Privacy policy — Wild Alamo

Wild Alamo is a small private website run by its owner. It collects very little about you, uses what it collects only to run the site, and shares nothing for advertising or any other commercial purpose. This page says exactly what is collected, why, who else handles it, and how long it is kept. It is written to be read, not filed.

1. What the site collects

If you only watch

Almost nothing. The web server keeps ordinary access logs (the address your connection came from, the pages requested, and when) for a short time, to keep the site running and to notice abuse. There are no analytics, no advertising networks, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts watching what you do. (On a clip with people blurred in it, the page loads Cloudflare's own small script for its video player, so the blur can follow the picture; it talks only to the player.)

Each clip shows how many times it has been viewed and liked. A view is counted once per browser session when the clip's page is opened, and a like is one press per session that you can take back. Both are plain counts on the clip; nothing records who viewed or liked what. The share buttons are ordinary links: nothing is sent to X, Facebook, WhatsApp or anyone else unless you press one, and then only the clip's address and title go with you.

If you have an account

Your name and email address, as you gave them.
A one-way hash of your password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from the hash.
When you registered, when you were approved, and when you accepted the terms.

If you ask for new sightings by email

Your email address, and how often you asked to hear.
When you asked, when you confirmed, and up to when you have been sent sightings.
A random code that goes in the links in your emails, so you can change or stop them without an account.

Nothing is sent to the address until someone opens the link in the confirmation email, so no one can sign you up without your inbox. An address that is never confirmed is deleted after a week. The emails say which sightings are new and nothing else; the site does not track whether you open them or what you click.

If you comment

The name you comment under and what you wrote, and when.
Your email address. It is never shown on the site: it is used only to send the one email that confirms a comment is yours (visitors) and by the owner when deciding a comment that was held. Members comment with their account's name and address.
What the automatic check said about each comment, and how many times visitors reported it.

Your browser session remembers which comments you wrote and that you confirmed your address, so you can delete your own comments and comment again without a second email. A comment whose address is never confirmed is deleted after a week, along with the address. Comments are removed on request: delete your own from its page, or ask the owner.

If you share a clip

The clip itself, and what you type about it: a title, the species, a place name, a description.
When you uploaded it, and when it was filmed (see section 3).
That the clip is yours, so you can edit or delete it.

To protect the site

Sign-in and registration attempts are rate-limited. To do that, the site keeps a short-lived count against your connection address and email address — but as a cryptographic hash, not in the clear, so the record is useless to anyone reading it and cannot be turned back into who you are.

2. What the site deliberately does not keep

Where a video was filmed. Video from a phone often carries GPS coordinates accurate to a few metres, which on a wildlife site is frequently someone's home. Your browser reads those coordinates to tell you they exist, and then throws them away. They are never sent to the site and never stored. The only location the site knows is the place name you choose to type.

The site also keeps no browsing history, no behavioural profile, and no information about you beyond what is listed above.

3. What the site works out for itself

Three things are derived from a clip rather than typed:

Whether people or vehicles appear in it, and where. Before a clip goes public, one still a second is checked by an object-detection model that runs at Cloudflare (see section 4). Wherever it finds a person, a blurred box covers them while the clip plays on this site; where a vehicle's number plate is in view, the plate itself, with a margin around it, is blurred the same way. Each thing the detector finds is checked once more by the same model that names the animal (section 4), so that a bird or a shadow is not blurred as a person and the blur lands on the plate rather than across the car. The stored video itself is not altered, so the blur is this site's, not the file's.
When it was filmed. Read from the video file itself in your browser, or from the date and time a camera stamps onto the picture, using text recognition that runs on the site's own server.
What animal it shows. A few still frames from the clip are sent to an artificial intelligence service (see section 4), which suggests a species. The suggestion is shown to you to confirm or correct.

All three are aids. All three can be wrong. You can change either at any time on the clip's edit page, and your word always overrides the machine's.

4. Who else handles your information

The site uses a small number of outside services, each for one job:

Cloudflare stores, converts and delivers the video. Your clip goes from your browser directly to Cloudflare; the site's own server never holds the file. Cloudflare also provides the site's domain name service, and its Workers AI service looks for people in still frames of each clip. It receives the pictures and nothing else.
Anthropic receives a handful of still frames from each clip so that its Claude model can name the animal. It receives the pictures and a fixed question about them — nothing else. Not your name, not the title, not the place name, not anything you typed. Anthropic does not use data sent through its API to train its models. It also checks each comment before it appears, and for that receives the comment and the name it was posted under — never the commenter's email address.
The hosting provider runs the server the site lives on, and so holds the database and the logs described above.
An email service delivers the site's emails: the note telling you your account has been approved, and new sightings if you asked for them. It sees your email address for that purpose.

No one else receives anything. Your information is never sold, rented, or given to anyone for marketing.

5. Cookies

The site sets one cookie: a session identifier that keeps you signed in and protects forms against forgery. It contains a random reference, not your details. While the site is behind a password during testing, a second cookie remembers that you have entered it. Neither cookie is used to track you, and neither is shared with anyone.

6. How long things are kept

Your clips and what you typed about them: until you or the owner delete them.
Your account: until you ask for it to be removed, or the owner closes it.
Your address for new sightings: until you unsubscribe, when it is deleted rather than switched off; a week, if you never confirm it.
Your comments: until you or the owner remove them; a week, with your address, if you never confirm it.
Server logs and rate-limiting counters: a short time, then discarded.
Backups of the database: a limited time, after which deleted items are gone from them too.

When a clip is deleted it is removed from Cloudflare as well, so it stops being available everywhere at once.

7. Children

The site is meant to be enjoyed by all ages, and everything on it is held to that standard. Accounts, however, are for adults: the owner approves each one personally and does not knowingly give accounts to children. Clips must never show a recognisable child — or a recognisable anyone.

8. Your choices

You can edit or delete any clip you shared, at any time, from its page.
You can correct the species and filming time the site worked out.
You can change how often you get sightings emails, or stop them, from the link in any of them.
You can ask for your account, and everything that goes with it, to be removed.
You can ask what the site holds about you and it will be told to you plainly.

9. Security

The site is served over an encrypted connection; passwords are stored only as hashes; secrets never appear in web-accessible folders; and the code that handles personal information is tested to make sure it does not leak into logs or to outside services. No system is perfect, but this one is small, and small is easy to look after.

10. Changes

If the site starts doing something new with your information, this page changes in the same breath and the date at the top moves. Anything material will also be mentioned to members.

11. Getting in touch

Questions, requests and complaints about privacy go to support@wildalamo.com. The terms of use cover everything else.