Guppo Privacy Policy
Last updated 22 September 2026
Guppo identifies the fish you catch and keeps a record of them. To do that it handles your photos and, if you allow it, where you were standing. This page says exactly what happens to both.
Two things are worth knowing before the detail. Guppo contains no advertising, no analytics and no tracking of any kind — there is no third-party SDK in the app watching what you do, and nothing about you is sold or shared with advertisers or data brokers. And your exact fishing spots are never shown to anyone, including your friends; the section on location explains how that is enforced.
Who we are
Guppo is the data controller for the information described here. Contact: honey_badger04@icloud.com.
Your account
Guppo creates an anonymous account for you the first time you open the app. It has no name, no email and no password, and it exists so your catches can be saved. You are not asked to sign up before catching your first fish.
You can later sign in with Apple. This is optional. Its purpose is recovery: an anonymous account lives only on that one phone, so if you delete Guppo or lose the device, the catches saved on our servers belong to an account nobody can sign in to again. Signing in with Apple attaches a permanent identity to your account and your existing catches are moved onto it.
When you sign in with Apple we receive your email address only. We do not ask Apple for your name. If you choose Hide My Email, we receive Apple's private relay address instead of your real one, and that is fine — everything in Guppo works the same way.
What Guppo collects, and why
| What | Why | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Photos of your catches | To identify the species, and to show in your own catch history | Your phone, and a private bucket on our servers |
| Catch details — species, date and time, length, weight, notes | Your Guppodex and catch history | Your phone and our servers |
| Precise location of a catch | To place the catch on your personal map. Optional — Guppo works without it | Your phone and our servers. Never shared exactly (see below) |
| Username, display name, bio, profile picture | So friends can find and recognise you | Our servers. Visible to other Guppo users |
| Friend connections | To show you each other's catches | Our servers |
| Email address, if you sign in with Apple | Account recovery and support | Our servers |
Guppo does not collect your contacts, your calendar, your browsing, your advertising identifier, your health data, your payment details, or your location in the background. Location is read only at the moment you record a catch, and only while the app is open.
Location — the part that matters most
Anglers guard their spots, and Guppo is built on that assumption rather than on a promise.
Your own map is exact
Your catches appear on your own map at the precise coordinates recorded. That is the point of the feature.
Everyone else sees an approximate area
When a friend sees one of your catches, the coordinates they receive are offset by roughly 1.5 kilometres. Three things make that meaningful rather than decorative:
- The offset is applied in the database, by a view. Your friend's copy of Guppo never receives your real coordinates, so there is nothing in the app to inspect or bypass.
- The offset is derived from the catch itself and is therefore always the same for that catch. A random offset that changed on each read could be averaged away by asking repeatedly.
- The map says which it is showing — "exact spot" or "approximate area" — so a vague position is never drawn as a confident pin.
Heat maps need a crowd before they appear
Shared heat areas only appear where at least three different anglers have logged at least five catches. Below that, a heat cell would simply be one person's fishing spot with a colour on it.
You can remove a location
A catch's location can be cleared without deleting the catch, and you can decline the location permission entirely. Guppo records catches either way.
Fish identification
When you photograph a catch, the photo alone is sent to Anthropic's Claude API, which identifies the species and sends the answer back. Your location, your name, your account and your other catches are not sent with it — the identification service receives a picture of a fish and nothing else.
Anthropic processes the image in order to answer the request. Anthropic states that it does not use inputs or outputs from its commercial API to train its models (their policy); the exception is data a customer explicitly submits as feedback, and Guppo submits none. The photo is not stored by Guppo's identification server — the only copy kept is the one in your own catch history.
Who else is involved
| Service | What it does | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase (hosted on Amazon Web Services, Oregon, USA) | Stores the database and your photos | Everything in the table above |
| Anthropic | Identifies the fish in a photo | The photo only |
| Expo (EAS Hosting) | Runs the small server that talks to the identification service | The photo, in transit |
| Esri | Supplies the map imagery | Which part of the world your map is showing. Not your catches |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, if you use it | Handled by Apple; we receive an account identifier and an email address |
These are service providers acting on our instructions. Nobody on this list is an advertiser, and no data is sold to anyone.
How long it is kept
Your catches are kept for as long as your account exists, because a collection you have built over years is the thing Guppo is for. Nothing expires on its own.
When you delete your account, everything goes: every catch, every photo in both the private and public buckets, your profile and your friend connections, from our servers and from your phone. It is immediate, and it cannot be undone.
Deleting your account
Open Guppo, go to Profile → Edit Profile, and choose Delete my account. You will be asked to confirm twice, and the second prompt spells out what is about to be erased. No email, no form, no waiting.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, object to or restrict how it is used, and receive it in a portable format. Deletion is built into the app. For anything else, write to honey_badger04@icloud.com and we will respond within 30 days.
If you are in the UK or the EEA and are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you may complain to your national data protection authority.
Guppo does not sell personal information, and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are used in California law. There is nothing to opt out of, because it does not happen.
Children
Guppo is rated 12+ and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from a child under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, write to honey_badger04@icloud.com and it will be deleted.
Security
- Catch photos live in a private bucket. They are never served from a public address; access requires a link that Guppo generates for you and that expires within minutes.
- Every table enforces row-level security in the database, so one account's rows cannot be read by another even if the app is tampered with.
- Everything is encrypted in transit, and at rest by our hosting provider.
- Profile pictures are deliberately public, because they are meant to be seen by anyone who can see your name. Catch photos are not, because they carry a place and a time.
No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise. If you find a security problem in Guppo, please write to honey_badger04@icloud.com.
Research
Guppo does not currently share any catch data with researchers or fisheries agencies. If that is ever offered it will be opt-in, it will be separate from any paid feature — paying for an app is not consent to share your data — and only aggregated areas meeting the three-angler threshold above would ever leave, never individual catches or accounts.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who receives it, the app will tell you. The date at the top always reflects the current version.