Privacy Policy

Filed 2 July 2026 · Revised 18 July 2026 · Beasts of the Field (iOS)

Beasts of the Field is a creature-collection game built around photographs of the real world. This policy explains, plainly, what data the game touches and why. It is written to be read.

Photos

Photographs you take stay on your device until you choose to "develop" one. Developing sends a reduced-size copy of that photo to our servers, where it is analyzed to identify the subject.

• Recognition. The reduced photo is processed by Anthropic's Claude API to identify the subject. Anthropic acts as a processor; we do not permit use of your images to train their models.
• Background removal. The creature "cutout" is normally made on your device by Apple's Vision framework. When that fails, the reduced photo may be sent through our server to Cloudflare's image-processing service to lift the subject; the temporary copy is deleted immediately after. Photographs of people never use this remote path.
• Capture archive. We retain the reduced copy of successfully developed photos, together with the identification result, in private storage. We use this archive to improve the game's recognition quality. It is never public and never sold.
• Battle art. The background-removed cutout of your creature is published at an unguessable web address so opponents can see your creature during battles. The same cutout may appear as that species' art on computer-controlled opposing teams inside the game. The full original photo is never published. You can unpublish any creature's art from its page in the app at any time.
• The public Field Index. Each species' page in the worldwide registry — in the app and at beastsofthefield.com — may show the species' name, one representative creature cutout, and the discoverer's chosen display name. Creatures developed from photographs of people never appear in the public index.

Photographs of people

You may develop a photograph of a person only with that person's permission, which the game asks you to confirm before developing. Photographs of minors are refused outright.

• The resulting creature is a fixed archetype based only on visible clothing and gear (for example "The Firefighter") — never an identification of the individual.
• The person's cutout becomes that creature's battle art, visible to opponents you battle. It is never added to the public Field Index, never used as computer-opponent art, and never enters our recognition archive.
• Person captures store no location of any kind and no photo metadata.
• If you appear in someone else's capture and want it removed, email us (address below) and we will take the image down.

Journal backup

So a lost or replaced phone doesn't lose your collection, the game keeps a private backup of your journal on our servers once you have an online account: your game progress, each creature's cutout, and a reduced-size copy of each creature's original photograph. This backup exists solely so you can restore your own journal (via Sign in with Apple on a new device). It is stored privately per account, is never public, never used for anything else — and person-capture art in it is likewise only ever restored to you. The entire backup is deleted when you delete your account.

Location

If you allow location access, captures record location two ways, for two purposes:

• What the game shows — everywhere a location appears to you or any player (your capture map, a creature's page), it is a deliberately imprecise position, rounded to roughly one kilometre.
• What we keep privately — when you develop a photo, the capture's precise coordinates and a limited summary of the photo's technical metadata (such as its timestamp) are stored with the develop record. We use these solely to detect cheating and abuse (for example, faked or re-photographed captures). They are never shown to other players, never public, and never used for advertising. Person captures store neither.

We never track your location in the background, and captures work fine with location denied — they simply score lower and go unmapped.

Your account

Accounts are anonymous: a display name you choose, a public handle, a random friend code, and a device credential stored in your phone's Keychain. We store only a cryptographic hash of that credential. No email, no password, no phone number.

If you optionally link Sign in with Apple (for account recovery), we store only Apple's anonymous user identifier. We request no name and no email from Apple.

For support and troubleshooting, the app also reports basic device information to your account: phone model, OS version, and app version. This is used only to diagnose problems (for example, a bug that affects one phone model) and is never shared or used for advertising.

What other players can see. Your display name, handle, avatar choice, and score appear on the game's public standings and on species you discovered. Friends additionally see your win/loss record, discovery count, and badges. A discoverability setting in the app controls whether strangers can find you by search: everyone, friends-of-friends, or nobody (friend code only).

Purchases

Payments are handled by Apple; we never see your payment details. We use RevenueCat, a purchase-management service, to keep your purchases and membership in sync across reinstalls; it identifies you only by an anonymous identifier. Purchase history is used to deliver what you bought and for nothing else.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store a push token so the server can nudge you about battles with friends (for example, "your move"). Daily-assignment reminders are scheduled entirely on your device. Declining notifications changes nothing else about the game.

Crash reports

The app sends crash and error reports to Sentry so we can fix bugs. These include technical details (device model, OS version, what the app was doing when it failed) and are not used for advertising or profiling. The app itself carries no behavioral analytics and no advertising trackers. (The website does use analytics; see "This website" below.)

Gameplay data

Species records (created when anyone first captures a new kind of subject), your battles with friends, friend connections, gym progress, and your discoverer credits are stored on our servers to make the game work across players. Scores on the standings are derived from this record.

What we don't do

• No advertising, and no advertising trackers.
• No behavioral analytics; crash reporting only.
• No sale or rental of your data, ever.

Service providers

Infrastructure that processes data on our behalf: Anthropic (image identification), Cloudflare (storage and image processing), Turso (database), Expo/EAS (hosting, app delivery, push notifications), Apple (payments, Sign in with Apple, TestFlight), RevenueCat (purchase management), Sentry (crash reporting). We also query iNaturalist's public dataset with species names and coarse areas — never anything that identifies you.

This website

To understand whether the site works, we keep anonymous daily tallies of our own (for example "the home page was viewed N times today") with no identifiers of any kind attached.

We also use Google Analytics on this website to see how visitors arrive and which pages they read. It sets cookies in your browser and sends Google your IP address, the pages you view, and general details about your device and referring site; Google processes this as our service provider and we do not use it for advertising or link it to your game account. We have not enabled Google's advertising or cross-device features. You can opt out with Google's browser add-on, by blocking cookies, or with your browser's Do Not Track or tracking-protection settings. Google explains its own handling at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Analytics runs on the website only; it is not in the app.

If you sign the launch ledger, we store your email address solely to send one launch announcement; it is deleted on request and never shared.

Deletion & questions

In the app: you can unpublish any creature's battle art from its page, and delete your entire account from the Naturalist's Card. Account deletion removes your account, friendships, battles, archived captures, published art, and trust records from our servers, and clears the game's data from your device. It does not cancel an active subscription — manage those in your device Settings.

After a deletion we keep one minimal administrative record: your handle, display name, friend code, the deletion date, coarse totals (creatures developed, battles played), and — only if you had linked Sign in with Apple — its anonymous identifier. This exists solely to recognize abusive accounts that return; it contains no photos, no locations, and no friendships.

By email: contact@beastsofthefield.com works for anything else, including removal requests from people who appear in someone else's capture. Deleting the app removes everything stored on your device.

Children

The game is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

During field testing this policy may be revised; the filing date above will change when it does.