Privacy Policy
Last updated: August 28, 2026
The short version. Creel keeps your fishing log on your iPhone. There is no Creel account, no Creel server holding your catches, and no advertising or analytics tracking of any kind.
Your log syncs through your own private iCloud account if you leave that on. Your location is sent to weather and map providers to fetch conditions and draw maps. Your photos stay on your device. Nothing you log is ever visible to other people.
The one time your data is sent to us is when you deliberately submit feedback or a bug report from inside the app — and you choose what that includes.
This Privacy Policy describes how Creel Outdoors LLC (“Creel,” “we,” or “us”) handles information in connection with the Creel iOS application (the “App”).
No account, no Creel server
The App has no sign-up, no login, and no user accounts. We do not issue you a user ID, and we do not operate a server that stores your fishing log. Because we never hold an account for you, we hold no profile about you to sell, share, or lose.
What the App stores on your device
Everything you record lives in a database on your iPhone. That includes:
- Catches you log — species, measurements, dates, and any notes you add
- Photos you take in the App or choose from your photo library
- Fishing spots, lakes, and trips, including GPS coordinates and recorded trip routes
- Weather and water-condition records attached to your entries
- App settings, and usage counters the App keeps locally to power its own insights
The local usage counters that drive the App’s insights are never transmitted to us. They are stored on your device and automatically deleted after 90 days.
Location
With your permission, the App uses your location to tag catches and spots, show nearby spots on the map, record the route of a trip, and fetch conditions for where you are. Coordinates are stored on your device at full precision as part of your log.
If you turn on the optional auto-start feature, the App asks for background (“Always”) location access so it can notice when you arrive at one of your saved lakes and offer to start a trip. That check happens on your iPhone against lakes you saved. Auto-start is off unless you switch it on, and the App is fully usable without it.
Your location is never sent to a Creel server. It leaves your device only as coordinates passed to the weather and map providers listed below, so they can return conditions and map imagery.
Photos and camera
With your permission, the App uses the camera to photograph a catch, and can read your photo library to find fishing photos and read the GPS location and date stored in them. It can also save annotated photos back to your library if you ask it to.
Your photos are not uploaded. They are not sent to us, and they are not sent to any third party for processing. The only exception is a screenshot you deliberately attach to a feedback report — see below.
On-device intelligence
The App identifies fish and estimates measurements from your photos using machine-learning models that run entirely on your iPhone, including its LiDAR sensor on supported models. Your photos are not sent to a cloud service for analysis, and no image or derived representation of an image is transmitted for that purpose.
We do not use any third-party AI service. Your photos, notes, and fishing log are never sent to an external AI or machine-learning provider, and nothing you record in the App is used to train models — ours or anyone else’s.
iCloud sync
Your log syncs through Apple’s CloudKit into your own private iCloud account, so it survives a lost phone and appears on your other devices. This uses Apple’s private database: the data is tied to your Apple Account, governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy, and is not readable by us or by anyone else.
The App uses no public or shared iCloud database. There is no mechanism in the App by which one person’s catches, spots, or locations become visible to another person. You can turn iCloud sync off in the App’s settings, or disable iCloud for Creel in iOS Settings.
When information leaves your device
These are every outside service the App contacts, and exactly what each one receives.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Apple WeatherKit | Location coordinates and a time range. No account or device identifier from us. | Current and forecast weather conditions. |
| Apple iCloud / CloudKit | Your fishing log, into your own private iCloud account. | Backup and sync across your devices. |
| Open-Meteo | Location coordinates and a date range. No identifier, no account, no log content. | Historical weather used to analyse past conditions. |
| Mapbox | Map requests for the area you are viewing. Mapbox also collects its own de-identified location and usage telemetry — see below. | Map display. |
| Cloudflare and Linear | Only a feedback or bug report you choose to submit, and whatever you include in it. | Receiving and tracking your support requests. |
That table is the complete list. The App contacts no other service, and Creel Outdoors LLC has no parent, subsidiary, or affiliated company that receives your data.
These providers are required to protect your data to the same standard described in this policy. Each is bound by its own published privacy commitments and by the terms under which we use it, none of them is permitted to sell your information or use it to advertise to you, and none receives your fishing log. Their policies are linked here so you can read them yourself: Apple, Open-Meteo, Mapbox, Cloudflare, and Linear.
Mapbox telemetry
Maps in the App are drawn by the Mapbox Maps SDK, which collects data of its own by default, governed by Mapbox’s privacy policy. According to the privacy manifest Mapbox publishes with the SDK, that data is: coarse and precise location, an identifier Mapbox assigns, product interaction, other usage data, performance data, and other diagnostic data. Mapbox declares that it uses this for app functionality and analytics, that none of it is linked to your identity, and that none of it is used for tracking. Mapbox also states it does not record advertising identifiers with location telemetry.
You can opt out of Mapbox telemetry by tapping the ⓘ attribution control on any map in the App and choosing “Mapbox Telemetry.” This collection is Mapbox’s own — we receive none of it, and we cannot see it.
Feedback and bug reports
If you submit feedback, a bug report, or a crash report from inside the App, that submission is sent to a server we operate on Cloudflare, which files it as an issue in Linear, the issue tracker we use to work through problems. This happens only when you choose to send a report. Nothing is sent in the background.
A submission can include:
- What you type — a subject and description
- An email address, only if you enter one so we can reply
- Your device model, iOS version, and the App’s version and settings
- A screenshot of the App at the time, if you attach one — which may show a catch photo if one was on screen
- Recent app diagnostic logs and a record of the screens you visited before the problem
- Counts of how many catches, trips, and spots your database holds — counts only, not the entries themselves
- For a crash report, technical crash details collected by iOS
A report does not include your fishing log, your saved locations, or your photo library. We use a report only to diagnose and fix the problem and to reply to you, and we do not reuse it for any other purpose.
Giving us your email address is optional. No feature of the App depends on it, and nothing works differently if you leave it blank — the only difference is whether we can write back. If you would rather send nothing from inside the App at all, you can describe the problem by email instead.
What we do not do
- We do not sell or rent your personal information, and we never have
- We do not use advertising, ad networks, or ad identifiers, and the App contains no ads
- We do not track you across other apps or websites, and the App never asks to
- We include no third-party analytics, attribution, or crash-reporting SDK — there is no Google Analytics, Firebase, Facebook SDK, or equivalent in the App
- We do not share your fishing spots or catches with other users or with third parties
- We do not access your health data, contacts, calendar, microphone, or motion sensors — the App does not use those frameworks at all
- We do not build advertising or marketing profiles about you
How long information is kept
Your log stays on your device until you delete it, and in your iCloud account until you delete it there. The App’s local usage counters are pruned automatically after 90 days.
Feedback and crash reports are deleted after 12 months. A scheduled job runs every day and deletes any report older than that, along with any email address you gave us. Deletion is automatic — you do not have to ask. Our issue tracker holds deleted items in a recycle bin for up to 30 days before purging them, so the longest a report can exist is about 13 months.
If you attached a screenshot, we delete the report it belongs to on that same schedule. We cannot yet promise how long our issue tracker keeps the uploaded image file itself, so we are not making a claim we have not verified. If you would rather not leave one at all, submit a report without a screenshot, or email us instead.
If you want a report deleted sooner than that, email us and we will remove it.
Your choices
- Grant or revoke location and photo permissions at any time in iOS Settings → Creel
- Turn off background location, or leave auto-start switched off
- Turn iCloud sync off in the App’s settings
- Delete any individual catch, spot, or trip inside the App
- Export your full log to a file you control, at any time, from the App’s backup screen
- Delete the App to remove all of its local data from your device
- Opt out of Mapbox telemetry from the map’s attribution control
Because we hold no account for you, there is no server-side profile for us to delete. If you have sent us a feedback report and want it removed, email us and we will delete it.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or export personal information, and to object to certain processing. Most of these you can exercise directly: your data is on your device, you can read it, change it, export it, and delete it without asking us. For anything you cannot do yourself — such as a feedback report you sent — contact us at the address below and we will act on your request. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.
Children’s privacy
The App is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information through a feedback report, contact us and we will delete it.
International users
Creel Outdoors LLC is based in the United States. Your fishing log stays on your device and in your own iCloud account. If you send us a feedback report, that report is processed in the United States.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the App changes. Material changes will be reflected by the “Last updated” date above, and we will describe significant changes on this page.
Contact
Creel Outdoors LLC
inquiries@creel.fish