Privacy Policy

The short version

• Your data is yours — you can export all of it, and delete all of it, at any time
• We process it only to serve you — your forecasts, your stats, your history
• We never pool it with other anglers' data, for any purpose
• We never sell it, and we don't run ads
• Your spots are never shown publicly, and never appear on a captain page or a share card
• An account is required to sync, because syncing your data needs somewhere to sync it

What we are careful not to claim

Two things are worth saying plainly, because the industry usually says the opposite.

We do not say "we can't read your data." Your catches, spots and trips are stored on our servers in a form our systems can read. That is what makes it possible to prepare your forecasts before you lose signal, to recover your history onto a new phone, and to answer a support question when something looks wrong. Saying otherwise would not be true.

We do not call anything "anonymised." A coordinate with a timestamp identifies a person remarkably well, and the link between you, a place and a time is exactly what makes the product work. Pretending that link can be scrubbed away would be a marketing claim rather than a technical one.

What we commit to instead is narrower and enforceable: your data is used to serve you, it is never combined with anyone else's, and it is never sold.

Your account

Creating an account requires an email address and a password. That is the only sign-in method — there is no Google, Facebook or Apple sign-in, and no social network is involved at any point.

• Accounts are handled by Amazon Cognito. We never see or store your password.
• Your email is used to verify the account, to reset a forgotten password, and to tell you if something happens to your data. We do not send marketing email to it.
• You can use the app without an account. You keep everything on that one device, and nothing syncs.

What is stored, and where

Location

The app asks for location while you are using it. It is used to find the water near you, to score today's conditions there, and to place a catch when you record one.

Your coordinates are stored with your catches and sync to your account like the rest of your data. They are never published, never shown to another angler unless you deliberately share something, and never used to build a picture of where people fish.

You can decline location access and still use the app — you place your spots by hand instead.

Photos

Photo Scan reads your photo library to find pictures of fish and rebuild your catch history from them.

• The scan itself runs entirely on your phone. No photo is sent anywhere in order to analyse it — the recognition happens on the device, using Apple's on-device Vision framework on iPhone and Google's on-device ML Kit on Android. Both ship their model inside the app, so the scan works with no connection at all.
• We ask for photo access at the moment the scan starts, not during onboarding.
• You review every proposed catch before it is saved. Anything you reject is discarded.
• Photos attached to a catch you keep do sync to your account, like the rest of your data, so they survive a lost phone. Photos you never attach are never uploaded.

What we do with your data

All of it is in service of your own app:

• Preparing your forecasts ahead of time. Because the app has to work with no signal for days, our servers fetch weather, conditions and history for the places you care about and push them to your phone while you still have a connection. That requires knowing which places those are.
• Learning your water. Your forecast scores are tuned against your own catch history, so the app gets better at the places you actually fish.
• Keeping your devices in step, and getting your history back onto a new one.
• Supporting you when you write in with a problem.

We never combine your data with another angler's. There is no shared heat map, no aggregate "hot spots" feature, no data product, and no third party who receives it.

What we share, and with whom

We use a small number of service providers to run the app. They process data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, storage and accounts.
• Apple or Google — the App Store or Google Play, whichever you bought through, handles your subscription and payment. We never see your payment details.
• Google Firebase — anonymous crash reports and usage counts. These contain no coordinates, no catch details, no names and no photos.

We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use advertising networks.

Anything you choose to publish

Some features put content in front of other people. All of them are things you choose, one at a time:

• Share cards and trip postcards — the day's story, photos and catch counts. They never carry your coordinates.
• Captain profiles, if you run charters and choose to publish one, carry your business details and are reviewed before they go live. They never carry your catch data or your spots.

Deleting one removes it from our infrastructure.

Your rights and controls

• Export everything, any time. A complete copy of your data, in open formats, from inside the app.
• Delete your account from inside the app, or at gethooked.fish/delete-account if you no longer have the app. Either way genuinely deletes your data from our servers rather than merely hiding it, and it is unrecoverable afterwards.
• Delete anything individually — a catch, a trip, a photo, a forecast.
• Use the app without an account, in which case nothing ever reaches us.
• Removing the app removes everything stored on that device.

Deleted data is removed from live systems immediately and falls out of our encrypted backups within 35 days.

Children

Get Hooked! is rated 13+ and is not directed at children under 13. An account requires you to be at least 13, matching our Terms of Use, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.

This is about accounts, not about who can go fishing. A child using a parent's or guardian's device is not creating an account and we collect nothing about them separately from the adult whose account it is.

Changes to this policy

If we change how your data is handled in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect — not by quietly editing this page. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Contact us

Bottom line: your spots are the most valuable thing you own as an angler, and the whole point of this app is to make them worth more to you. They are never pooled, never sold, and never published.