This Privacy Policy explains how Coastal – Wind, Surf & Tides ("Coastal", "we", "us", or "our") handles information when you use the Coastal mobile application and its supporting data services.

Coastal is a weather, marine-conditions, tide, fishing-outlook, beach-shelter, and ferry-information service. It is not an emergency, navigation, or safety service.

Coastal does not require user accounts and does not include advertising, cross-app tracking, or analytics SDKs. The app does not request continuous location access, contacts, camera, or microphone. If you choose to attach a catch photo, Coastal requests access only to the photos you select. If you choose Use My Current Location while logging a catch, Coastal requests foreground location access for that action.

When you choose a coastal place, Coastal uses that place’s public, predefined coordinates—not your device location—to request weather, marine, tide, terrain, imagery, buoy, and ferry information.

When logging a catch, you may use GPS coordinates embedded in the selected photo, choose your phone’s current foreground location, place a pin manually on the map, or use the selected coastal place. Coastal does not continuously track your location. A public catch shares its chosen location on Coastal’s public map; a private catch does not.

Coastal stores your last selected place, favourite places, and cached map and forecast data locally so the app can load faster and continue working when a network source is temporarily unavailable.

If you choose to attach a catch photo, Coastal creates a random installation identifier stored securely on your device. It is used to rate-limit uploads and associate catches with that installation; it is not a hardware device identifier or an advertising identifier.

Selected catch photos are resized and recompressed on your device before upload. The upload is checked by an automated vision service for fishing relevance and possible fish-species identification. Species suggestions may be inaccurate and must be confirmed by you. Photos that do not pass the relevance check are not stored.

New catches are public by default. A public catch makes its photo, species, notes, catch time, and chosen map location available to other Coastal users. Turning off Public before saving stores a private flag with the catch and prevents it from appearing in the public catch feed or public map.

Like most internet services, data providers and hosting infrastructure may automatically receive technical network information such as your IP address, request time, device type, and the requested resource. We do not use that information to build advertising profiles or track you across apps or websites.

Information is used only to operate Coastal, remember your choices, retrieve and display coastal data, diagnose service problems, protect the service, and comply with applicable law.

Coastal retrieves public data and media from third-party services including Open-Meteo, Fisheries and Oceans Canada / Canadian Hydrographic Service, Environment and Climate Change Canada, NOAA National Data Buoy Center, BC Ferries, the BC Data Catalogue, Pelyr OPEN-AIS, AISStream, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Copernicus Sentinel-2, NASA Blue Marble, Amazon Web Services Open Data terrain tiles, and OpenStreetMap services. Optional catch-photo uploads are processed and stored through Cloudflare Workers, Workers AI, and R2.

Requests to these providers are governed by their own privacy policies and terms. Coastal may also use hosting and content-delivery infrastructure to serve mobile app data endpoints.

We do not sell personal information. We do not share personal information for behavioural advertising, and Coastal does not display third-party advertising.

Information may be disclosed when reasonably necessary to operate the service, comply with law, protect rights or safety, investigate abuse, or complete a business transfer subject to appropriate safeguards.

Local preferences, catch details and coordinates, and cached data remain on your device until the app data or cache is cleared. On iOS or Android, uninstalling Coastal removes app-local data according to the operating system’s normal behaviour.

Catch records and approved photos are also retained by Coastal’s supporting service. Public catches remain available to other users; private catches remain associated with the random installation identifier. Because Coastal does not yet create accounts, uninstalling the app can remove the on-device identifier needed to associate the installation with its private catches.

Coastal is a general-audience coastal information service and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

We use reasonable safeguards appropriate to a service of this nature, but no network transmission or storage system is completely secure. Third-party data services may process technical network information in Canada, the United States, Europe, or other jurisdictions where they operate.

We may update this policy when Coastal’s features, providers, or legal obligations change. The effective date at the top of this page will be updated when material changes are published.