The short version: we do not want your spot

• Your location. The app never requests location permission and never reads your device location. The map draws fixed regional boundaries, the same ones for everyone.
• Your hunting spots. A hunter report names a region, never a point. There is no coordinate field to put a location in, so there is nothing to leak, subpoena, or sell.
• Your identity. The iPhone app has no accounts and no logins, and nothing anywhere asks for a phone number or a password. Reports are not tied to a person. Two things on this website do hold an email address, both described in full further down: an account for DuckCast Pro on the web, and a launch list that closed when the app reached the App Store.
• Advertising and tracking data. No advertising identifier, no cross-app or cross-site tracking, and no advertising SDKs. The one thing measured anywhere is a cookieless page-view count on this website, described below. The iPhone app contains no analytics of any kind.

Your Hunt Log, your saved regions, your display palette, and the last forecast the app downloaded are stored on your phone. They are not transmitted to us, with one exception you choose each time: a hunt you post to a hunting group, described below. Delete the app and the rest goes with it.

The website, not the app, uses Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. It is cookieless: no cookies, no fingerprinting, no advertising identifier, and nothing that follows you to another site. It tells us which pages get read and nothing about who read them. The iPhone app carries no analytics at all.

DuckCast Pro is normally an iPhone subscription and lives with your Apple ID. Someone without an iPhone can have Pro on this website instead, and that needs an account, because a website has no other way to remember who has it. Today that means someone we have given a free pass to.

An account holds your email address, the date it was created, the date you last signed in, and which Pro you have and until when. For a free pass it also holds a short note from us saying why it was given. That is the whole record. No name, no location, no password, and no device information.

You sign in with a link we email you. It works once, for 15 minutes. To deliver it, your address and the message pass through Resend, the email service that sends it. If you buy Pro on this website, Stripe has your address too, as described next. No other company does. Asking for a link with an address that has no account sends nothing and stores nothing.

Signing in sets one cookie on this website. It says which account is signed in and nothing else, and it is not used for analytics or tracking. Signing out removes it.

An account is never joined to hunter reports or to the page view counter above. The one place it meets the iPhone app is a hunting group you choose to join, described next, and there the other members see the name you picked and the mornings you posted, never your email address. To have an account deleted, write to amartin@h-mstrategies.com from the same address.

If you buy Pro on this website, Stripe handles the payment. Your card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us. Stripe keeps what it needs to charge you and send your receipts, such as your email address, your card and, where sales tax applies, your billing address, under Stripe's own privacy policy.

We keep only what tells this website that you are Pro: the Stripe customer and subscription ids linked to your account, which plan you chose, its dates, whether it renews, and whether the last renewal charge went through. Buying Pro creates an account for the email you give at checkout, if you did not have one. None of it is joined to hunter reports or to the iPhone app.

Buying Pro in the iPhone app is different: Apple handles that payment and we never see who you are.

A hunting group is a season leaderboard for a few hunters who know each other. It works in the iPhone app and, for DuckCast Pro on the web, on this website, and members of either can be in the same group.

A group holds its name and code, the name each member picks for themselves in it, and the hunts members choose to post: the date, the region, how many birds of each species, and the forecast score that morning. That is all. No notes, no location finer than a region, and nothing from your Hunt Log you did not post. Behind each member is an anonymous token on the iPhone or the account id on the website, so the group knows which posts are yours. Neither is ever shown to anyone.

The other members of that group, and only they, see the names and the posted hunts. When someone posts, members using the iPhone app get a notification naming them and the birds.

You can take back one hunt or all of yours at any time, which deletes them. Leaving a group takes you and your hunts off its board; the hunts stay stored, and come back if you rejoin with the code, unless you took them back first. When the last member leaves, the group is deleted.

DuckCast is on the App Store now, so this website no longer offers the signup. While it was not downloadable yet, a hunter could leave an email address here to be told when it was. Here is everything that happened while the form existed: an address and the date it was given were written to our own database. That is the whole record. No name, no location, no device information, and nothing about which pages the person read.

It was never a newsletter, a drip sequence, or a marketing list to be enrolled into. The addresses lived in our own Postgres database rather than a mailing-list company, so no third party ever held them.

It was never joined to anything else. An address left here was never linked to hunter reports, to anything done in the app, or to the page view counter described above, and it never will be.

If you left an address before the form came down and want it removed, write to amartin@h-mstrategies.com and the row is deleted. No account to log into, no confirmation loop.

Filing a hunter report is optional and the app is fully usable without ever filing one. A report contains exactly this: the region you hunted, which species you saw and how many of them relative to a normal day, whether the birds looked like new arrivals, whether you saw active migration, how hard they were feeding, the habitat type, and an optional free-text note.

A report also carries an anonymous token generated on your device. It says nothing about you, your phone, or your location, and it cannot be traced back to either. It exists for exactly one job: if someone abuses the free-text note, every report from that token can be hidden or blocked as a group instead of one at a time. It is not an account, and there is still no person record to attach it to.

Please do not put personal information or a specific location in the note. We do not want it and we do not need it. Reports exist for one purpose: making the regional forecast better for the people who file them.

We do not sell reports. The email addresses on web accounts and on the launch list are the only contact information we hold, and they are never sold, rented, shared, or handed to anyone: not to a data broker, not to an advertiser, not to another company. The only exceptions are the email service that delivers sign-in links, which sees an address only to deliver a link to it, and Stripe, which has the address of anyone who buys Pro on this website, to charge them and send receipts. We do not build advertising profiles.

DuckCast fetches public data to build its forecasts: weather from Open-Meteo, radar from NOAA NEXRAD, crop progress from USDA NASS, and drought conditions from the US Drought Monitor. That traffic flows toward us, not away from you. None of those services receive anything about you, because the app never sends them anything about you.

DuckCast is not endorsed by any of them.

DuckCast is built for adult waterfowl hunters and is not directed at children. The iPhone app asks no one for personal information: no email address, phone number or real name. A hunting group asks for a name to show the other members, which can be a nickname, and holds nothing else about who you are. The launch list, while it existed, asked for an email address and nothing else, and so does a web account; there is no way to know how old the person behind an address is. We do not knowingly keep an address belonging to a child: if you believe we hold one, write to amartin@h-mstrategies.com and it will be deleted.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the date at the top changes with it and the change is described here, before the change ships.

October 1, 2026, later the same day: added Payments on this website, for buying Pro here through Stripe.

October 1, 2026: added accounts on this website for DuckCast Pro on the web, described above. Added hunting groups, which work on the website now too. Groups were in the iPhone app before this page described them; it does now, for both.

September 3, 2026: the launch-list section was rewritten. It had said the app was not downloadable yet, eleven days after it actually reached the App Store. Nothing about what is collected changed; the signup form itself came down on release day, and this page is now just current about that.

Questions about privacy, or a request to remove a report you filed: amartin@h-mstrategies.com. Reports carry no name or contact information, so include the region and the date and we will find it.

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