Privacy Policy & User Agreement
catch-a-cat — photographing and recognising individual cats.
catch-a-cat identifies individual cats from photographs and keeps a record of the ones you have seen. This page describes exactly what that involves, written against the software that does it.
What we collect
- Photographs you take or choose. They are uploaded to our server, stored, and turned into a numeric fingerprint used to recognise the same cat again.
- Where a sighting happened. Either your device's position or the GPS coordinates embedded in the photograph. Matching is restricted by distance, so a cat photographed in one city is not confused with one hundreds of kilometres away.
- An installation identifier. A random value generated by the app. It is what your zoo belongs to before you create an account.
- An email address and password, only if you choose to create an account. Passwords are stored only as a slow one-way hash (scrypt), never in a form we can read.
- Notes you write in a cat's logbook, and a contact detail if you file a lost-pet report.
There is no advertising and no analytics in this app.
Looking through your photo library
If you turn on Find cats in my gallery, the app reads the photographs stored on your phone so it can pick out the ones with cats in them. This needs permission to read your photo library, and we ask for it with that explanation.
The examining happens entirely on your device. A small recognition model bundled inside the app looks at each photograph on the phone itself. No photograph is uploaded in order to work out whether it contains a cat, and photographs the feature passes over are never sent anywhere.
What we keep on the phone is a short list of which photographs looked like cats — the photo's identifier on your device and a confidence score, nothing more, and no image data. A photograph reaches our server only when you choose it and confirm a cat, at which point it is treated exactly like one you had taken through the app.
You can stop the scan and delete that list at any time from the same screen, and turning the permission off in Android settings stops it too.
What other people can see
catch-a-cat is shared by design: a cat is a community record, so its photographs, its name, and the places it has been seen are visible to other people using the app.
Locations shown to other people are deliberately imprecise. Every public marker is snapped to a grid roughly 100 metres across. Exact coordinates are only ever returned to the person who recorded that sighting.
A lost-pet report is the one place a contact detail you provide is shown to other people — that is its purpose, and it only happens when you file one.
Who else receives anything
We do not sell or rent your data, and nothing here is shared for advertising. Three third parties are nevertheless involved in making the app work, and all are worth knowing about:
- Cloudflare. Connections to catch-cat.online pass through Cloudflare, which protects the site from abuse and carries the traffic to our server. It necessarily handles your IP address and the requests themselves, including the photos you upload, on their way through. It is governed by Cloudflare's privacy policy.
- OpenStreetMap. The maps in the app are drawn from tiles fetched from OpenStreetMap's servers as you pan and zoom. Those requests necessarily reveal which part of the world you are looking at, and reach OpenStreetMap rather than us. They are governed by OpenStreetMap's privacy policy.
- Google Play services. On phones that have it, the app asks Android's fused location provider for your position, which is a Google component. We receive the coordinate; how Google handles the request is covered by Google's privacy policy.
Our own server is operated by Aleksandr Korabelnikov and is not shared with anyone else. There is no other processor, no analytics service and no advertising network.
Deleting your account
How to delete everything
In the app: ⋮ → Account → Delete my account. It is immediate and cannot be undone.
Write to solin1292+catchcat@gmail.com and say which email address or personal key the account uses. We will delete it and reply to confirm.
Deleting removes your sightings, your photographs and their fingerprints, your notes, your zoo, your sign-in details and any sessions. Cats themselves are not deleted when other people have also seen them — they are community records, and removing one would take it out of other people's collections too. Your connection to those cats is removed. A cat nobody but you ever photographed is deleted along with your account.
The photographs you upload
You keep ownership of every photograph you take. Uploading one does not transfer it to us.
What you do give us, by uploading, is a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and irrevocable licence to store that photograph, to derive the numeric fingerprints that recognition depends on, and to display it as part of the record of the cat it shows — including to other people using catch-a-cat. Non-exclusive means you remain free to do whatever else you like with your own photograph, including publishing or licensing it elsewhere.
The licence cannot be withdrawn. A cat's record is built up by several people over time and other people's ability to recognise that animal depends on the photographs already contributed, so this permission does not end if you later change your mind. Deleting your account still removes your photographs from the service going forward — see above — but it does not undo use already made under this licence.
Only upload photographs you have the right to upload
By uploading, you confirm that the photograph is yours, or that you otherwise hold the rights needed to grant the licence above. Uploading someone else's photograph without their permission breaks these rules, and responsibility for that rests entirely with the person who uploaded it — including responsibility for any claim that results.
Copyright complaints
If you hold the rights to a photograph that has been uploaded to catch-a-cat without your permission, write to solin1292+catchcat@gmail.com with:
- enough detail to identify the photograph — a link, or where in the app it appears;
- documentation showing that you hold the rights;
- how we can reach you.
We review every such request and remove material where the claim is substantiated. This is the one route by which a photograph is taken down at someone's request, and it exists precisely because the licence above cannot otherwise be revoked.
How long we keep things
Until you delete your account. Photographs and sightings that other people's matching relies on are kept as part of the shared record described above, minus the link to you.
Security
Passwords are stored only as a slow one-way hash (scrypt) with a per-password salt, so we never hold anything we could read back. Session tokens are random values kept only as hashes, which means a copy of our database does not let anyone sign in as you. Photographs and sightings sit on a server run by Aleksandr Korabelnikov, not on shared hosting or a third-party storage service.
Data travelling between the app and the server is encrypted (HTTPS, at https://catch-cat.online). One exception: Android versions before 0.8 that were set up on the old address, http://ezspeech.ai:8092, keep using it unencrypted until they are updated — update the app if that applies to you.
Children
catch-a-cat is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.
Changes
If this policy changes, the version here changes with the software it describes.
Who operates catch-a-cat
catch-a-cat is developed and operated by Aleksandr Korabelnikov, who is responsible for the data described on this page and is the point of contact for any question about it.
Contact: solin1292+catchcat@gmail.com
In effect from 25 October 2026.