Privacy Policy

Data we collect

We collect only the data needed to detect wildlife on your cameras and deliver the alerts you ask for. Specifically, we collect and store:

• Ring Account ID. The identifier Ring assigns to your account when you link Wildlife Alert. It is the key we use to keep your data separate from every other user's.
• Device IDs and device names. The identifiers and display names of the Ring cameras and doorbells you choose to monitor, so we know where a detection came from.
• Motion snapshots (not stored). When a motion event occurs, snapshots are pulled from Ring, analyzed in memory, and then discarded. We do not store images of your home at rest. When you open a detection in your history, the snapshot for that event is fetched live from Ring at view time using your own linked access — so the image is shown to you on demand, never retained on our servers.
• Detection metadata. The results of analysis — identified species, confidence level, alert level, the detecting device, the provider used, and the event timestamp. This metadata (not images) is what forms your detection history.
• Web-push subscriptions. The browser push subscription you grant so we can deliver push alerts to your phone or computer.
• Email address. The email address you register with (or that Google shares when you sign in with Google, or that Ring provides when you link your account). We use it to send: account and service messages (such as email verification, password reset, and a welcome message when you first link); wildlife alert emails (on by default so you don't miss detections; you can turn them off anytime in your dashboard preferences); and occasional product and service emails — for example news about new features, and a note if your free trial ends without a subscription so you know how to reactivate. Every product/service email includes a one-click unsubscribe link; unsubscribing stops those promotional emails but not your wildlife alerts or essential account messages.
• Your feedback and pet tags. If you use the optional "👍 / 👎" controls on an event, or answer the optional "Is this your pet?" question, we store your response — the thumbs verdict, any correction you choose (which may be a different species or a non-animal such as a person, vehicle, or object), and a per-camera note of a confirmed pet's species. We keep this only to make your own future detections on that camera more accurate. It is tied to your account and a specific camera, is never shared with other users, and is not used to train any AI model.
• Marketing link analytics. If you reach our site by scanning a QR code on one of our flyers (a link like wildlifealert.app/r/…), we record the campaign code from the link, the date and time, and your device's IP address — from which we derive only an approximate location (town/region, which may involve a third-party IP-geolocation lookup) — before redirecting you onward. We use this to measure which flyers and neighborhoods work, and, on a best-effort basis, to gauge how many scans lead to sign-ups. This is US-focused marketing; the raw IP address is deleted after 90 days, and it is purged if you link an account and later delete it. We do not use it to identify you personally.

We do not perform facial recognition or human identification, and we do not collect payment details — your subscription is billed by Ring.

Why we process your data

We process each type of data for a specific, limited purpose:

• Ring Account ID — to authenticate you, scope your data to your account, and honor your unlink and deletion requests.
• Device IDs and names — to know which cameras to monitor and to label detections with the camera they came from.
• Motion snapshots — to run multi-step AI analysis (animal screening, then species identification, then a context sanity-check) in memory at the moment of detection. Snapshots are not stored; when you view a past detection, its image is fetched live from Ring on demand.
• Detection metadata — to classify alert levels, match detections against your selected species, and build your detection history.
• Web-push subscriptions — to deliver the push alerts you have enabled to your phone or computer.
• Email address — to send account and service messages (email verification, password reset, and a welcome message on first link); the wildlife alert emails for the species you have chosen (on by default, disable anytime in your dashboard preferences); and occasional product and service emails such as new-feature news and trial-reactivation reminders. Product/service emails always include a one-click unsubscribe link, and opting out of them never affects your wildlife alerts or essential account messages.
• Your feedback and pet tags — to refine the accuracy of your own future detections on the camera the feedback came from (for example, learning that a camera reliably sees a particular species, or recognizing your confirmed pet so it is not mistaken for wildlife). This never changes which alerts you receive, is scoped to your account, and is not shared with other users.
• Marketing link analytics — to measure the reach of our flyer/QR campaigns (which campaign codes and neighborhoods draw the most scans) and, best-effort, how many scans lead to sign-ups. We derive only an approximate town/region from the IP and delete the raw IP after 90 days.

We process this data to provide and operate the service you requested. We do not sell your personal data.

No AI training. We do not use your snapshots, video, detection history, your feedback, or any other Ring data to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI or machine-learning model — neither our own nor any third party's. Data is sent to our AI provider only for real-time analysis of that single event, and that provider does not use it to train its models. Your feedback only adjusts the accuracy of your own future detections at the moment they are analyzed; it does not retrain any model. Because we never train on your data, there is no AI-training use to opt out of.

No human review of your footage. No employee of Asteya Tech LLC views, watches, or manually reviews your Ring videos or images. Detection is fully automated, and your data is accessible only within a session authenticated for your own account.

Sub-processors we share data with

To operate the service we rely on a small set of trusted sub-processors. Each receives only the data needed for its function:

• Google Gemini — our AI analysis provider. We send motion snapshots to Google's Gemini models to screen for animals and identify the species. We also make a separate text-only check (no image) that double-checks an identification against non-visual context — the time of day, season, your camera's town/city and current local weather, your confirmed pet, and the species you have previously confirmed on that camera — to catch results that don't fit the context. Data is sent for real-time analysis only and is not used, by us or by Google, to train AI models.
• U.S. National Weather Service (weather.gov) — a free U.S. government weather API. To provide the local-weather context for the accuracy check above, we send only an approximate, city-level coordinate derived from the town/city associated with a camera (a public city-center point, not your precise location or address) to fetch the current conditions. We send no account identifier, email, device id, image, or other personal data to this service.
• Google Sign-In (OAuth) — if you choose to register or sign in with Google, Google verifies your identity and shares your email and name with us to create or access your account. Used only for authentication; optional (email/password sign-in is available).
• Email delivery (SMTP) — our email provider sends you account messages such as address-verification and password-reset links, wildlife alert emails (on by default; you can turn them off in your dashboard preferences), and occasional product/service emails (new-feature news, welcome, and trial-reactivation reminders, each with a one-click unsubscribe). It receives your email address and the message content (such as the detected species, time, camera, and a link to the event) needed to deliver those messages.
• Web-push delivery service — the browser/operating system push services (e.g. Apple, Google, Mozilla) that deliver push notifications to your device. They receive the encrypted alert payload needed to reach you.
• Hosting and infrastructure provider — the cloud host (Google Cloud Platform) that runs the application and stores your data, under a single secured origin.

We require each sub-processor to protect your data and to use it only to perform services for us.

How long we keep your data

We retain your detection history — the metadata for each event (species, confidence, alert level, device, and timestamp), not images of your home — for 90 days. When a detection passes the 90-day retention window, we delete the record automatically. The same 90-day window applies to every subscription plan, so you always have roughly a season of wildlife history to look back on.

Data tied to your account link (such as your Ring tokens) is kept only while your account remains linked and is deleted when you unlink, as described below.

How we protect your data

We apply technical safeguards to keep your data secure:

• Encryption in transit. All connections to the service are served exclusively over TLS-secured HTTPS, so data moving between your browser, Ring, and our servers is encrypted.
• Envelope encryption at rest. Sensitive credentials, including your Ring access and refresh tokens, are stored using envelope encryption so they are protected at rest.
• Tenant isolation. Your data is scoped to your Ring Account ID and is accessible only within a session authenticated for your account.
• Secret confinement. API keys and signing keys are loaded from the environment and are never written to logs, rendered pages, or build artifacts.

Your rights and choices

You have control over your data. Depending on where you live, privacy laws such as the EU/UK GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) may give you the rights below; we extend these choices to all users:

• Access. You can view your monitored devices, preferences, and detection history at any time from your dashboard, and you can request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Deletion. You can permanently delete all the data we hold for your account at any time using the "Delete my data" button on your dashboard — this removes your linked Ring tokens, your sign-in account (email, name, and the password or Google connection you registered with), your cameras, preferences, detection history, your detection feedback and pet tags, usage records, and any pending email-verification or password-reset links, in one step, and cannot be undone. Individual detection records are also deleted automatically once they pass your plan's retention window.
• Deleting your data does not cancel your subscription. Your Wildlife Alert subscription is billed and managed by Ring, not by us. Using "Delete my data" erases the information we hold, but it does not end your Ring subscription or stop Ring from billing you. To cancel billing you must unlink or remove the app in Ring (see below); if you delete your data but leave the app added in Ring, your plan can remain active and billable until you unlink.
• Unlinking and cancellation. You can unlink Wildlife Alert from your Ring account — or uninstall it from the Ring Appstore — at any time. When you unlink, or when Ring notifies us that the app was removed, we stop processing your motion events and delete your stored Ring tokens, which severs our access to your cameras and purges the data tied to the link. Because Ring manages billing, unlinking or removing the app in Ring is also how your subscription is cancelled.

We do not sell or share your personal data for cross-context behavioral advertising, and exercising any of these rights will never cause us to deny you service or charge a different price. To exercise a right, use the contact details below; we will not discriminate against you for doing so.

Neighborhood Animal-Activity Report (opt-in)

The Neighborhood Animal-Activity Report is an optional, opt-in feature that shows a daily "weather report" of animal activity for the town or city where your Ring cameras are located — for example, "10 coyotes detected in Altadena this morning." It is off by default; we never enable it for you, and you can withdraw your consent at any time from your account preferences or the feature's welcome screen. The feature is informational only — it is not a public-safety, security, or neighborhood-watch tool.

• City-level location you provide. If you opt in, you tell us the town or city for each camera yourself, inside Wildlife Alert — you enter a US ZIP code or type a city name and pick the matching US city from a lookup, and you can set a different town/city for each camera. This location is not taken from Ring: we do not request or use any Ring-provided location data for this feature, and Ring's own coarse device location is never used to place your cameras. A ZIP code you enter is used only to find the city and is not stored. We store the resolved location at town/city granularity only (town/city, with state and country) — we do not store the ZIP code, your street address, GPS coordinates, or any location more precise than the city, and the aggregated report never shows any location finer than the city. The city lookup is United States only for this version.
• Animals only. The report covers detected animals only. It includes no Ring video, clips, images, or other user-generated media, and no human-detection data of any kind.
• De-identified and not linked to you. Each shared record contains only three things — the animal species, the city-level location, and the time of the detection. It carries no PII: no account identifier, no email, no Ring account ID, no device ID, and nothing that could tie the record back to you. Because these aggregated records hold no link to any account, they are de-identified and persist even after you delete your account or your data — there is no account association left to remove.
• Reciprocal. To view other users' aggregated detections you must share your own. If you are not opted in, you will not see the neighborhood data, and none of your detections are contributed.

Sale of aggregated, de-identified trend data. We may sell or share aggregated, de-identified, non-PII animal-trend data that originates only from users who have opted in. Any data we offer for sale is limited to the animal species, the city-level location, and the detection timestamp, and excludes all PII, any location more precise than the city, Ring video, user-generated media, and human-detection data. This applies only to the de-identified aggregate records described above; as stated elsewhere in this policy, we do not sell your personal data.

Changes to this policy and our AI features

We may update this policy as the service evolves. When we make a material change we update the "last updated" date at the top of this page, and significant changes are reflected here before or when they take effect. Your continued use after an update means you accept the revised policy.

When we add or change AI capabilities — for example new detectable species, improved accuracy, or new detection features — we describe the current behaviour on our How it works and FAQ pages, which we keep up to date. Detection is AI-based and best-effort: each result carries a confidence level and Wildlife Alert is not a security or safety system.

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