Birdly Yard Privacy Policy

Scope

This Privacy Policy explains how Birdly Yard handles information when you browse our backyard-bird guides, use the state and month filters, create a yard plan, play bird sounds, manage an account, or contact support.

Birdly Yard is an educational service focused on birds that may be relevant to residential yards in the United States. You can use the public bird guides and planning tools without telling us your name or exact location.

Information Used by the Bird Guides and Yard Planner

Birdly Yard lets you choose a U.S. state, month, target bird, yard type, existing habitat features, and concerns such as outdoor cats or window risk. We use those choices to show seasonal bird information and practical yard recommendations.

These choices are not a request for your street address, GPS coordinates, or the location of a specific nest. A state, month, or target bird may appear in the page URL so that the view can be refreshed, bookmarked, or shared. Yard-planning choices and the bird-sound preference may also be saved in your browser's local storage. Local-storage values remain on your device unless you clear them or your browser removes them; they are not account records stored in the Birdly Yard database.

Information We Receive When You Use the Site

The information Birdly Yard receives depends on which features you use:

• Public browsing data. Our hosting infrastructure receives ordinary web-request information such as the requested page, date and time, IP address, browser or device information, referring page, and error or security signals. We use this information to deliver pages, diagnose failures, limit abuse, and protect the service.
• Account data. If you create or use an account, we may store your name, email address, profile image, sign-in provider, account identifiers, verification status, preferred locale, and account creation or update dates.
• Authentication and session data. We use session tokens and may store session expiration times, IP addresses, and browser user-agent information to keep you signed in and to detect unauthorized or abusive activity. Passwords are handled through our authentication system and are not stored as readable plain text.
• Support data. If you submit a support ticket, we store the ticket title, message text, status, replies, and any images you choose to attach. Support attachments may be stored separately from the ticket record and made available through a file URL.
• Information you send voluntarily. If you report a correction or contact us about a bird guide, we receive the information included in that request.

How We Use Information

We use information only for purposes connected to operating Birdly Yard, including to:

• Deliver bird guides, state and month results, and yard-planning recommendations.
• Remember device-level choices such as whether bird-sound previews are enabled.
• Create and secure accounts, maintain sessions, and provide account settings.
• Answer support requests and investigate reported content or technical problems.
• Prevent spam, excessive automated requests, fraud, and other misuse.
• Monitor reliability, debug errors, maintain data integrity, and improve the service.
• Comply with legal obligations and enforce the Birdly Yard Terms of Service.

We do not use yard-planning selections to infer an exact home address, and we do not sell personal information. As of the date shown above, Birdly Yard does not run third-party advertising or behavioral-advertising trackers on its public bird-guide pages.

Cookies and Browser Storage

Birdly Yard uses storage that is necessary for the features you request:

• Authentication cookies keep signed-in users connected to their accounts.
• A sidebar preference may remember whether account navigation is expanded or collapsed.
• Local storage may remember the yard-planner profile and bird-sound preference on the current device.

You can clear cookies and local storage through your browser settings. Clearing them may sign you out or reset saved preferences, but it will not delete information already stored in an account or support ticket.

Service Providers and Disclosures

Birdly Yard runs on Cloudflare infrastructure, including web delivery, server execution, database services, and operational monitoring. Cloudflare processes request and service data on our behalf under its own contractual and privacy terms.

We may also disclose limited information to an authentication, email-delivery, or file-storage provider when that provider is enabled and its service is needed for a feature you request. For example, an email provider needs an email address to deliver an account message, and a storage provider needs an uploaded file to store a support attachment.

We may disclose information when reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to valid legal process, protect users or wildlife, investigate abuse, or defend the rights and security of Birdly Yard and others. If Birdly Yard is reorganized or transferred, information may be included in that transaction subject to appropriate safeguards and notice where required.

We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Data Retention

We keep information only for as long as it is reasonably needed for the purpose described in this policy:

• Device preferences remain in your browser until you clear them.
• Account and profile information is generally retained while the account remains active.
• Session records expire or are removed as sessions end or are invalidated.
• Support records may be retained while a request is open and afterward when needed to preserve the support history, prevent abuse, or resolve recurring problems.
• Security, error, and infrastructure records are retained according to operational needs and the settings of the relevant hosting service.

We may retain information longer when required by law, needed to resolve a dispute, or necessary to protect the service. Backup copies may remain for a limited period after active records are removed.

Your Choices and Privacy Requests

You can control several kinds of information directly:

• Change state, month, yard conditions, or target-bird selections at any time.
• Clear the Birdly Yard yard profile and sound preference by clearing this site's local storage in your browser.
• Update available profile fields from account settings.
• Sign out to end the active browser session.

Depending on where you live, you may also have rights to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal information, or to receive information about how it is used and disclosed. Birdly Yard does not discriminate against users for exercising applicable privacy rights.

To make a privacy request, use the support feature in your signed-in Birdly Yard account and clearly label the ticket as a privacy request. We may need to verify that the request concerns your account before acting on it. Some information may be retained when an exception under applicable law applies.

Children

Birdly Yard is a general-audience educational service. Its account and support features are not directed to children under 13, and children under 13 should not create an account or submit personal information. If we learn that we collected personal information from a child under 13 without the authorization required by law, we will take reasonable steps to delete it.

Security

We use measures designed to protect information in transit and restrict access to account and administrative functions. No online service can guarantee absolute security. Please use a unique password, protect access to your email account, and notify us through support if you believe your Birdly Yard account has been misused.

Changes to This Policy

We will update this policy when Birdly Yard's data practices or enabled services materially change. The date at the top identifies the current version. If a change materially affects registered users, we may also provide notice through the site or an account communication when appropriate.

Contact

For questions about this policy or a request concerning account information, submit a privacy-labeled ticket through the support feature in your signed-in Birdly Yard account.