Privacy Notice

Effective: 24 August 2026 Version: 2026-08-24

This notice explains what SallaPati collects, why, and what happens to it. It is written to satisfy Turkey's Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK, Law No. 6698, Article 10) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

1. Who is responsible

Data controller: SallaPati Address: Istanbul, Türkiye Email: [email protected]

2. What we collect

Identity and account. When you sign in with Google, Google gives us an account identifier, your email address, your display name, and the address of your profile picture if you have one. A username is derived from that name.

Optional details. You may enter a birth year and a gender when you register. Both are optional and may be left blank; nothing in the app depends on them.

Location. Only at the moment you add an animal or post an update: the latitude and longitude your device reports, how accurate that reading is, and whether it came from a mock location provider. The app does not track you in the background.

Photos you take inside the app.

Usage data. Points, level, the animals you added, the updates you posted, what you follow, and your notification preferences.

Device attestation. A record confirming the request came from a genuine copy of the app. In the mobile app this comes from Google Play Integrity. The website performs no device attestation: it loads no Google script and sends no browser or interaction signal to Google for this purpose.

3. How your location is protected specifically

This section describes how the app is built, not a promise about it.

The marker on the map is not where you were. You add an animal while standing next to it, so an exact marker would publish exactly where you were standing. The stored coordinate is therefore displaced by a random 15-25 metres before it is written. That displacement happens once, at write time. Regenerating it per read would let an observer average many observations back to the true point.

The real coordinate your device reported is never shown to any user. It is kept as an audit record in a separate table, and no client-facing endpoint reads from it. Only an administrator account can reach it, through an endpoint that records every such access.

Your updates carry no location. Only a rounded distance to the animal.

Location is stripped from photos. Android JPEGs carry GPS coordinates in their EXIF data. When your photo reaches the server, that data is removed and the file re-encoded before anything is written to disk. The untouched original is never stored anywhere reachable.

4. Why we process it

• To create your account and keep you signed in
• To build and show the map and the animal records
• To verify that an update was genuinely posted next to the animal
• To protect the points system from abuse (distance, accuracy, mock-location and

implausible-movement checks)

• To notify you about animals you follow
• To meet our legal obligations

5. Legal basis

Identity, account and location data are processed on the basis of your consent, given on the registration screen and withdrawable by deleting your account.

The audit records that protect the points system rest on legitimate interest (KVKK Art. 5/2-f; GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)): a points system built on self-reported location cannot be operated without a record against which that report can be checked.

6. Who we share it with

Google (Firebase Authentication, App Check) for sign-in and, on the mobile app, device attestation. Google may process this data outside Turkey.

Our own servers, hosted in a data centre in Nuremberg, Germany. For users in Turkey this is a transfer abroad under KVKK Art. 9, covered by the consent you give at registration.

CARTO, which serves the map background. Those requests show CARTO the rough area you are looking at. They are not tied to your account and CARTO is not told who you are.

Google AdMob serves the adverts in the app; see section 7.

Beyond these we do not sell your data or pass it to anyone else.

7. Advertising

The app shows a banner at the bottom of some screens and, occasionally, a full-screen advert. Adverts are served by Google AdMob.

You see none at first. For the first 10 days after you create your account, or until your first 25 contributions -- whichever comes first -- there are no adverts at all. During that period the advertising SDK is never started: your advertising ID is not read and no request reaches the ad network.

What advertising processes. After that period, Google AdMob receives your device's advertising ID (a resettable number Android provides), device and app information, and your IP address.

Your location is not given to the ad network. The location fix the app collects stays on our server (section 3) and is not shared with advertisers. Google can, as with any internet request, infer a rough area from your IP address.

Consent (EEA, UK and Switzerland). If you are in one of those regions, a consent form is shown before the first advert. You may refuse -- the app keeps working and you simply see non-personalised adverts. The form is operated by Google and you can change your choice later.

How to limit it. On Android, Settings -> Privacy -> Ads lets you reset or delete your advertising ID. Deleting it does not remove adverts; it stops them being personalised.

Children. If you did not give a birth year, or you are under 13, adverts are switched to child-directed mode: personalisation is turned off and content rating is restricted. Because the birth year is optional, unknown is treated as a child -- the more protective assumption.

8. How long we keep it

For as long as your account exists. When you delete your account:

• Your profile, optional details and location audit records are deleted.
• The animals you added stay on the map but are transferred to a system

account and no longer linked to you. A volunteer leaving should not erase the neighbourhood's record of its animals.

• An irreversible hash of your account identifier is kept so we can tell

whether a deleted account has registered again. Your identity cannot be recovered from it.

9. Your rights

You may ask whether we process your data, request a copy, have inaccurate data corrected, have your data deleted, object to automated analysis that produces a result against you, and seek compensation for unlawful processing. Write to the address above.

You can also delete everything yourself, at any time, from Profile > Delete my account.

10. Changes

When this notice changes its version is updated and the app asks you to accept the new one. Which version you accepted is recorded.