results.

• Confirm the camera is online and motion detection is enabled in the Ring app.
• Check that push alerts are turned on in your dashboard for the species you care about.
• On iPhone/iPad, make sure you added Wildlife Alert to your Home Screen and enabled notifications from that installed app.
• If your account link has expired, re-link Wildlife Alert from the dashboard so we can receive motion events again.

If alerts still do not arrive after these checks, unlink and re-link the account to refresh the connection.

If your question is not answered above, email us and a real person will get back to you:

Support: team@wildlifealert.app

For anything about a charge, a refund, or your subscription, please also contact Ring through your Ring account, since billing is handled by Ring.