Privacy Policy

Effective: 20 July 2026  ·  Last updated: 6 August 2026

Hive Yard is a beekeeping record app and website. This policy explains, in plain language, what we store, why, where it goes, and how to get rid of it. If anything here is unclear, ask us — the address is at the bottom.

Who we are

Hive Yard ("we", "us") provides the Hive Yard Android app and the website at thehiveyard.com. We are the controller of the personal information described below.

What we collect

Your account

To sign in you provide an email address, or you sign in with Google, which gives us your email address and the name on your Google account. If you set a display name or profile picture, we store those too. Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication; we never see or store your password.

The records you create

This is the heart of the app, and it is only ever what you type or capture yourself:

• Apiary and hive names, hive type, queen details, and hive configuration.
• Inspection notes and dates, follow-up flags, and equipment counts.
• Photos you take or choose, and any captions you add to them.

Free-text fields — notes especially — hold whatever you choose to put in them. We do not scan them for anything beyond the keyword matching that raises a follow-up flag for you, and that runs on your own device.

Technical information

• Crash reports, through Firebase Crashlytics: what went wrong, roughly where in the code, and the device model and Android version. These are not linked to your account — we do not attach your user ID to them.
• A notification token, so that a reminder set on the website can reach your phone. It identifies the installation, not you.
• App integrity checks, through Firebase App Check and Google Play Integrity, which confirm requests come from the real app rather than a script. This is what protects the AI features from being abused at our expense.

Bug reports you send

If you use Report a bug — in the app's Settings, or in Settings on this website — we receive what you wrote, together with your account email address, your device or browser, the version you were running, and which plan you are on. Nothing is sent unless you fill the form in and tap Send.

Unlike a crash report, a bug report is linked to your account. That is deliberate: you are telling us something is wrong, and we need to be able to write back and ask. It does not include your hives, inspections, notes, or photos — only what you describe yourself.

What we do not collect

• Location. The app holds no location permission and collects no GPS or network location.
• Contacts, calendar, call logs, SMS, or your other files.
• Advertising identifiers. There is no advertising in Hive Yard.
• Analytics or behavioural tracking. We do not measure which screens you visit.
• Payment details. Billing is not live; nothing here takes a card number.

What this website stores in your browser

Four things, and we would rather list all four than write "we use cookies to improve your experience" and leave you to guess. None of them follow you to another website.

• Your sign-in session. Kept by Firebase Authentication so that moving between pages does not ask you to log in again. It lasts until you sign out or clear your browser data.
• One display preference — whether you last viewed your equipment as a table or as cards. It is a layout setting, it never leaves your browser, and it is not tied to you.
• An invite code you are part-way through accepting. Opening an invite link while signed out would otherwise lose the code behind the login screen, so it is held just long enough to get you through it. It is discarded once the invitation has been offered to you, and in any case when you close the tab.
• One cookie, set by Google — “_GRECAPTCHA”. This is the only true cookie on the site and the only item here that anyone but us places. It belongs to reCAPTCHA, which distinguishes a real browser from a script — the website half of the app integrity checks described above. It is what keeps a bot from running the AI features up as a bill at our expense. We do not read it, and it is not used to advertise or to profile you.

There is no analytics of any kind. No page-view counter, no session recorder, no advertising or cross-site tracking cookie, and no third-party tag that exists to watch what you do. We do not know which pages you visit or how long you stay.

Since 3 August 2026 the typefaces on this site are served from our own server rather than from Google Fonts, so simply reading a page no longer sends your IP address to Google to draw a heading. In fairness we should say what remains: the Firebase code the site runs on is loaded from Google's CDN, which necessarily sees that request.

Because everything above is either needed to sign you in, a preference you set yourself, or a security check, none of it is the sort of tracking a consent banner exists to ask about — which is why you have not been shown one.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Device permissions, and why

• Camera — only when you take a hive or inspection photo.
• Microphone — only while a voice session is running, so you can dictate notes hands-free. The app does not listen in the background, and there is no wake word.
• Notifications — to remind you about a scheduled inspection. You can decline.
• Internet — to sync, if you sign in.

The AI features, specifically

Hive Yard has optional AI features that help you identify what you are looking at and take notes by voice. These are the only features that send your content to a third party for processing, so they deserve to be spelled out.

• Photo analysis sends that photograph to Google's Gemini model and returns a description. It runs when you tap to analyse a photo — never automatically.
• Voice sessions send your speech to Google for transcription and, in the guided session, a spoken reply. Audio is streamed while the session is live; we do not store recordings. What we keep is the resulting text, saved as your inspection notes.
• Context — a voice session is told your hive names so it can file notes against the right hive, and may include the notes from the session in progress.

Google processes this on our behalf under its paid Firebase and Google Cloud terms, which provide that your prompts and the responses to them are not used to train Google's models. If you would rather nothing left your device at all, simply do not use these features — the rest of the app works fully offline.

The AI is educational, not advice. It offers possibilities to check, never a diagnosis, and it will not recommend a treatment or a dose. For anything serious — foulbrood above all — it will tell you to contact your state apiary inspector. Please do.

Working offline, and what syncing changes

Hive Yard is offline-first. If you never sign in, your records stay on your phone and we do not receive them at all. Signing in turns on sync: your records are copied to Google Firebase so the app and website show the same yard, and so you do not lose everything with the phone.

Sharing a yard with someone else

You can invite other people into your yard — a partner, a mentor, someone who looks after your hives while you are away. This is the one part of Hive Yard where your information and another person's meet, so it gets its own section.

Nothing moves when a yard is shared. The records stay in the owner's account, and an invitation grants the other person permission to reach into it. There are two levels: view only, and view and edit. Either way it is the owner's yard throughout.

What the people in a yard learn about each other

• Everyone in a yard can see everyone else's username. When you accept an invitation we record a display name for you — the one you chose, or the name on your sign-in, or failing both the part of your email address before the @. That name is shown to the owner and to the other members, so that a shared yard is not a room of strangers.
• The owner of a yard can see the email address you joined with. It is stored with your membership so they can tell who accepted an invitation they sent. Other members cannot see it — the list they see is usernames only, and it never falls back to a full address.
• Members can see the yard owner's name, so they know whose yard they are looking at.
• You do not learn anything about each other's accounts beyond this. Your plan, your settings, your own separate yard and your other memberships are not visible to anyone else, including the owner.

Your name goes on the work you do there

If you log an inspection, add a photo, or change a hive in someone else's yard, that record is signed with your username so the yard's history says who did what.

Those records belong to the yard, not to you, and they stay when you go. If you leave a yard — or the owner removes you, or you delete your Hive Yard account entirely — we take your name off everything you signed there and replace it with “Former user”, and we disconnect it from your account. The records themselves remain in the owner's yard. They are the history of their colonies, and deleting them would take away something that is theirs. This cannot be reversed, including if you are invited back later.

The same is true of photographs you take in someone else's yard: they are stored in the owner's account from the moment they upload, and they stay there afterwards.

What sits on other people's devices

A member's phone keeps a full copy of the yard it is showing, so it works in an apiary with no signal. Two things follow, and we would rather say them than let you assume otherwise:

• Removing someone is immediate here, and eventual on their phone. The moment you remove a member, our servers refuse them — they cannot fetch anything new and cannot change anything of yours. But a phone that is switched off or out of range still holds whatever it had already downloaded, until it next connects and clears itself. We cannot reach into a device that is not online, and no one can.
• Opening a shared yard replaces the copy on your own phone. A phone holds one yard at a time, so entering someone else's yard clears your own from that device and downloads theirs; going back downloads yours again. Nothing of yours is lost — it is in your account the whole time — but if you have unsynced changes, the app will wait rather than switch.

Notifications between members

If a hive's next inspection date changes, we notify the yard owner and any member who can edit, so the person who might do the work finds out. View-only members are not notified. The message carries the hive's name and the new date, and nothing else.

Invitations

An invitation is a code, valid for three days and for one person. We store the code, who created it, what it grants, and when it expires — no personal information about whoever you intend to give it to, because we are not told. Redeeming a code deletes it, and codes nobody uses are deleted after they expire. Anyone holding the code can join, so pass it to the person you mean and not to a public place.

Ending it

An owner can remove any member at any time, from the app or this website. A member can leave a yard the same way, without asking. Either way the membership is deleted, access stops, and the name-removal above happens. Leaving a yard has no effect on your own yard, your own records, or your account.

If you would like something you wrote in someone else's yard removed rather than just unnamed, the owner can delete it — it is in their records. You are also welcome to write to us at the address at the bottom of this page and we will help.

Who else is involved

We do not sell or share your information. It is handled by these providers on our behalf:

• Google (Firebase) — sign-in, database, photo storage, notifications, crash reporting, and the AI features described above.
• Hostinger — hosting for this website, and the mailbox a bug report is delivered to.

Data is stored on Google's infrastructure and may be processed in the United States and other countries where Google operates.

How long we keep it

Your records stay until you delete them or delete your account. Deleting your account removes your apiaries, hives, inspections, flags, equipment, photos, and your sign-in — from our systems and from the phone you delete it on. It cannot be undone.

Work you did in someone else's yard is the exception, and it is worth being exact about. Deleting your account takes your name off it and cuts its link to you, as described under sharing above — but the inspections, photos and hive changes themselves stay in that yard, because they are the owner's records of the owner's colonies. Your memberships are deleted, so you lose access at the same moment.

To delete your account: in the app, User Account → Delete my account; on this website, Settings → Delete your account. Backups may take up to 30 days to age out, and crash reports, which are not linked to you, are kept by Crashlytics for up to 90 days. If you can no longer sign in, or you want the full detail of what deletion removes and what briefly remains, see Delete your account.

Bug reports are kept separately. A report you send reaches us as an email, so deleting your account does not withdraw it — the copy we hold still carries the address you sent it from. If you would like a report of yours deleted, ask us at the address below and we will remove it.

Security

Your data is stored in your own area, and the security rules only permit you to read and write it. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Anyone who unlocks your phone can open the app and read the copy stored there, so please use a screen lock.

Children

Hive Yard is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will remove it.

Your rights

You can see your data in the app or on this site, correct it by editing it, export nothing more than you already hold, and delete all of it at any time using the account deletion above. Depending on where you live — for example under UK/EU GDPR or California law — you may also have the right to request a copy of your information, to object to processing, or to complain to your data protection regulator. Write to us and we will help.

Where a shared yard is involved, some of this runs through the yard's owner rather than through us. Records in their yard are theirs to correct or delete, and we do not remove another person's beekeeping history on a third party's say-so. What we can always do ourselves is end your access, take your name off what you signed there, and answer a request about your own account. Ask us either way and we will tell you plainly which of the two applies and, where it is the owner's to do, help you ask them.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top, and for anything significant we will say so in the app.

Contact

Questions, requests, or anything that looks wrong: privacy@thehiveyard.com