Privacy Policy

Last Updated: July 24, 2026 (Version 2.2 - Up to Date)

At Irish Fishing Hub, we are committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring the security of your personal data. This Privacy Policy outlines how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you access our application and website.

1. Introduction & Scope

The Irish Fishing Hub ("we", "our", or "us") is deeply committed to protecting your privacy. This comprehensive Privacy Policy defines exactly how we collect, process, share, and retain your data when you interact with our web application, mobile views, APIs, and associated services (including the V2 AI Identifier and Community Feed).

2. Explicit Data Collection & Usage

2.1 Mandatory Authentication & Profiling Data

Data Points: Email address, cryptographically hashed passwords, usernames, and profile avatars.

Purpose & Justification: Required to establish your unique identity, issue JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for secure session management, provision access to Pro-tier features, and allow cross-device synchronization.

Storage Vendor: Google Firebase Authentication. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit.

2.2 User-Generated Content & Community Sharing

Data Points: Catch photos, text logs, declared species, bait details, timestamps, reported weights, and user interactions (likes, reports).

Purpose & Justification: This data forms the core of the Community Feed. By uploading it, you explicitly consent to its public display across the application.

Exposed Metadata: When you upload photos to the community feed, Exif data (camera details, embedded GPS) is computationally stripped on the client-side before upload to Firebase Storage to protect your exact "secret" fishing spots unless you manually declare the location.

2.3 AI Machine Vision Processing

Data Points: Images uploaded specifically to the "AI Species Identifier" tool.

Purpose & Justification: Images are transmitted to our backend AI processing model to execute inference and return a species prediction array.

Retention Guarantee: Images uploaded solely for AI identification (and not posted to the community feed) are processed purely in-memory or in ephemeral storage. They are permanently deleted upon completion of the inference task. We do not use your private AI queries to train future machine learning models.

2.4 Financial & Payment Ledger Data

Data Points: Billing email, active subscription status, payment history identifiers.

Purpose & Justification: To manage Pro subscriptions.

Security Isolation: We do NOT collect, store, or transmit your credit card numbers, CVV, or bank details. All financial transactions are handed off entirely to Stripe Inc. via highly secure iframe segregation. Their privacy standards apply to the financial data.

2.5 Telemetry, Analytics & Advertising Profiles

Data Points: IP addresses, browser user-agent strings, device viewport sizing, operating system versions, and page navigation flows.

Purpose & Justification: This telemetry is utilized inherently by secure web servers to return data. It is also utilized by analytics and Google AdSense to classify application health and serve personalized advertising banners.

3. Third-Party Data Processors & Sub-processors

We leverage industry-standard third-party sub-processors to run the service. We hold them to strict data protection standards:

• Google Cloud & Firebase: For real-time NoSQL database hosting, asset storage, and authentication.
• Stripe: For PCI-DSS compliant payment processing.
• Google AdSense: Advertising network. Third party vendors, including Google, use tracking cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior web history. You may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings.

4. Legal Compliance, GDPR & Data Rights

If you reside within the European Economic Area (EEA), your data is handled in strict accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You possess the following non-negotiable rights:

• Right to be Forgotten: You may request to delete your account via the email provided or the support menu on your profile . This executes a cascading deletion script that physically wipes your profile, public community posts, uploaded bucket images, and authentication tokens from our active database within 24 hours.
• Right to Access: You may request a raw JSON export of all associated user data held in the Firebase Realtime Database.
• Right to Restrict Processing: You may opt out of data processing by terminating your account.

5. Law Enforcement & Mandatory Disclosure

We are governed by the laws of the Republic of Ireland. We will disclose your user data, without your prior consent, if compelled to do so by a valid subpoena, court order, or warrant issued by An Garda Síochána or relevant international authorities investigating illegal activities or immediate threats to public safety.