Wildlife monitoring should not come at the expense of people’s privacy.

Project S.W.A.N. means the Scientific Wildlife Acoustic Network and the website, accounts, forms, listening stations and related services operated under that name. This policy applies when you browse the public website, create an account, submit an enquiry, host or sponsor a node, or interact with a Project S.W.A.N. station.

The project is intended to monitor wildlife activity. It is not intended for surveillance of people or for recording private conversations.

Project S.W.A.N. uses service providers for website hosting, databases, object storage, email delivery, mapping, security and technical support. These providers may process limited information on the project’s behalf.

Some stations may also publish wildlife observations to an external biodiversity or acoustic-monitoring service such as BirdWeather. Only the information required for that service should be shared, and host-site arrangements may differ between stations.

Public pages may load maps, fonts, images or other media from external providers. When a browser requests those resources, the provider may receive technical information such as the visitor’s IP address and browser details.

Personal information is not sold to advertisers. It may be disclosed where required by law, to protect someone from serious harm, or as part of a properly managed organisational change.

Retention depends on what the information is and why it is needed. Wildlife detection records may be retained for long-term comparison and education. Audio is more sensitive and should be minimised, withheld or deleted when it is not needed to support a suitable wildlife record.

Account and enquiry information is kept while the relationship is active and for a reasonable period afterwards for support, security, record-keeping and legal purposes. Technical logs are kept for a limited period unless an incident requires longer investigation.

Records may be anonymised rather than deleted where the remaining information can no longer identify a person and still has scientific or statistical value.

Public station pages, bird profiles and learning resources are intended to be usable without a child creating an account. School and classroom access should be managed by authorised adults using the school’s safeguarding and data-protection procedures.

Node placement at schools and youth settings must be agreed with the host organisation and assessed for privacy, safeguarding, signage, physical safety and appropriate public location information.