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Life Observer

Privacy

What Life Observer stores, who can see it, and what leaves this server.

Who is responsible

Life Observer is operated by InfoTilt, Inc., 72 Van Reipen St #353, Jersey City, NJ 07306, United States, which is responsible for (the data controller of) the personal information described here. Contact: info@lifeobserver.com.

What is stored

  • Your account — name, email address and a hashed password. Nothing else is required.
  • Your sightings — the names you record, date and time, an optional position, an optional ZIP code, a count and your notes.
  • Your photographs — resized and re-encoded on upload, which discards the camera metadata embedded in them. Any GPS position and capture time are read out first and offered to you on the form; they are stored on the photo record so you can accept them later.
  • Identification results — the candidates returned for a photo, kept so you can revisit them.

Location

Two positions are stored for a sighting that has one: the exact coordinates you gave, and the centre of a grid cell about a kilometre across. Only you ever receive the exact pair. Every other route out of this site — another member, a share link, the public feed, the identification service — receives the rounded one.

Who can see a sighting

Nobody, until you choose otherwise. A sighting is private when created. Marking it shared exposes it to the members you name and to anyone holding a link you generated. Marking it public exposes it to the web, including search engines. Revoking a link or removing a member takes effect immediately.

The identification service

Picture matching sends your photograph, the month of the sighting and the rounded location to Anthropic's API. It does not send your name, your email address, your exact coordinates or your notes. Nothing is sent unless you press Identify on a particular photo.

Deleting things

You can delete any sighting, which removes its photographs from disk along with its shares, its links and its stored suggestions. Deleting your account removes all of it.

What this site does not do

It does not sell data or run advertising. If the owner switches on analytics, Google Analytics counts page visits using cookies; it never receives your sightings, photographs or positions. It does not store your IP address against your sightings.