Privacy Policy

The short version

Neko Alley turns photos of cats into pixel pets. The photos stay on your phone, and in your own iCloud if you're signed in. Finding the cat, reading the coat, drawing the sprite: all of it runs on your device. There is no account, no login, and no server of ours that your pictures are sent to.

Everything that can leave your phone is listed below, and all of it is under your control.

What stays on your device

• Your photos, the cut-out of the cat, and the thumbnails (iCloud sync also copies them to your own iCloud; see below).
• Your collection: each cat's coat, name, catch date, and the city and country if you chose to add one.
• Camera access is used only while the catch screen is open, to take the picture you asked for. Nothing is recorded or streamed.
• Your walks: distance, steps and times read from the phone's step counter while a walk is open, kept in the walk log on this device. Walks never use your location.
• EXIF data, including any GPS coordinates your camera recorded, is stripped when a photo is saved. No coordinates are ever stored, in a photo or anywhere else.

What can leave your device

1. iCloud sync (on if you're signed in to iCloud). Your collection, photos included, syncs through Apple's CloudKit into your own private iCloud account, so a new phone doesn't mean an empty alley. That's your iCloud storage, governed by Apple's privacy policy. We cannot read it.

2. Sharing a card to KakaoTalk (only when you tap it). KakaoTalk can only display images hosted on Kakao's servers, so choosing "Send to KakaoTalk" uploads the card image, which is your photograph of the cat with the cat's sprite and name drawn on it, to Kakao, along with the cat's name as the message title. The full-size photo file and the cut-out are not uploaded. Kakao's handling of that image is covered by Kakao's privacy policy. Every other way of sharing sends the image directly from your phone and involves no server of ours.

3. Adding a city to a catch (off until you turn it on). A catch can carry the city and country where you met the cat. This is off until you tap "Add city" on a catch, and you can turn it off again in Settings. When it is on, the app takes a rough position (accurate to a few kilometres, never your exact location) and sends it to Apple's geocoding service to be named, once per catch. For a photo chosen from your library, the position comes from the photo instead, rounded the same way. The app keeps the words that come back, such as "Seoul, South Korea", and discards the position. Apple's handling of the lookup is covered by Apple's privacy policy. We never receive your location, and walks never use it.

4. Walking with a friend (only while a walk is open). A co-walk links your phone directly to a nearby phone over Bluetooth and the local network, with no server in between. Your phone sends your cat's name and colors, and a short random code made for that walk so the two phones can tell each other apart. No photo, no location, and nothing about you. Anyone nearby with a walk open can join, and the link closes when you leave the walk screen.

Anonymous counts

To learn whether the app is any good, we count a small, fixed set of events: a first catch, every catch, a return on a later day, the daily hunt, paws, tagging a regular, finishing or sharing a roll, sticker exports, adopting a buddy, finishing a walk, a friend joining a walk, a buddy going home, and sharing a card.

• We record only that the event happened, plus the day (a calendar day in UTC, so it carries no time zone) and the app version. CloudKit also stamps each record with the time it arrived, as it does for every record it stores. There is no free-form data. The app is built so that no photo, cat name, coat, or place can be attached to an event.
• No advertising identifiers, no device fingerprint, no third-party analytics company. These counts go to our own Apple CloudKit database.
• Each count carries an id that CloudKit assigns to your iCloud account for this app alone. We see that id, not your name, email or Apple ID, and cannot turn it into one. It is what lets us tell 10 people from 1 person 10 times.
• Counts are sent from TestFlight builds only. App Store builds send nothing, and show no switch. During TestFlight the switch under YOU → Settings → Share anonymous counts starts on and is one tap to turn off.

What we never do

• No ads, and no ad networks.
• No selling or sharing of data with data brokers.
• No tracking you across other apps or websites.
• No accounts, so nothing is tied to an email address or a real name.

Children

Neko Alley is not directed at children under 13, and collects no personal information from anyone.

Deleting your data

Deleting the app removes everything stored on the device. To remove the synced copy, delete Neko Alley's data from iCloud in Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Manage Account Storage. Anonymous counts carry only the CloudKit id above, which we cannot connect to a person, so there is nothing individual to delete.

Contact

hellojustinoh@gmail.com

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes and the new version is published here before the change ships.