Privacy

What FishRankings collects, what it shows other people, and how to get rid of it.

Last updated 2026-08-10

What is collected

Only what the site needs to do its job. There is no advertising network here and nothing is sold.

Your account: a username, an email address, a password (stored only as a hash, never as text), and optionally a country and display name.
The catches you log: species, weight, length, date, method, the water and place you name, and any notes you write.
The photographs and clips you attach to a catch.
A position for a catch — only if you ask for one. It is never read unless you turn it on, and never while the app is closed.
Ordinary web server logs, and a session cookie so you stay signed in.

A daily count of how many people used the site and the app. Your address is never stored for this — it is turned into a short one-way code, kept for about thirteen months, and used for nothing but the totals.

There is no analytics service, no advertising SDK and no third-party tracker in either the website or the app. Visitor numbers are counted on our own server, and nothing about you is sent anywhere else or follows you to other sites.

Location, and why your marks stay yours

Attaching a position to a catch is entirely optional. Nothing is logged if you never turn it on, and turning it off again stops it immediately.

By default a catch is shown on the public map displaced by up to 10 km from where it actually happened, chosen at random for each catch. Your true position is stored so that your own logbook is accurate, but the blurred one is what every public map, feed and profile reads. You can choose to show a catch exactly where it happened, or to keep it off the map entirely — per catch, every time.

Photographs are re-encoded when you upload them, which removes the EXIF block a phone camera writes — including the GPS coordinates it hides there. Clips are not re-encoded, so instead the location metadata inside them is stripped out before the file is readable. Neither one publishes where you were standing.

The app never asks for background location and cannot read your position while it is closed. On Android it declares no background location permission at all; on iOS it asks only for "while using the app".

What other people can see

FishRankings is a public logbook, so most of what you log is meant to be seen. Specifically:

Your username, display name, country, rank, points and catch totals appear on your profile and on the leaderboards.
Your catches, their photographs and clips, and their blurred map position appear in the feed, on species pages and on the map.
Your email address, your password hash and your true coordinates are never shown to anybody else, and are not in any public page or API response.

Who else gets your data

Nobody. Your data is not sold, rented, or handed to advertisers or data brokers.

Some parts of the site load files from other companies, and doing so tells them your IP address, as it does on any website:

Map tiles are fetched from OpenStreetMap, OpenSeaMap and ArcGIS when you open a map.
Web fonts are fetched from Google Fonts on the website. The app bundles no fonts from Google and makes no request to them.
The site runs on a hosting provider, which processes the traffic on our behalf.

Cookies

One session cookie, set when you sign in, so that the next page knows it is still you. It is required for the site to work and is not used to track you anywhere else.

Your language, theme and units are remembered in your browser's own storage. That never reaches the server and is not a cookie.

How long it is kept

Your account and catches are kept until you delete them.

Sign-in tokens for the app, and password reset links, expire on their own and are cleared out automatically.

Your data, and getting it back or removing it

It is your account. Specifically, you can:

See everything you have logged, from your own profile.
Edit or delete any individual catch, at any time.
Delete the whole account, with everything in it.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, from Account settings on the website or from the You tab in the app. It does not need a support request and nobody has to approve it. Changed your mind? Signing in again within 30 days cancels it.

Deleting removes your profile, every catch you logged, every photograph and clip you uploaded, your likes, follows, badges and sign-in tokens. Your profile leaves the site straight away and every device is signed out. The account is then kept for 30 days so that you can undo it by signing in again; after that it is destroyed permanently and cannot be recovered. Aggregate counts that identify nobody — such as how many catches a species has — may remain.

Children

FishRankings is not directed at children under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and it will be removed.

Contact

For any question about this policy, or to make a request about your data, write to privacy@fishrankings.com.