Animal World Map (“we”, “us”) is an independent project operated by TODO: Your legal name (sole trader), a sole trader established in TODO: Country of establishment, at TODO: Street address, postal code, city.

We are the data controller for the personal information described in this policy. The site is available at https://animalworldmap.com, and is hosted by TODO: Hosting provider name and country.

For anything related to your privacy, write to [email protected]. We answer every request ourselves — there is no support desk in between.

We ask for as little as the service allows. Most of the site — the world map, the species catalog and the blog — works without an account and without you giving us anything.

Your account

Creating an account requires only an email address. There is no password: we email you a 6-digit code instead. We store your email, an internal account identifier, the date your account was created and the date you last signed in. Sign-in codes are stored hashed, never in readable form, and are deleted as soon as they are used or after 10 minutes.

Credits and purchases

We keep your credit balance and a ledger of every movement: free credits granted on sign-up, packs purchased, and credits spent on a chat message, a voice conversation or a narrated story. Each entry records the reason, the amount, and — for AI features — a technical count of tokens and an estimated provider cost, which we use to keep the pricing sustainable.

We never see or store your card details. Payments are handled entirely by Polar, our merchant of record. We receive only a confirmation that an order was paid and an identifier linking it to your account.

Voice conversations

When you talk to the AI guide we record the start time, periodic activity signals and the number of seconds billed, so we can debit the right amount of credits. We store the duration — not the audio, and not the transcript.

Things you send us

• Feedback and species reports: the category, your message, the species concerned, and your name and email if you choose to provide them.
• Species requests: the name of the animal you would like added and the email address to notify when it is.
• Sponsorship requests: your name, email, optional message, and — for companies — the company name, website, your role and the company size, along with the payment status of the sponsorship.

These submissions also record the browser user agent, which helps us reproduce a reported bug on the right device.

Technical information

To stop abuse of the sign-in form and of the paid features, we count requests against your IP address and email address for a limited window (between fifteen minutes and one hour depending on the action). These counters are deleted automatically when the window closes. Our server, like any web server, also processes IP addresses and request metadata to deliver pages and record errors.

It is worth being explicit about what never reaches our database:

• Your conversations. Chat messages and story prompts are sent to the AI provider to produce a reply, then discarded. We keep the counters needed for billing, not the content.
• Your voice. Audio recorded in your browser is sent for transcription and is not stored by us.
• Your card details. They go to Polar and never transit through our servers.
• Your precise location. The globe never asks for your device location; moving around the map is not linked to you.
• Advertising or cross-site tracking data. There are no third-party advertising trackers, no social pixels, and we do not sell or rent your personal information to anyone.

Cookies

We use exactly one cookie, awm_session, and only once you sign in. It keeps you signed in for sixty days, is inaccessible to JavaScript, and carries nothing but a signed reference to your account. It is strictly necessary to provide the service you asked for, so it does not require consent — and there is no cookie banner because there is nothing else to consent to. Signing out deletes it.

Analytics

We measure traffic with Plausible, which we host ourselves on our own infrastructure. It sets no cookies, collects no personal data, does not fingerprint your device and cannot follow you across websites. It tells us how many people visited a page — nothing that identifies you.

Alongside page visits, we count anonymous actions so we know which parts of the site are useful: a species profile opened, an audio story played, a filter used, a search run. These counts carry the species or the button involved, never who you are — no account, no email, no chat message, no identifier of any kind, and nothing that could be traced back to a single visitor.

Stored in your browser

Your favorite species, your recent searches and your voice preferences are saved in your browser's local storage. They stay on your device and are not part of your account. When you open your favorites, the species identifiers are sent to our server only to look up the matching records — they are not saved there. Clearing your browser data removes them.

Third-party connections

Displaying the map loads tiles directly from Mapbox, and species photos are loaded from Wikimedia Commons. Your browser therefore reveals your IP address to those services, as it does with any image or map on the web. We have no control over what they log; their own privacy policies apply.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the GDPR requires us to state a legal basis for each purpose. Here they are.

The AI wildlife guide, the narrated stories and the voice mode work by sending what you write or say to specialist providers, listed in the next section. What you should know:

• We send the content of your message and the species you are asking about. We do not send your email address, your account identifier or your purchase history — the provider has no way to know who you are.
• Only the last few turns of a conversation are sent, so the guide can follow the thread. Nothing is kept once the reply comes back.
• Under their API terms, these providers do not use content submitted through their interfaces to train their models. They may retain it briefly for abuse monitoring, under their own policies.
• Narrated stories are written once per species and shared by everyone who listens. A story is not personal to you, and the audio file is not linked to your account.

Please do not share sensitive personal information — about yourself or anyone else — in a conversation with the guide. It is a companion for learning about wildlife, not a confidential channel.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We rely on the following providers to run the service. Each one receives only what its job requires.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it — a valid court order or a legal obligation — or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim. If the project is ever transferred to someone else, your information would move with it, and we would tell you before that happens.

Our providers operate globally, so your information may be processed outside the country where you live, including in the United States. Where information leaves the European Economic Area, the transfer relies on the safeguards those providers put in place — typically the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, or an adequacy decision such as the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

We keep information only as long as it serves the purpose it was collected for.

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights over your personal information. Under the GDPR, all of them apply:

• Access — obtain a copy of the information we hold about you.
• Rectification — have inaccurate information corrected.
• Erasure — have your account and its data deleted.
• Restriction — ask us to pause processing while a dispute is resolved.
• Portability — receive your information in a machine-readable format.
• Objection — object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, where processing relies on consent. This does not affect what was lawful before.
• Complain — lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. We would rather you came to us first, but the right stands either way.

If you are in California, we confirm that we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

How to exercise them

Email [email protected] from the address associated with your account. We reply within thirty days, and free of charge. To delete your account, simply ask — we remove your account and its data within 30 days, keeping only what accounting law obliges us to retain about past purchases.

Sign-in codes are stored hashed and tied to your email address, expire after ten minutes and are destroyed after five wrong attempts. Session cookies are signed, sent over HTTPS only in production, and cannot be read by scripts running in the page. Access to the database is restricted, and credentials are never committed to our source code.

No system is perfect. If we ever discover a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify the competent authority and, where the law requires it, you directly. If you believe you have found a security problem, please write to [email protected] — we will take it seriously.

Animal World Map is made for anyone curious about wildlife, and the map and species catalog are perfectly suitable for children. An account, however, is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Where local law sets a higher age for consenting to online services — sixteen in parts of the European Union — that age applies instead.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has created an account, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

As the service grows, this policy will change. The date at the top of this page always reflects the latest revision. When a change materially affects your rights — a new purpose, a new category of information — we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

See also our terms of service, which govern your use of Animal World Map.

Questions, requests, or something in this policy that does not match what you see on the site? Write to [email protected].

TODO: Your legal name (sole trader)
TODO: Street address, postal code, city
TODO: Country of establishment