Your moments. Your choices.

Who is responsible

Danillo van Hetten provides HeyAnimal. Contact support@heyanimal.app about your privacy or personal information.

Information we use

• Account: sign-in email or Apple account identifier, profile name, username and account status.
• Age eligibility: the birth date you enter is checked to establish whether you are at least 16. Your profile stores eligibility and acceptance status, not your full birth date. The date is temporarily transmitted to the eligibility service. On supported iOS versions, Apple may also provide an age range for the eligibility check; HeyAnimal does not retain that returned range.
• Your content: photos, captions, animal choices, selected countries, albums, trips, comments and audience choices.
• Social activity: friend requests, accepted connections, blocks, Saved, reports and support requests.
• Use of the app: if you turn on Discover personalization, interactions such as viewed posts, comments opened and saves help tailor recommendations and the viewed-moments part of your year summary.
• Purchases: an account identifier, product and transaction information, and subscription status. Apple handles payment details.
• Technical information: our service providers process connection and diagnostic information needed to deliver and protect their services.

Permissions and location

Camera permission is requested when you use the camera. The app takes photos; it does not request microphone access for recording. You choose a country yourself. HeyAnimal does not request precise GPS, your address book or an advertising identifier.

Optional reminders use your iPhone. Social notifications, when enabled, register an Apple push token linked to your account and chosen notification types. Lock-screen messages use generic wording; opening one checks your current account and content access.

Optional usage measurement

Optional usage measurement is off by default. If you choose to participate, HeyAnimal records account-linked feature counts, session entry and response timings to understand use and return visits. These records do not contain your photos, captions, email or advertising ID. You can turn this off in Settings; doing so also removes your optional usage events and summaries.

Detailed optional events are removed after 90 days and daily summaries after 400 days by the hourly maintenance schedule.

Safety before sharing

The safety process holds submitted social photos, comments, profile names and shared album text for review. Authorized moderators can inspect the submitted material and record a decision. Choosing Private withdraws a photo or album from publication review. This does not give moderators general access to your private library.

If you choose Use automatic safety check and allow the check for a submission, we send that submitted photo and its relevant text, or the submitted comment, profile name or album text, to OpenAI Moderation. A clean result can approve that submission automatically. A flagged result or processing failure leaves it for human review. Without that choice, the submission stays in human review. Your private library is not scanned. We record the consent and screening outcome so we can operate the safety process and handle appeals.

How your choices work

Private content is restricted to your account. Friends content is available to accepted friends. Public content is intended for a wider audience. You may narrow a photo’s audience or delete it. Copies another person has already made cannot be recalled. Saving someone else’s post does not make it your own capture or unlock an animal.

Authorized service operations may process content to store it, deliver it, investigate reports and protect the service. “Private” describes its audience in the app; it is not a claim of end-to-end encryption.

Your Discover choice

In Profile → Settings → Edit profile · Privacy & support, open Your Discover. Discover starts with recent, approved public moments unless you have explicitly chosen personalization. We do not record new feed-interaction history for recommendations or viewed-moment counts while personalization is off. You can turn personalization on to build recommendations from new feed interactions. Turning personalization off erases your recorded feed interactions and viewed-moment counts for the annual story, and stops recording new ones while off. Your own photos, friends, Saved and capture-based annual story remain available. Hidden posts, blocks and reports still protect your feed.

Turning personalization back on starts building new history; it cannot restore erased history. This choice is separate from optional usage measurement. If your installed version does not show this control, contact support for help with your preferences.

Why we process information

Account access, storage, the sharing actions you request, support for those features and subscription access are used to provide our service under the user agreement. Optional usage measurement relies on your separate opt-in; you can withdraw it without losing access to the app.

We use relevant information to protect members from abuse, secure the service and resolve safety reports. Personalized Discover uses feed interactions to suggest relevant public moments, with a choice to use recent public moments and erase that history. We do not use it for advertising, eligibility decisions or pricing.

Services involved

• Supabase: authentication, database, server functions and private photo storage. The configured project is in the EU region.
• Resend: delivery of sign-in emails.
• Porkbun: hosting the support mailbox; email addresses and messages you send to support are processed there.
• Apple: optional Apple sign-in, App Store purchases and subscription management.
• RevenueCat: subscription/customer status linked to your HeyAnimal account.
• OpenAI / ChatGPT Sites: hosting this website. Website requests involve ordinary connection information needed to serve and protect the site. Separately, OpenAI Moderation processes the specific social content you choose to submit for an automatic safety check, as described above.
• Wikimedia: country photographs loaded from Wikimedia infrastructure. Loading a remote image sends ordinary connection information to that host. Source links open the relevant external websites.

Our service providers may process information in more than one country. An EU database region does not mean every provider processes all information exclusively in the EU. Contact support@heyanimal.app for information about the providers involved in your request.

Retention and deletion

Your active account retains the content you keep and the information needed for its features. Account deletion is available in the app and removes associated content from the live account services. Device originals and queued photos are stored separately on your iPhone. Apple’s transaction records are managed by Apple.

Scheduled maintenance removes detailed interaction and optional measurement events after 90 days, optional daily summaries after 400 days, screening jobs/consent after 30 days, publication-review audit after 180 days and notification jobs after 7 days. Expired push registrations are removed 7 days after expiry; technical rate-limit counters are removed after 2 days. Maintenance runs hourly, so deletion can occur on the following run. Photos are not deleted by this schedule. Overdue new social submissions return to Private.

For your year summary, we separately retain a minimal record linking your account, a viewed post and its year. These records can remain after detailed interaction events expire. They are removed when you clear viewing history, turn off Discover personalization, delete your account, or the source photo is deleted. Year summaries always respect the current visibility of each photo.

Ordinary support conversations are reviewed for deletion 180 days after resolution; closed user reports and related moderation records are reviewed 180 days after the latest closing action. These are review points, not automatic deletion promises. Open cases and necessary exceptions, such as unresolved appeals or security incidents, are reviewed monthly and kept only as long as needed. Support mailbox copies are reviewed under the same ordinary-case rule. Provider backups and security logs have separate retention periods; contact support@heyanimal.app about a specific record. Deletion from the live service does not mean every provider backup is erased immediately.

Your requests

For privacy requests, email support@heyanimal.app or use Privacy request in the app. Tell us which information or action your request concerns. Do not include a password or sign-in code.

Settings lets you export your own records, export synced original photos in ZIP batches, save a copy of one owned photo, clear viewing history and change the Discover choice. Photo files are separate from the record export; unsynced drafts remain on your iPhone. Choose a secure destination for an export. You can also edit your display name, change photo audiences and initiate account deletion.

Depending on applicable law, you may have rights to access, correct, erase, restrict or receive your information, object to certain processing, and complain to a data-protection authority. For GDPR requests, we normally respond within one month of receipt. If a permitted extension is needed because of complexity or the number of requests, we explain the reason and extension within that first month. We may ask for proportionate information to verify account control; never your password or a sign-in code.

We verify account control before providing account information. A response deadline is separate from the time it takes a provider to remove information from backups.

Age and changes

HeyAnimal is intended for people aged 16 and over. Contact support if an account appears to belong to someone under 16. Significant changes to this notice will be explained before they take effect where required.