DuckCast

The short version: we do not want your spot

DuckCast has no accounts, no login, and no advertising. It does not track you, does not know where you are, and never asks. Last updated September 3, 2026.

  • 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. There are no accounts, no logins, no phone numbers, and no passwords. Reports are not tied to a person because there is no person record. There is one exception, and it no longer applies to anyone reading this today: before DuckCast reached the App Store, a hunter could leave an email address to be told when it did. That form is gone now that the app is out, and what it collected is described in full further down.
  • 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. Delete the app and they go 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 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 launch list is the only contact information we hold, and it is never sold, rented, shared, or handed to anyone: not to a data broker, not to an advertiser, not to another company. 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 collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. The launch list, while it existed, asked for an email address and nothing else, and there was no way to know how old the person typing it was. We do not knowingly keep an address belonging to a child: if you believe one is on the list, 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. As the product grows it may add accounts or payment; if that happens, this page will say exactly what that adds before it ships.

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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