Effective date: 8 July 2026 · Version: 1.0

Birdio ("the app", "we", "us") is developed and operated by Zhorobekov Ermek ("data controller"). Contact: [email protected].

This policy explains what data the app processes, why, and what rights you have. We designed Birdio to work with as little personal data as possible: there are no accounts, and the app's core feature, bird identification by sound, runs entirely on your device.

Privacy at a glance

• No account, no registration. We do not collect your name or email address.
• Sound identification is fully on-device. Recordings are saved only on your phone and are never transmitted to us or anyone else. Nobody can access them but you.
• Photo identification by cloud AI happens only with your explicit consent, asked before the first use. The offline photo mode (Birdio Pro) never uploads photos at all.
• Your location is never sent to us. "Birds near you" is computed on your device from bundled data.
• No ads. No sale of data. No cross-app tracking. We never request the iOS tracking permission (ATT) and do not use the advertising identifier (IDFA).

1. What we process, why, and on what legal basis

1.1 Sound identification

Audio is recorded and analyzed entirely on your device by an on-device machine-learning model. Recordings are not transmitted to us or anyone else and are not "collected" in any legal sense. Recordings you choose to save stay on your device.

1.2 Photo identification: on-device mode

If you use the offline identification model (Birdio Pro), your photos are analyzed on your device and never leave it. The offline model itself is downloaded on demand from Apple's servers the first time you enable it, and needs an internet connection and free storage space to install.

1.3 Photo identification: cloud mode (with your consent)

If you choose cloud identification, the photo you submit is sent over an encrypted (TLS) connection directly to Google's Gemini API, which returns the identification result. We do not operate our own identification server and do not keep a copy of your photo.

• We ask for your explicit consent before the first cloud identification. You can withdraw it at any time in Settings; the app remains usable without cloud identification.
• We remove photo metadata (EXIF), including any embedded location, on your device before upload.
• We do not store your photos; they are sent directly to Google and processed transiently.
• Google acts as our data processor under a Data Processing Addendum (paid Gemini API tier): your photos and results are not used to train Google's models and are retained by Google in abuse-monitoring logs for up to 55 days, after which they are deleted.