Your name and email are private. Your location is not.
Your name and email address are removed from the public record within seconds of submitting and moved to a store only Hydroscape can read. The location you give stays on the public record: the coordinates appear on the Live Data Map where you put them, at whatever precision your device managed.
In your personal view (MyHydroscape)
- Exact location — you see the what3words address and the specific map pin you submitted
- Only you can see this. No other user of Hydroscape has access to your personal map.
On the public Live Data Map
- Exact position. The pin appears where you put it.
- No what3words drawn on the map, although it is present in the record behind it.
- No submitter identity. The record is anonymous to anyone reading it.
So if you record a sighting at filled.count.soap, someone using the public map can see that a cormorant was reported at that spot, on that date. What they cannot see is who reported it.
In shared regulatory data
When we share data with Rivers Trusts, Wildlife Trusts, water companies, IFCAs, catchment partnerships, or Environment Agency teams, locations are:
- Aggregated — usually to catchment, postcode area, or grid square level
- Anonymised — no submitter details
- Totals and trends, not your individual records. There is no consent step at signup, because there is nothing to consent to: the records are already public, and your name is not in them.
Individual what3words addresses are not passed through in these aggregated views.
To a club or fishery
The same as to anybody else. A club looking at the records for its own waters sees the position and the date with no reporter attached. There is no club view that names you, and no club pays us for one.
The value of the dataset comes from granularity. A cormorant "seen somewhere in Nottinghamshire" is useless. A cormorant seen at filled.count.soap on a specific date and time is evidence — for a licence application, for a fishery's management, for a catchment study.
We ask for precise data and then protect it. That's the trade-off.
Roost and colony counts are the sensitive case, and they are not on the public map at all. Records from the Roost Count tool are visible only to you, in your MyHydroscape account, and to Hydroscape. That is deliberate: a roost is a place where a large number of birds can be found reliably, at a known time.
For sightings of other sensitive species we do not currently reduce the position shown. If a record of yours would expose a sensitive site, the options below apply.
If you're worried your record might expose a sensitive site, you can:
- Note it in the submission's notes field (we'll flag it)
- Email info@hydroscape-group.co.uk after submission asking for the record's public visibility to be restricted
- In severe cases (for example, an active nest of a Schedule 1 bird), skip the public tool entirely and email us directly with the record
When you capture GPS through the app:
- Your phone's location services are used briefly to capture coordinates
- We don't continually track location — only at the moment you tap the crosshair to capture
- You are asked for location permission the first time. You can turn it off again in your device settings, or in your browser settings if you are using Hydroscape in a browser.
The three-word address is filled in for you from the position you set, and the field is read-only, so there is nothing to type. You can set the position by tapping the map instead of using GPS if you would rather not be located.
Cameras quietly write things into a photo file: the time, the make of phone, and often the GPS position where the shot was taken. Two different things happen to that, depending on what you are doing:
- A photo attached to a report is resized and saved again on your phone before it is sent, and that re-save does not carry the camera data across.
- A photo you send to HydroVision AI to identify goes as it is, so whatever your camera wrote into the file goes with it to the AI service.
Either way, the position on your record is the one you set in the form. We never read the position out of a photo file and we never put it on a record.