Privacy notice

1. Who we are

MyWolfdog (mywolfdog.com) is the data controller for the personal data processed through this website (the “site”). You can contact us about how data is handled at data@mywolfdog.com, and send any request about your own data to privacy@mywolfdog.com.

This notice explains what personal data we hold, where it comes from, why, how long we keep it, who else handles it, and the rights you have over it under UK data protection law (the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018).

2. The dog records, and people who never signed up

Most of what the site holds is about dogs: more than 74,000 of them, with their parents, litters, health test results and kennels. These records come from two community pedigree archives and one official studbook, each used with its operator’s permission, and from what visitors and members add.

We deliberately do not take personal data about the people connected with those dogs. We do not collect owners’ names, postal addresses, towns or postcodes, telephone numbers, email addresses or breeders’ contact details from the archives, and where an archive had written an owner’s name into a dog’s name, we remove it. We keep kennel names, because a kennel name is a business name, and a kennel’s country.

A kennel name can still point to a person, and a dog’s record can say something about its owner. If a record is about your dog or your kennel, you can have it corrected or removed without an account and without giving a reason, using Correct or remove a record. A removal takes the record off the site the moment you send it, before anyone has read your request. We will also tell you, on request, which archive a record came from. Because none of this data is contact data, we cannot tell each person individually that their dog is listed, and doing so would be disproportionate (UK GDPR Article 14(5)(b)); this notice, and that route on every page, is how we tell you instead.

3. Data we collect

If you add to the record (a dog, a litter, a parent, a littermate): your name, your email address and what you add. Your name is shown publicly on the dog’s page beside what you added; a first name is enough. Your email address is never shown to anyone.

If you ask about a record (to correct, remove, see or object to it): your email address, your name if you give it, the dog concerned and what you tell us. None of it is published. If you ask to be told when your country is covered, we keep the email address you give for that. Once the site’s email sending is switched on, it emails a receipt to the address you give, with a reference, and at most three receipts go to one address in a day; either way, we reply there.

If you create an account:

• Your display name and handle, and, only if you add them, a bio, a town (never an address) and a profile picture. You choose who sees each of these; everything starts private.
• Your passkeys: the public half of each key, which cannot be used to sign in anywhere else, and a name you may give it. The private half stays on your device or in your passkey manager and never reaches us. We do not ask for an email address or a password.
• Your recovery codes, stored only as one-way hashes, and when each was used.
• Your sessions: a one-way hash of each session, a coarse label such as “Safari on iPhone” (the full browser string is never kept) and when it was created, last used and expires.
• The version of these terms you agreed to, which includes confirming you are 16 or over.
• What you do as a member: the dogs you say are yours and how (owner, co-owner or breeder), with any story and town you add; your photos and captions; friend requests and friendships; blocks; messages and group chats, with any reactions, edits, photos and what you have seen; groups, posts and walks, including the town a walk meets in and how many dogs you are bringing; your posts, comments, reactions and shares, and posts you save or hide and people you snooze; the dogs you tag in posts and the friendships you ask or accept for your dogs; classes and packs you run or say yes to for your dogs, with their sessions, and the notes and photos you add to them; how you say you know wolfdogs, if you do; when you closed the welcome on your home page and saw its tour, so neither comes back; corrections you propose and votes you cast; and reports you make.
• If you turn on notifications for a device: the address your browser gives for them and its keys, which are useless to anyone but this site, and what you want pushed and your quiet hours. What a push says is encrypted to your browser before it leaves us. Turning it off on the device, or signing out, deletes it.
• Whether you share that you have seen messages or are typing, and whether you are active. Being active is held in memory for at most an hour and never written to the database, a log or a backup; typing is held for seconds.

Photos are redrawn and saved as new files when you upload them. Nothing from the original file survives: no location, no camera details, no date and no embedded thumbnail. We keep a full-size version and a small one, and never the original.

Health certificates you upload are redrawn like photos and seen only by you and the site’s moderators, who check the result against them. Other members see only the verified result, never the certificate, since certificates carry owners’ names and addresses.

Videos are kept as you upload them, except that every part of the file that can say where or on what device it was filmed is blanked before it is stored: the location, the device details, any embedded description, and any separate track of GPS or sensor readings. The picture and sound are not changed.

Your IP address is used to limit how often one address can sign in, join, recover an account or use the open forms. It is held in memory only, for at most 24 hours, and is never written to the database, a log or a backup.

4. Cookies and similar technologies

__Host-wd_session is set only when you sign in. It keeps you signed in, lasts up to 30 days, cannot be read by scripts on the page and is sent only to this site. It is essential, so UK law (PECR) allows it without asking.

wd_consent remembers your answer to the question about use tracking, so you are not asked on every page. It lasts about six months, after which you are asked again. Remembering a choice you made is essential, so it needs no consent of its own.

Use tracking (section 5) runs only if you allow it. If you do, WebRec’s script keeps an anonymous identifier and the current session’s identifier in your browser’s storage (names beginning wr_). Saying no, or changing your answer to no, removes them.

There are no advertising or social-media cookies. The site’s typeface is served by the site itself, so reading a page does not send your browser to a font service.

5. Use tracking

If you allow it, the site tracks how its pages are used: which pages you open, where you click and scroll, and any errors the page runs into, so we can find what is confusing or broken and fix it. We ask first, and the site works exactly the same if you say no.

WebRec does this by capturing a replay of each visit: the layout of each page, with its text hidden, and the clicks and scrolling on it.

Use tracking is limited, by settings in the site’s own code that cannot be changed from outside it:

• Everything you type, and all the text on the page, is hidden. What is kept shows the shape of a page and what was clicked, not what you read or wrote.
• Photos, videos and open chats are left out entirely.
• Nothing is tracked on these pages: /account, /admin, /data-requests, /developer, /friends, /join, /messages, /moderation, /saved, /sign-in, /support/cases. Tracking pauses when you open one and resumes when you leave.
• The content of requests between your browser and the site, and the browser’s console, are never tracked.
• We do not tell WebRec who you are: nothing it keeps is linked to your account, name or email address.
• If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, nothing is tracked, even if you said yes.

What is kept does include the address of each page you visit, which can name a dog or a member’s handle, your approximate screen size and browser, and the time. WebRec sees your IP address when your browser sends it the data.

You can change your answer at any time from Cookie choices at the foot of every page, or in section 4. Saying no stops tracking at once. To have what was already kept deleted, write to privacy@mywolfdog.com.

6. How we use your data

• To publish and maintain the pedigree and health record, and to credit what visitors add.
• To run accounts, sign-in, profiles, friendships, messages, groups, walks and photos.
• To let the people close to a dog settle corrections to its record, and to let a dog’s owner change it directly.
• To answer requests about records, including removing and correcting them.
• To prevent abuse: rate limits, reports, blocking, and moderation.
• If you allow it, to track how the site is used and find what is broken (section 5).
• To contact you about something you added or asked, and for nothing else. We send no newsletters or marketing.

7. Who can see what

Everything the site holds is for members: the dog records, family trees, kennels, guidance and community all need a free account. Only the front page, joining and signing in, this notice, the terms and the form for correcting or removing a record are open to everyone, and none of them shows anything from the records. Correcting or removing a record never needs an account; without one, that form finds a dog only by its full name.

Each thing you share has its own setting: everyone, anyone signed in, your friends, or only you. Because the site itself is for members, “everyone” means everyone with an account. Your profile, your town and the dogs you say are yours start private; photos start visible to friends. Your profile’s setting is also the outer limit for everything on it. Blocking someone hides each of you from the other.

• Messages are visible only to the people in the chat, unless one of you reports a message; a moderator then sees that message to decide on the report. Somebody added to a group chat sees what is said from then on, not before. Photos sent in a chat are seen only by the people in it.
• A post is seen by the audience you choose for it, friends unless you choose otherwise, and its photos follow it. A share is never seen more widely than the post it shares. Reactions and comments are seen by whoever can see the post. What you save or hide, and whom you snooze, is seen only by you.
• A dog’s friends are other dogs, made friends by their people, and any member can see them; a friendship between dogs names no person. Anybody can tag a dog in a post. A tag by one of the dog’s owners, by a friend of theirs, or by whoever runs a class or pack the dog is in, shows the post on the dog’s profile at once; anybody else’s waits for an owner to say yes. The dog’s owners, or whoever wrote the post, can take a tag off, and the post is still seen only by its own audience.
• A class or pack is seen only by whoever runs it and the people of the dogs in it. A dog joins only when one of its owners says yes, unless it is the leader’s own or nobody on the site has said it is theirs. Its people choose whether the others in the class see their name beside it. Photos on a session are seen by everybody in the class; a note is seen by everybody in it, or, if it is about one dog, only by that dog’s people and whoever runs it. Which dogs yours has met there is seen only by you and its other people. If whoever runs it leaves the site, the class stays for the others, and their own notes and photos go with them.
• On this day shows you your own posts, posts your dogs were tagged in, and sessions your dogs were at, from the same date in earlier years. It is worked out when you look, is seen only by you, and nothing is posted for you.
• How you say you know wolfdogs (living with them, remembering one, or simply loving them) is seen by whoever can see your profile. A dog who has died keeps its profile and its friends; its birthday is shown only to its own people, as a day to remember.
• Your friends list is seen only by you and your friends. People you may know are suggested only from members who have opened their profile to members, with the reason given; nobody is told they were suggested.
• What you follow is visible only to you, and who follows you is visible only to you. Only people who can see your profile can follow you.
• Your notifications are visible only to you. They are shown on the site, pushed to a device only if you turn that on, and never emailed; ones you have read are deleted after 90 days.
• On a dog’s corrections page, a proposer or voter is named only to people who may see their profile; everyone else sees “a member”.
• A walk’s organiser is shown to anyone who can see the walk. Who is going is shown only to signed-in members who can see it.
• Moderators can see a member’s account to act on a report, whatever its settings. Every moderation action is logged.
• The site’s administrators can see requests about records, with the email address given, so they can answer them, and the name and email given with anything added to the record.

8. Who we share data with

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Cloudflare runs the site for us: its network, the servers the site runs on, and the private storage that holds member data backups and photos. Cloudflare sees the IP address of every request to the site. It acts as our processor.

WebRec, run by Rouic Ltd (England and Wales), tracks how the site is used for readers who allow it (section 5). It acts as our processor and, by its own account, stores what it keeps on its own servers in the UK. We do not switch on its optional AI summaries, which would send that data to OpenAI in the US.

Your passkey manager (for example Apple, Google, Microsoft or a password manager) holds the private half of your passkey. That is between you and them; we never receive it.

Your browser’s push service (Google for Chrome and Edge on Android, Apple for Safari, Mozilla for Firefox, Microsoft for Edge on Windows) carries a notification to your device if you turn notifications on. It sees that a message is going to your browser and when; what the message says is encrypted to your browser before it leaves us, so the push service cannot read it. You choose this by turning notifications on, and turning them off ends it.

Our email provider, once the site’s email sending is switched on, delivers the receipt for a request about a record: it sees the address and the receipt. It will act as our processor, and we will name it here before it sends anything.

We may disclose data where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect someone’s safety.

9. Lawful basis for processing

• Running your account and the features you use: performance of our contract with you (Article 6(1)(b)).
• Publishing the pedigree and health record, including kennel names, and crediting contributors by name: our legitimate interests, and the breed community’s, in an accurate, open record of pedigree and health, balanced by collecting no contact data about owners or breeders and by removal on request, at once (Article 6(1)(f)).
• Rate limits, reports, blocking, moderation and the moderation log: our legitimate interests in keeping the site safe and usable (Article 6(1)(f)).
• Answering requests about your data, and keeping a record that we did: our legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)).
• Enforcing the minimum age: our legal obligation and legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(c) and (f)).
• Use tracking: your consent (Article 6(1)(a), and regulation 6 of PECR for what it stores in your browser). You can withdraw it at any time, as easily as you gave it.

10. How long we keep it

• Your account is kept until you delete it. You can do that yourself at any time from Your data, and it takes effect at once.
• Deleting your account removes your profile, passkeys, recovery codes, sessions, photos (including the stored files), dog claims, friendships, blocks, votes, open proposals, group posts and memberships, and walks you organised with their replies. Every conversation you were part of is deleted for both people. Things that have to keep working without you are kept with your name removed: corrections that were already settled, reports you made, and groups you started, which pass to another member or close if nobody is left.
• Backups: a copy of member data is saved after changes, and a dated copy at most every ten minutes. Dated copies are deleted automatically after 90 days, so anything deleted from the site is gone from every backup within 90 days.
• Sessions last 30 days and are deleted at the next sign-in by anyone after they expire, or straight away when you sign out.
• IP addresses are held in memory for at most 24 hours, and are lost sooner whenever the site restarts.
• Messages are kept until either person in the conversation deletes their account. There is no automatic expiry.
• What you add to the record is kept, with the name and email you gave, for as long as the record it belongs to. Ask us and we will remove your details.
• Requests about records, and the holds and removals they led to, are kept as the record that each request was handled. A removed dog’s name and date of birth are kept so it is not re-imported from an archive.
• Use tracking data is deleted automatically by WebRec at the end of our plan’s retention period, and none is kept for more than 90 days.
• Reports and the moderation log are kept for accountability, with no fixed end.

11. Your rights

You have the right to see the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to receive it in a portable form, to object to or restrict how it is used, and to withdraw consent where we rely on it.

• Members can download everything their account holds as a file, and delete the account, from Your data.
• Anyone can correct or remove a dog’s record from Correct or remove a record, without an account.
• For anything else, including what you added to the record, write to privacy@mywolfdog.com. We answer within one month, as the law requires.

We make no decisions about you based solely on automated processing. Rate limits pause a burst of requests for a while; they do not decide anything about you.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk). We would like the chance to put it right first.

12. Minimum age

Accounts are for people aged 16 or over, and joining asks you to confirm that. We do not ask for a date of birth. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will close it and delete its data. The public pages (the front page, this notice, the terms and the form for correcting or removing a record) need no account and collect nothing about you beyond what is described above.

13. Security

Accounts use passkeys, so there are no passwords to steal. Sessions and recovery codes are stored only as one-way hashes. Every connection uses HTTPS. Backups and photos are held in private storage that is not reachable from the internet, and a photo is served only to people its owner chose. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach put your data at risk, we would say so on the site and report it to the ICO as the law requires.

14. International transfers

Cloudflare is a US company with servers worldwide, so your data may be processed outside the UK. Where it is, we rely on the safeguards UK law requires, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to Cloudflare’s standard contractual clauses. The push services browsers use are run by US companies too; what passes through them is encrypted so that they cannot read it. WebRec states that the use tracking data it keeps stays in the UK.

15. Changes to this notice

When this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change is material, we will tell members on the site. Each member’s account records the version they agreed to when they joined.

16. Contact us

Questions about this notice: data@mywolfdog.com. Requests about your own data: privacy@mywolfdog.com.