Privacy
Last updated: 2026-08-19
What this app is
The Wayside is a private field journal for your own use. It is a place to keep photographs of plants and places you want to remember, and where and when you found them. There is no feed, no sharing, no social features, and no way for another person using this app to see your entries. What you record here is yours.
What is collected
When you capture a photograph, the app records the precise latitude and longitude of where you were standing — the full-accuracy coordinates your device reports, not a rounded or approximate area — together with the date and time of capture. Those coordinates are stored with the photograph and are linked to your account.
Alongside that, the app stores:
- the photographs themselves (a full-size rendition and a thumbnail);
- anything you write — notes, field notes, adjustments, tags, place names and return plans;
- the weather predictions the app fetches for the places you record;
- your account: an identifier issued by Sign in with Apple, and an account number of our own.
What is not collected
No email address. No name. No contacts, no address book, no advertising identifier, no analytics, no crash or usage tracking. There is no third-party measurement SDK in this app.
Sign in with Apple hands the app your name and email address when you first sign in. This app deliberately never stores either one — there is nowhere in the database to put them. All that is kept is the opaque identifier Apple uses to recognise you next time.
Where it is stored
Database rows are held by Neon (managed Postgres). Photographs, the API and the web app are held by Cloudflare (R2 for the images, Workers for the API, Pages for the site). Both companies act only as processors — they store and serve this data on instruction and are not licensed to use it for their own purposes.
What leaves, and to whom
| Who | Receives | Never receives |
|---|---|---|
| PlantNet | The bytes of a photograph, when you ask for an identification | Your coordinates, your notes, your account |
| Open-Meteo | Coordinates, in order to return the weather there | Your photographs, notes or account |
| aviationweather.gov | A station or area query derived from coordinates, for observed conditions | Your photographs, notes or account |
| Apple | Only what a Sign in with Apple exchange requires | Anything you record in the journal |
| Anthropic (Claude) | Species names only | Your photographs, coordinates, dates, seasons or notes |
The AI never sees your journal. When the app writes an encyclopedia entry about a species, the only thing sent to Claude is the name of the species — not your photographs, not your coordinates, not your dates and not your notes.
Caching
One thing outlives a request, and it is fairer to say so than to claim nothing does: the weather service caches its answers in a key-value store, keyed by coordinates rounded to two decimal places — about a kilometre. Those entries are not linked to your account and they expire on their own after a short time.
Retention
Everything is kept until you delete it. Nothing expires on its own, nothing is purged on a schedule, and there is no archive or backup copy you cannot reach through the app.
Getting your data out
One action — Export, in Settings on the phone or on the Account page on the web — produces a single archive containing every row and every photograph the account owns, in JSON and CSV. There is no request to file and no waiting period.
Deleting your account
One action in the app ends the account: it revokes the app's Sign in with Apple grant, deletes your rows from the database and deletes your photographs from storage.
Two things survive, and here is exactly what and why. The synthesis cost ledger — the internal accounting of what the encyclopedia's AI calls cost — keeps its rows with the account identifier removed. Those rows record that money was spent; they no longer record who spent it, and they contain nothing about your places, photographs or notes. And invite records keep a row with your identifiers removed: any invitation you had not yet used is cancelled, and no surviving row records who you were or who you invited.
Children
This app is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes
This page is the current policy. When it changes, the Last updated line at the top moves with it.
Contact
Every right this policy describes is exercised in the app itself, without asking anyone: use Export to take a full copy of your data, and Delete account to erase it. Both are in Settings on the phone and on the Account page on the web, both take effect immediately, and neither needs a request or an approval.