Privacy Policy

Paul Niederle, Vienna, Austria
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +43 720 699 0677

The complete Vienna tree register is bundled with the app. Your favourites, your herbarium, collector cards, achievements and personal statistics (trees and species discovered, distance walked) are stored only on your device. They are not transferred to us and are deleted when you delete the app.

With your permission, the app uses your location to show your position on the map, find trees near you, guide you on Explorer tours and check whether you are close to a target tree in a rally. Your location is processed on the device and is not sent to us.

When you report a community tree, the coordinates of that tree and the GPS accuracy are transmitted and published as part of the entry. When you collect a tree in a rally, the coordinates of the collected tree (not your own position) are stored with the rally.

Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), which you can withdraw at any time in the iOS settings.

When you scan a leaf, the photo is sent encrypted to our own recognition server (leaf.treesinvienna.eu). It is processed in memory only to identify the species and is not stored. Each request is protected with Apple App Attest, which confirms that it comes from a genuine copy of the app; no personal data is involved in this check.

Legal basis: performance of the service you requested (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

An account is only required to report or flag community trees and to upload tree photos. You can sign in with Apple, GitHub or an email address. We store your user ID, your email address and, if provided, your name. The account service runs on our own server (login.treesinvienna.eu).

Legal basis: performance of the user relationship (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

Reported trees are public. An entry contains the species, the tree’s location, district and street, optional height and trunk circumference, and the display name of the person who reported it. Reports about incorrect entries are stored with the reporting user ID.

Tree photos you upload are reviewed before they become visible to everyone. The app first requests a short-lived upload link from our server (api.treesinvienna.eu), which checks that you are signed in; the photo is then stored in Cloudflare R2 and linked to your user ID.

Legal basis: performance of the user relationship (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

Rallies work without an account. To assign your progress, the app uses a device identifier provided by iOS (identifier for vendor), which is not linked to your Apple ID and changes if you reinstall the app. We store the rally you created or joined, the display name you enter (for example “Team 1”), the trees you collected and the time of collection. We recommend using pseudonyms rather than real names.

Legal basis: performance of the service you requested (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

The app loads content from the following services when needed:

• Apple Maps (Apple Inc.) for the map image.
• Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation) for species descriptions and images. Only the species name is sent.
• iNaturalist for species photos in the leaf scanner. Only the species name is sent.
• Supabase as the database for community trees, photo records and rallies.
• Cloudflare for storing tree photos (R2) and as a network provider for our servers.

When the app contacts any of these services, your IP address is necessarily transmitted. We do not pass on data for advertising purposes.

• Local data: until you delete the app.
• Leaf scanner images: not stored.
• Account, community trees and photos: until you ask us to delete them.
• Rally data: as long as the rally is needed, at most twelve months.

Under the GDPR you have the right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection, and you may withdraw consent at any time. There is currently no in-app option to delete an account; to delete your account and associated entries, email [email protected]. We respond within 30 days.

You may also lodge a complaint with the Austrian Data Protection Authority (Datenschutzbehörde), Barichgasse 40–42, 1030 Vienna, dsb.gv.at.

The app is suitable for all ages and is used in schools. For users under 16, the required consent must be given by a parent or guardian or organised by the school. Rallies do not require an account, and we recommend pseudonyms instead of real names.

We update this policy when the app or the law changes. The current version is always available at treesinvienna.eu/en/privacy.