Reef Notes is a saltwater aquarium logbook. This policy describes exactly what leaves your device and what does not.
These are stored locally and, if you are signed in to iCloud, synced through your own private iCloud database. We operate no server that can read them and we never receive a copy.
Photo ID, disease diagnosis, water-test reading, aquascape and lighting advice send the selected photo to our proxy service. The AI advisor sends your question and, if you pick a tank, its water parameters. Dream Tank sends your text description and, if you choose one, the reference photo you selected. Anything you submit to the community — a Fish Friends post or a keeper photo — is also screened by AI before a human reviews it.
Our proxy forwards these to one of two AI providers and returns the result:
minimaxi.com, operated in China) — currently the
default for photo understanding, community screening and the AI advisor.This means a photo or question you send to an AI feature may be processed outside your country, including in China or the United States. Which provider handles a given request can change if one is unavailable; both are used only to produce your result. If you would rather not send a photo off your device, simply do not use these features — every other part of the app works without them.
The proxy stores nothing — no image, no prompt, no response is written to any database or object store. The photo exists only for the duration of the request. The one exception is Dream Tank: because generation takes longer than a single request, the finished image is held in our object storage so your device can collect it, and is deleted automatically within 24 hours.
Only content you explicitly submit is published: the photo you choose, your caption, your optional nickname and tank type. Every submission is held for human review before it can appear.
If you add a keeper photo to a species entry, we receive that photo, the species it belongs to and your optional nickname. Like a community post, it is screened by AI and then held for human review; nothing appears until we approve it. Approved keeper photos are public and are shown with the nickname you chose.
If you mark a species entry as helpful or wrong, we receive the species, whether it was a thumbs up or down, and — for a thumbs down — which fixed reason you picked (photo, facts, name or other) plus the optional note you may type. This feedback is used to prioritise our own corrections and is never shown to other users. Please don't put personal information in the note.
Signing in uses Sign in with Apple. Your real Apple user identifier stays on our server and is never sent to any client; other users only ever see an irreversible hash of it. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we never see your address.
We store an Apple refresh token solely so that deleting your account can revoke your sign-in with Apple. It is used for nothing else and is deleted with your account.
Fish Friends → profile menu → Delete Account. This permanently deletes your posts and their image files, your keeper photos and their image files, your species feedback, your likes, dislikes, favorites and reports, and your stored Apple token. It is not a deactivation and there is no retention period. Your own tank records are unaffected because they were never uploaded.
Reef Notes is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Material changes will be reflected here with a new "last updated" date.
Questions about this document: duscott80@gmail.com