Your records go three places: your MyHydroscape account if you have one, the public Live Data Map, and the regulatory and conservation bodies we work with. Your name and email go to none of them. The record itself, including the position you gave, is public from the moment you submit it. Your records are never sold.
1. Your personal account
If you're signed in to MyHydroscape when you submit, the record appears in your personal dashboard. You see everything you've submitted, on a map, with photos, with full detail.
This view is yours alone. No other user of Hydroscape can see your personal dashboard.
2. The anonymous national dataset
Every record contributes to the aggregated Hydroscape dataset. This is:
- Visible on the Live Data Map. Anyone can see that a cormorant was recorded at a position on a date. They cannot see who recorded it, and the what3words address is not shown.
- Visible in platform analytics. Species trends, regional totals, seasonal patterns.
- No name on it. Your name and email are taken off the public record within seconds of you submitting it and moved to a store only Hydroscape can read. What stays on the public record is a random account id, which identifies nothing on its own.
3. Regulatory and conservation bodies
We work with the bodies below and give them totals and trends drawn from the records. No names, no emails, no individual reporters:
- Rivers Trusts
- Wildlife Trusts
- Water companies (for catchment decisions)
- IFCAs (Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authorities)
- Catchment partnerships
- Environment Agency teams
- Natural England (where relevant)
There is no signup consent step and no sharing switch in your account. There is no point pretending otherwise: every record you submit is public as soon as it is filed, so anyone, including all of the bodies above, can read it. What we share with them on top of that is totals and trends, not your name or your email, and we do not sell anything to anybody.
If you would rather a particular record was not public, do not file it through the public tool. Email info@hydroscape-group.co.uk with it instead, or ask us to restrict one you have already filed.
- We never sell data. Not to advertisers, not to commercial third parties, not to anyone. If that changes, it changes with an explicit opt-in, not buried in terms updates.
- We never attach your personal details to public records. Your name and email are held in your account only.
- We never use your records to train AI models. Hydro-Vision AI reads a photograph to answer one question, whether the reported species is visible in it, and records the answer against your record. Your photographs are not training data.
- We never attach your identity to a public record. The position you submit does appear on the Live Data Map as you gave it. What is never public is who gave it.
- Stored securely in our cloud storage
- Used for AI verification of your record
- Used as evidence on the public Live Data Map (only the photo, never your name)
- Available back to you via your MyHydroscape gallery
- Never shared with third parties for non-research uses
- Never used commercially
You cannot delete a record once it is filed, and neither can we from the app: records are fixed on purpose, so that a dataset used as evidence cannot be edited after the fact. If a record of yours is wrong, or you want it taken down, email info@hydroscape-group.co.uk and we will deal with it. Deleting your MyHydroscape account takes your name off your records but leaves the records and the photographs in the dataset. See deleting your account.
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 and to Hydroscape, because 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, email info@hydroscape-group.co.uk and we will restrict it, or send it to us directly and skip the public tool.
There is no club dashboard that puts your name against your records, and nothing on this platform costs a club money. A club or fishery reading Hydroscape sees what everybody else sees: the public records for its waters, with no reporter on them.
The only people who can see your name beside a record are Hydroscape, through the private copy described above.