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Privacy

How Birdsense uses the microphone, and what we keep on this site.

Last updated 4 September 2026

What this is

Birdsense is a garden-bird interpreter for 22 common UK and Ireland garden species. It listens when you ask it to, then offers a cautious reading: likely species, kind of call, and one English sentence. It is not a word-for-word translation.

The live site is birds.botblog.co.uk. The listen app is password-gated. This privacy page is public, so anyone can read it without logging in.

Microphone

The microphone is used only while the listen page is open and you are recording. We do not run always-on background listening.

On a phone, listening usually needs the page or app on screen. iPhones often pause when the phone locks. Android may keep the microphone for a while if you leave the tab. That is a phone limit, not something we override.

What we keep

This is a single private deployment, not a cloud account that syncs across your devices.

Short hearing clips may be saved on this server so you can replay a reading. They live in data/clips/ here.
Readings — species, call type, English line, and times — are stored in data/readings.json on this server.
A private note on a log row stays on this server with that reading.

There are no user accounts. What you hear is kept on this one site. You can clear the garden log from the Log tab; that deletes readings, notes, and hearing clips on this server.

What we do not do

We do not sell recordings.
We do not show ads.
We do not run a social feed or an account marketplace.
We do not share your clips or notes with other users.

Services we use

Google Perch — species identification from the audio you send while listening.
OpenAI — writes a cautious English sentence from the reading. We do not sell the audio.
Licensed Wikimedia media — we host photos and short reference songs that are licensed for reuse. Creators and licences are named on the About page inside the app.

Password

Listen, the garden log, and the saved clips sit behind the site password. This page and the support page do not.

Contact

Questions about this policy: info@botblog.co.uk.