Privacy Policy

Effective Date: November 20, 2025

Last Updated: June 18, 2026

Wings & Whistles LLC ("Wings & Whistles LLC," "we," "us," or "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.

By using the Wings & Whistles LLC mobile app or website (collectively, the "Service"), you agree to the practices described in this Policy.

Wings & Whistles LLC is organized under the laws of the State of New York, United States.

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Account and Authentication Information

If you sign in with a third-party provider (such as Apple or Google), we receive information needed to create and manage your account, including:

• Name
• Email address
• Authentication identifiers provided by the sign-in provider

We use this information to create your account, keep you signed in, and communicate with you about the Service.

1.2 Bird Recordings and Content

When you use the app to record bird sounds, we collect and store:

• Audio recordings you capture through the app
• Metadata associated with the recording (such as time and basic device information)

Bird identification in the app is currently performed using models that run on your device. Your recordings are processed locally on your device to generate identification results.

If you choose to opt in to model improvement, we may also upload and use selected recordings (in de-identified form, together with associated context such as approximate location) to help train and improve our bird recognition models.

If you do not opt in, your recordings are used only to provide you with identification, playback, history, and related app features. They are not used to train our models.

If we ever change how identification is performed, for example by introducing server-side (cloud) identification, we will update this Policy and provide appropriate notice.

1.3 Location Data

With your permission, we collect your device's location when you record bird sounds and when you use certain location-aware features. This helps us:

• Help identify birds more accurately by using location as one of several context signals
• Show you birds and content that are likely to be found around you or in nearby habitats

You can control location permissions at any time in your device settings. If you revoke permission, we stop collecting location data through the app, although existing recordings may still have associated location data.

1.4 Premium Subscription, Flight Crew Passes, and Purchase Information

If you purchase a Wings & Whistles Premium subscription, the transaction itself is processed by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play). We do not receive or store your payment card or banking details.

Flight Crew passes are event-day or seasonal organization passes, not auto-renewing app subscriptions. If an organization purchases a Session Pass, Classroom pass, or Camp Pass through the instructor dashboard, payment and billing details are processed by Stripe. We do not store full payment card numbers.

We do receive and store purchase/access status information, including:

• An identifier that links your account or organization to the purchased access
• The product purchased (for example, monthly or yearly Premium, or a Flight Crew Session, Classroom, or Camp Pass)
• Whether the access is currently active, its expiration or renewal date, and whether an app-store subscription is set to auto-renew
• The original purchase date and source (for example, Apple App Store, Google Play, or Stripe Checkout)

We use this information to grant you access to Premium features, restore your subscription on new devices, troubleshoot purchase issues, and meet our tax and accounting obligations. We use RevenueCat as a service provider to receive subscription events from the app stores and reflect this status in the app. RevenueCat retains the underlying transaction records (such as purchase, renewal, cancellation, and refund events) on our behalf so that we can verify purchases and respond to support requests.

1.5 Flight Crew Camp and Classroom Sessions

Flight Crew lets camps, classrooms, nature centers, libraries, and similar groups run private bird-listening challenges. Adult hosts and instructors may create accounts, organizations, crews, teams, billing records, staff invites, printable QR materials, and reports.

Campers can join a Flight Crew with an instructor-provided code or QR link without creating an account; we do not require full real names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, home addresses, photos, precise locations, or public profiles.

To operate a private Flight Crew session, we may process anonymous participant ids, device-scoped ids, team membership, avatar or display-name choices generated inside the app, joined counts, species found or learned, score and activity timestamps, and private crew status. We may also process technical records needed to run and secure the service, such as IP addresses, device or app version, request metadata, session codes, and security or fraud-prevention logs. This limited session and technical data is used only to run, secure, restore, support, and recap the private session (see Section 7). Reports are designed for group-level recap and do not require camper personal contact information.

1.6 Usage and Device Information

We collect certain non-personal, usage-related information to understand how the Service is used and to improve performance. This may include:

• Device type, operating system, and app version
• Feature usage patterns (for example, which screens are visited)
• In-app events (such as when you start or stop a recording)
• Diagnostic information and crash reports
• Masked screen replays for a small sample of sessions, used to diagnose interface failures. Text and images are redacted before capture.

This information is typically collected in de-identified or aggregated form and does not directly identify you.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, operate, and maintain the Service
• Create and manage your account
• Save, organize, and display your bird recordings and related content
• Use your location (when enabled) to help identify birds more accurately and show you birds and content that are relevant to your area
• Personalize your experience (for example, suggested features or content)
• Monitor and improve performance, reliability, and usability
• Debug and fix issues, including through crash reports and diagnostics
• Communicate with you about updates, support, and relevant information
• If you opt in, train, evaluate, and improve our bird recognition models using selected recordings and associated metadata (which may include approximate location)

When we use recordings for model improvement, we aim to remove direct identifiers and may work with aggregated or de-identified data so that individual recordings are not easily linked back to a specific person.

3. Data Sharing and Third-Party Services

3.1 Service Providers and Partners

We use third-party services to help provide and improve the Service, including:

• Authentication providers such as Apple and Google
• Analytics tools such as Google Firebase (including Firebase Analytics) and Google Analytics
• Cloud hosting and storage providers
• Subscription management providers such as RevenueCat, which receives purchase events from the Apple App Store and Google Play and relays subscription status to the app
• Payment providers such as Stripe for organization Flight Crew pass checkout, receipts, invoices, billing portal access, and tax calculation
• Web hosting providers such as Vercel for our website
• Other technical service providers that support app functionality

These third parties process information on our behalf and only as necessary to perform their services for us. They are not permitted to use your personal information for their own independent marketing purposes.

From time to time, we may update the specific services we use. When we do, we will update this Policy or provide an additional description of current vendors on our website.

3.2 No Selling of Personal Information

We do not sell your personal information.

We also do not share your personal information with third parties for their own advertising or marketing purposes.

We may share limited identifiers in hashed form (such as a hashed email address) with advertising platforms (for example, Meta/Facebook) to create custom audiences and lookalike audiences for our own marketing campaigns. These platforms use the hashed identifiers to match their users and deliver our ads and related reporting, and we do not provide them with your plain-text email address.

Some usage or diagnostic data may be collected or processed by analytics or diagnostic services strictly to help us understand and improve app performance and reliability. Those services operate under their own privacy policies in addition to this one.

3.3 Legal and Safety Requirements

We may access, preserve, or disclose information if we believe it is reasonably necessary to:

• Comply with applicable laws, regulations, legal process, or government requests
• Protect the rights, property, or safety of Wings & Whistles LLC, our users, or the public
• Detect, prevent, or address fraud, security, or technical issues

4. Cookies and Tracking Technologies (Website)

Our marketing website and blog may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (such as local storage and pixel tags) to:

• Remember your preferences
• Understand how visitors use the site
• Improve site performance and content
• Measure the effectiveness of our pages and campaigns

We may use analytics tools such as Google Analytics for these purposes. These tools may collect information such as your IP address, browser type, pages visited, and time spent on pages.

You can control cookies through your browser settings, including by blocking or deleting them. If you disable cookies, some website features may not function as intended.

The mobile app itself does not rely on browser cookies, but it may use similar technologies provided by analytics services as described in Section 3.

5. Data Retention

We retain your personal information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service and fulfill the purposes described in this Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law.

If you delete your account through the app or request deletion:

• We delete or de-identify personal information associated with your account within a reasonable period, subject to any legal obligations to retain certain records.
• Data that has already been used to train or evaluate our models may remain in aggregated or de-identified form and may not be fully removable, but it will no longer be linked to your account.

6. Your Rights and Choices

6.1 In-App Controls

Within the app and your device settings, you can:

• Location: Turn location access on or off in your device's system settings.
• Model training: Opt in or out of allowing your recordings to be used to improve our bird recognition models via the app settings.
• Account deletion: Permanently delete your account and associated personal data through the in-app account settings. This will remove your account and related data from our active systems, subject to the retention notes above.

6.2 Access, Update, or Delete

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete information
• Request deletion of some or all of your personal information
• Object to or restrict certain types of processing
• Request a copy of your information in a portable format (where applicable)

To exercise these rights or to ask questions about your data, contact us at:
support@wingsandwhistles.app

We may need to verify your identity before we can process certain requests.

7. Children's Privacy

The general Wings & Whistles experience (personal accounts, saved recordings, subscriptions) is designed for adults and is not directed to children under 13. Wings & Whistles LLC does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 through that experience.

Flight Crew is different by design. It is a supervised group mode for private educational, camp, classroom, school, library, nature center, homeschool, youth-program, and similar organized group sessions run by an authorized adult or organization. We expect many Flight Crew participants to be children, so the camper experience is engineered to avoid asking campers for direct personal identifiers and to limit camper data to what is needed to run, secure, support, and recap a private supervised session:

• No camper accounts or direct personal info. Campers join with an instructor-provided code or QR link. We do not ask campers for full real names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, home addresses, photos, precise locations, or accounts, and no public profile is created. In-game identities are playful display names generated inside the app (for example, "Acorn Lark").
• Microphone audio stays on the device. The app uses the microphone so the bird-identification model can analyze sounds locally in real time. Wings & Whistles does not receive, record, store, upload, or share raw audio or voice files. Only the matched bird species and related game events are synced to the private session.
• No GPS or precise location. Sessions use a state-level region chosen by the instructor to build a local bird list. Flight Crew does not request device location permission from campers and does not use GPS or precise location for camper sessions.
• Limited session and technical records. To keep a camper connected to their session and team, prevent duplicate joins, restore a session after the app closes, sync team scores, support recaps or certificates, investigate support requests, and protect session security, we may process a random device-scoped or session-scoped identifier, invite/session code, team assignment, app-generated display name and avatar, score and activity events, device or app version, IP address, server request metadata, and security or fraud-prevention logs. We treat persistent identifiers collected from Flight Crew campers as internal-operations data: they are not used to contact anyone, serve behavioral advertising, build profiles, track across apps or services, or for independent marketing.
• Recaps and certificates stay non-identifying. Flight Crew reports and printable materials are designed around teams, app-generated display names, species found or learned, and group-level results. Hosts must not enter camper full names, emails, phone numbers, birthdates, home addresses, photos, precise locations, or other personal information that Flight Crew is not designed to collect from campers.
• Third-party software. We configure the third-party software used in the adult app so that Flight Crew camper-session data is not collected or used for advertising, marketing, attribution, profiling, or cross-service tracking. Attribution, login, purchase, and nonessential analytics components are disabled or not initialized during Flight Crew camper sessions.
• Retention. Flight Crew session records are retained on a tiered schedule after a session ends. Device-scoped identifiers and individual participant records (including individual team assignments) are deleted within 90 days of the session's end. Session events and per-find activity logs are retained for up to 12 months so hosts can view recaps and handle support issues (organizations can configure shorter periods), then automatically deleted. After that, only the aggregate recap data needed for past-cup views or certificate reprints remains: team-level scores, species lists, app-generated display names, and avatars. Once identifiers are deleted, that data cannot be used by Wings & Whistles to identify or rejoin a device. Hosts and organizations can request earlier deletion of a session and its records at any time, and we honor those requests within 30 days. Backup copies are overwritten on our ordinary backup cycle within 90 days.
• Deletion questions from parents and guardians. Because camper records contain no names or contact information, we cannot link a session record to a specific child. Parents and guardians can contact the program host, or email support@wingsandwhistles.app with the session code or program name, and we will review and delete at the session level.

In school and similar educational settings, the supervising instructor or institution authorizes and runs the session for an educational purpose. In non-school or private group settings involving children under 13, the session host should have parent or guardian permission for each participating child where required. Wings & Whistles remains responsible for its own privacy and children's privacy obligations.

The adult or organization that runs a Flight Crew session is responsible for supervising camper participation and obtaining any parent, guardian, school, camp, organization, or program permissions required for that session. Session hosts must not ask campers to provide, or enter into Flight Crew on a camper's behalf, camper personal information that Flight Crew is not designed to collect.

A short overview of Flight Crew for parents and guardians is available at wingsandwhistles.app/flight-crew/parents.

If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us at support@wingsandwhistles.app so we can review and address the situation.

8. International Users

If you access the Service from outside the country where our servers are located, your information may be transferred to, stored, and processed in a country that may have data protection laws that differ from those in your jurisdiction.

We take steps to protect your information in accordance with this Privacy Policy wherever it is processed.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will:

• Update the "Effective Date" and "Last Updated" date at the top of this page, and
• Where appropriate, provide additional notice within the app or by other means.

Your continued use of the Service after any changes become effective indicates that you have read and understood the updated Policy.

10. Contact Us

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or how we handle your data, contact us at:

Email
support@wingsandwhistles.app