Privacy Policy

Last updated: 25 September 2026

The short version

Stringer is a private fishing logbook. Your catches, your photos and your spots live on your phone, with a private backup in your own iCloud so you can get your book back on a new phone. We cannot see that backup, and there is no Stringer account to create. There is no feed, no follower list, and no way for another angler to see where you fish. We do not sell your data, we do not run ads, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

If any of that ever changes, it changes here first, and we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

What Stringer stores on your device

• Your catches — species, size, date and time, water type, notes, and the gear you used.
• Location of a catch — precise GPS coordinates, if you granted location access. See "About location" below, because this is the most sensitive thing the app touches.
• Photos you attach to a catch or to gear. These stay in the app's private storage on your device.
• Your spots — any place you mark and name yourself.
• Your achievements and the progress toward the ones you have not earned.
• A random identifier generated on your device the first time you open the app. It is not your Apple ID, it is not tied to your name, and it is not sent anywhere.
• Your settings — units, sharing preferences, and similar.

None of the above leaves your phone except as described in the next section.

What leaves your device

Apple Weather and Apple Maps. To fill in the weather and the name of the water you are fishing, Stringer sends a location to Apple. Apple's handling of that request is governed by Apple's own privacy policy, not this one. Apple has stated that it does not associate WeatherKit location requests with an identifiable person.

Your own iCloud, if backup is on. If your iPhone is signed in to iCloud, Stringer backs up your catches (including notes, weather and trips), photos, spots, gear, loadouts and achievements to your private iCloud database, using Apple's CloudKit. It is stored under your Apple ID and counts against your iCloud storage. It is encrypted and handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy, and neither we nor anyone else can read it. A new iPhone signed in to the same iCloud gets your book back. You can turn backup off in Settings → Account; your book then stays only on this phone.

Nothing else. We run no servers that hold your data, so there is nothing about you on anything of ours.

No analytics. No advertising. No third-party SDKs. Stringer contains no analytics library, no advertising library, and no software development kits from other companies. There is nothing in the app whose job is to watch you.

About location

Location is the most sensitive information a fishing app touches. Where a specific person fishes, repeatedly, over years, is exactly the kind of record that should not leak. We treat it that way.

• Location is requested only while you are using the app. Stringer never asks for background location and cannot see where you are when it is closed.
• If you decline location access, the app still works. You can set a catch's location by hand, or leave it blank.
• Coordinates are never shown on a share card. A card you share shows the water body name at most, and you can reduce that to your state, or to nothing at all, in Settings → Privacy & sharing.
• Settings → "Don't record exact locations" stops Stringer from saving your precise coordinates at all, for catches and for trips. With it on, the position sent to Apple for weather and water-body lookup is first rounded to roughly a one-kilometre grid, so the exact point never leaves your device, and no coordinates are sent to your iCloud backup from then on. Coordinates already backed up stay in your private iCloud until you delete the catch or your data.
• We never send your coordinates to an advertiser, a data broker, or an analytics provider, because we do not use any.

What we never do

• We do not sell or rent your information to anyone.
• We do not share your fishing locations with other users. There is no mechanism in the app to do so.
• We do not track you across other companies' apps or websites, so Stringer never shows you an App Tracking Transparency prompt.
• We do not use your photos or your catch data to train anything.

Your controls

• Export everything. Settings → Export my data produces your catches, gear and achievements as spreadsheet files plus your photos. This is free and always will be. Your data is yours.
• Delete a catch at any time from the catch itself.
• Delete my data in Settings → Account permanently removes your records and photos from your iCloud backup and from your phone. There is nothing left to restore. You can also remove Stringer's iCloud data yourself in the Settings app, under your name → iCloud.
• Turn off precise location at any time in Settings.

Children

Stringer is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the app will show you the change before it takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or a request about your data: kawika.beaman@hotmail.com