Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

TailStory (“TailStory”, “we”, “us”) is a pet health record app and companion website, operated from Vienna, Austria. This policy explains what personal data we collect through the TailStory mobile app (iOS and Android) and the website at tailstory-app.com, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the controls you have over it.

For the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), TailStory is the data controller for the personal data described below. You can reach us at [email protected] for any question or request covered by this policy — see Contact us.

2. Scope of this policy

This policy covers the TailStory app, this website, and the TailStory backend that both of them talk to. It does not cover the practices of independent third parties you choose to visit from inside the app or the site — for example, the shop “Buy” button always opens a merchant’s own website in your device’s browser, and what that merchant does with your data is governed by their own privacy policy, not ours.

TailStory is built for pet owners in the EU/EEA, starting in Austria. If you use the app from outside the EU/EEA, the same protections described here still apply to you.

3. Data we collect

We only collect data that a feature you actually use needs. In detail:

3.1 Account & sign-in

• Email address, if you sign in with a one-time emailed code.
• Name, email and a provider identifier, if you sign in with Google, Apple or Facebook — we receive only what that provider passes us to create and recognise your account, never your password on that provider.
• You can also use TailStory as a guest, without an account — pets added as a guest stay on the device and are never linked to an identity until you sign in.

3.2 Profile data

Your display name, an optional profile photo, and whether you use TailStory as a pet owner, a pet sitter, or a professional partner.

3.3 Pet data

• Profile fields you enter or confirm: name, species, breed, sex, birthdate, weight, colour, microchip number, neuter status, whether a cat goes outdoors, and free-text notes.
• Photos of your pet. A photo you add for a new pet is analysed once by an AI model to suggest species, breed, coat type, body condition, size and visible health observations — you review and approve every suggestion before anything is saved, and the estimates are stored alongside the photo as ai_analysis.
• Quick logs — walks, meals, water, litter box and similar day-to-day taps — and timeline entries such as vaccinations, medication, vet visits, surgeries, grooming and weigh-ins.
• Symptom checks — a photo of an area you point the camera at (stool, food, water, ear, eye, skin, mouth, wound, paw), the model’s observation of what is visible in fixed terms, and the resulting entries you approve.
• Scanned documents — a photo of a lab report, prescription or vaccination card you choose to scan, and the values or events read from it, which you review before saving.

3.4 The EU pet passport

If you record your pet’s EU passport, we store the passport number, issuing country, issue date, the issuing vet or clinic and its phone number, microchip implantation and reading dates and location, tattoo details, and the rabies vaccination and validity dates you enter. If you scan pages of the physical booklet, those images are stored in a private, non-public storage location and can only ever be retrieved through a short-lived signed link after we confirm you own the pet — they are never included in a share link and never sent to an AI model.

3.5 TailStory Doctor (the AI chat)

The questions you type or say to TailStory Doctor, any photos or documents you attach to a message, and the assistant’s replies. When you ask about a specific pet, the assistant is given that pet’s profile, its logged history and its medical timeline so it can answer about that animal specifically; when you ask a general question, none of that is available to it. See How our AI features work.

3.6 Notifications & device data

If you allow notifications, we store a push token tied to your device, your device’s current time zone (so a reminder set for “9 AM” arrives at 9 AM wherever you are), and, if you switch it on, your recap language and preferred time.

3.7 Shop & affiliate activity

When you view a product or tap “Buy”, we log that click against your account so we can pay out and reconcile the affiliate commission that funds the free tier. That log carries a derived country, never a raw IP address, and no advertising or cross-app identifier. We never see or store anything about the purchase itself — that happens entirely on the merchant’s own site.

3.8 Subscription & payment data

TailStory Plus is sold as an in-app subscription through the Apple App Store or Google Play, billed and reconciled through RevenueCat. TailStory never sees or stores your card details — our backend only ever learns whether your account is entitled to Plus and the store’s renewal date, from RevenueCat and the store themselves.

3.9 Analytics & diagnostics

We use PostHog to understand which screens are used and to catch crashes. We send your account ID (never your email or name), which screens you open — as a route pattern such as /pet/[id], never the specific pet’s name or ID — app open/close events, and, for a small number of actions we explicitly instrument, an event name and a structural detail such as which quick-log form was used. We do not record your screen, and we do not turn on tap-by-tap autocapture, because both would end up capturing a pet’s name, a medication, or a vet’s address as if it were UI chrome. Nothing is sent to PostHog while you are signed out and unidentified beyond an anonymous session id, and analytics is off entirely in any demo/screenshot build of the app.

3.10 Website contact & review forms

If you write to us or submit a review on this site, we collect the name, email, optional phone number and message you provide, and send it directly to our backend over an encrypted connection. The website itself does not store a copy or use it for anything other than answering you or, for a review, considering it for publication.

3.11 Location

TailStory does not collect or store your precise device location. The in-app vet-search map works from cached map tiles and a clinic directory keyed to the area you are browsing, not a stored coordinate tied to you. Camera and microphone access are used only to capture the photo, video or voice recording you actively take — never for background tracking.

4. Why we use it, and our legal basis

We do not sell your data, and we do not use your pet’s data to build advertising profiles — there is no advertising SDK anywhere in TailStory.

5. How our AI features work

TailStory uses Google’s Gemini models to power photo-to-profile analysis, TailStory Doctor, symptom photo checks, voice transcription and lab-record scanning. A few things hold across every one of those features:

• Nothing is saved from an AI call until you approve it. Every AI suggestion — a profile field, a proposed log, a read lab value — is shown to you with a confidence indicator and only written to your pet’s record once you confirm it.
• Urgency is never decided by the model. For symptom photo checks, the AI only reports what is visible, in fixed terms; a separate, fixed clinical table — not the model — decides whether that reads as normal, worth monitoring, or worth a vet visit now.
• TailStory Doctor is not a veterinarian and does not diagnose. Every conversation carries a visible reminder that it does not replace an examination by your own vet, and red-flag symptoms are always answered with “see a vet now” ahead of anything else.
• Sensitive documents never reach a model. EU pet passport scans and their identifying details (passport number, issuing vet, rabies validity) are excluded from every AI prompt by construction — the code that builds a prompt only ever includes a small, named set of fields, never the whole record.
• We do not use your data to train anyone’s general-purpose AI model. Requests to Gemini are processed to generate the response shown to you and are not used by Google to improve its consumer products, under the terms of our commercial API agreement.
• No automated decision made by TailStory has a legal or similarly significant effect on you — every AI output here is a suggestion you can accept, edit or dismiss.

6. Who we share data with

We work with a small number of processors who help us run TailStory. Each one only receives the data its service needs, under a data processing agreement where the GDPR requires one.

We may also disclose data where required by law, to enforce our terms, or to protect the rights, property or safety of TailStory, our users or the public.

7. Emergency Pass & Sitter Digest

TailStory lets you generate two kinds of expiring, revocable share link so a vet or a sitter can see what they need without an account:

• An Emergency Pass (30 days) carries your pet’s chip number, vaccinations, medication, medical notes and passport gaps — everything a vet would need in an emergency.
• A Sitter Digest (14 days) carries the learned daily routine, goals, dose times, house rules and any open symptoms — deliberately excluding medical history a sitter has no need for and cannot act on.

Both links use a random, unguessable identifier, are marked no-index and no-referrer so they cannot leak through search engines or another site’s referrer header, and answer an identical “not found” whether a link is simply wrong, has been revoked, or has expired — so nobody can tell those three apart from the outside. You can revoke either link at any time from the pet’s profile. Passport scans are never included in either link.

8. International data transfers

Some of the processors in §6 — including Google, Apple, Meta, RevenueCat and PostHog — process data outside the EU/EEA, principally in the United States. Where that happens, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, an adequacy decision, or an equivalent safeguard recognised under the GDPR, as offered by that processor.

9. How long we keep data

• Account and pet data is kept for as long as your account is active. If you delete a pet, its logs, timeline, passport record and stored photos are deleted with it, including passport scans in private storage.
• Account deletion. Write to us at [email protected] and we will delete your account and its pets. Affiliate click records are kept for commission accounting and audit purposes, but your account is disconnected from them — the record survives, the link to you does not.
• TailStory Doctor conversations are kept on your account so a consultation survives closing the app, and are deleted with your account.
• Notification tokens are removed when you sign out or revoke notification permission, and stale tokens are pruned automatically.
• Website contact and review submissions are kept only as long as needed to respond to you or, for a published review, for as long as the review remains public at your request.

10. How we protect your data

• All traffic between the app, this website and our backend is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS).
• Passport scans and other identity documents are stored in a private location with no public read access, and can only be retrieved through a link that expires and that we only ever issue after confirming you own the pet in question.
• Every request is checked against the account that owns the data it touches; the TailStory Doctor cannot be asked about a pet on another account, because the pet id it answers about is fixed server-side and never taken from anything you type.
• We do not embed any advertising SDK, and we do not use cross-app or advertising identifiers anywhere in the app.

11. Your rights

Under the GDPR, and wherever else similar rights apply to you, you can:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete — most of it you can edit directly in the app.
• Delete your account and the data tied to it.
• Export your data in a portable format.
• Object to, or ask us to restrict, certain processing based on our legitimate interest.
• Withdraw consent at any time — for example, by turning off notifications — without affecting anything done before you withdrew it.

To exercise any of these, write to [email protected]. We will respond within one month, as the GDPR requires. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority — in Austria, the Österreichische Datenschutzbehörde.

12. Children’s privacy

TailStory is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us at [email protected] and we will delete it.

13. Cookies & local storage

This website does not use advertising or tracking cookies. It sets one small, functional cookie to remember your language choice between visits, and stores your light or dark mode preference in your browser’s local storage so the site does not flash the wrong theme on load. Neither is used to track you across other sites.

The app stores your session, your cached pets and settings on your device using standard app storage (AsyncStorage), so the app opens instantly and keeps working offline. This is not a tracking mechanism — it never leaves your device except as the ordinary sync calls described elsewhere in this policy.

14. Changes to this policy

We will update this page as TailStory’s features change, and update the date at the top when we do. If a change is significant — for example, a new category of data or a new processor — we will also say so inside the app.

15. Contact us

TailStory is based in Vienna, Austria. For anything in this policy, a data request, or a question about your privacy, write to [email protected].