Catopia: Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 23, 2026. Published by Kévin Psalmon ("we", "us"). Full publisher details below.

This policy explains what data Catopia ("the app") collects, how we use it, and your choices, including how to delete your data.

Publisher

Kévin Psalmon, sole trader (entrepreneur individuel)
3 rue des 7 Dormants, 45000 Orléans, France
SIREN 522685478
Contact and publication director: contact@catopia.app

Hosting. This site is hosted by Vercel Inc., 440 N Barranca Avenue #4133, Covina, CA 91723, United States. The game's backend is hosted by Convex (United States).

1. Data we collect

• Account data. When you sign up (email/password, Sign in with Apple, or Sign in with Google), our authentication provider Clerk processes your email address and a user identifier. Sign in with Apple may relay a private, Apple-generated email.
• Gameplay data (metadata only). When you catch a cat, we store the keepsake metadata (a generated name, breed guess, rarity, timestamp, and the public place the cat was placed at, never the spot you were actually standing on) in our backend Convex, associated with your account, so features like the map and leaderboards work.
• Location. With your permission, we use your location for two separate things.
  
  (1) On your device. Your precise position centres the map and picks the nearby public place that your shared cats are placed at (see below). That precise position stays on your phone. It is not uploaded and it is not stored by us.
  
  (2) A coarse area, sent to us. So the game can tell you when cats appear near you, your phone sends a rounded area a few kilometres across, enough to know roughly which town you are in, never which street or which building. We keep only the latest one: every update overwrites the previous, so there is no history of where you have been. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and never shown to other players. You can switch the nearby-cat alerts off in the app's Settings, which deletes it. You can also deny or revoke location access in iOS Settings.
• Photos and images. The photos you take are processed on-device, and the full photo, with its background, never leaves your device. Only limited image data leaves it, in these cases:
  
  (1) Cat identification (automatic). A model that runs entirely on your phone identifies the cat first. When that model cannot decide with enough confidence, and only then, a cut-out of the cat (the cat alone, on a plain grey background, with no scene, no faces and no location) is sent to Google (Gemini) through our backend to identify its breed or coat. The image is used for that single answer and is not used to train Google's models. Nothing about where you are is attached to it.
  
  (2) Community map. When you catch a (non-legendary) cat, a cut-out of the cat is shared together with a public place near you (a park, a shop, a bus stop, chosen automatically on your device) and never your real location, at most once per hour, to our backend Convex. It is shown to other players in your country for 6 hours, then it stops being served. This is part of how the game works.
  
  Aside from these, your images are not uploaded.
• Crash reports. With your consent (the box you tick when you sign up), we collect anonymous crash and error reports to fix bugs. We do not collect usage analytics.
• Purchases. Subscriptions and in-app purchases are processed by Apple. We receive purchase status (active / expired), not your payment details.

2. How we use data

To provide and secure your account, run gameplay features (album, map, leaderboards, training, cosmetics), let you know when cats appear in your area, process purchases, prevent abuse, fix crashes, and comply with the law. We collect nothing beyond what those features need to work. We do not sell your personal data, we never use the data described above to target advertising, and we collect no sensitive data (no health data, no financial details, no contacts, no browsing history).

2b. Advertising

The free version of Catopia shows advertising: a full-screen ad from time to time between rounds of play, and optional videos you may choose to watch in exchange for a larger in-game reward. Catopia Pro members see no full-screen ads.

Those ads are served by Unity LevelPlay (ironSource) and the advertising networks it mediates. Three things about them:

• The ads are contextual, not personalised. Catopia never asks for permission to track you, never reads your device's advertising identifier (IDFA), and does not build or buy a profile of you. Which ad you see is not chosen from anything we know about you.
• None of the data described in section 1 is passed to advertisers. Your photos, your cats, your location area, your email and your account are not shared with them, ever.
• The ad provider does receive technical information that any app must send to fetch and display an ad, and to count it: device model and operating system, language and country, and whether an ad was shown, watched or closed. It is used to deliver and measure that ad, not to identify you across other apps or websites.

If you would rather see no full-screen advertising at all, Catopia Pro removes it.

3. Sharing

We share data only with service providers that run the app on our behalf: Clerk (authentication), Convex (backend and database, hosted in the United States), Google (Gemini, cat identification when the on-device model cannot decide; images are sent only as described above and are not used to train its models), Apple (purchases, sign-in), Sentry (crash reports) and, in the free version only, Unity LevelPlay (ironSource) and the ad networks it mediates, for the advertising described in section 2b. Each processes data under its own terms.

4. Retention and deletion

We keep account and gameplay metadata for as long as your account is active. If you do not sign in for 12 consecutive months, we treat the account as abandoned and delete it, along with its gameplay data. We email you 30 days before that happens, at the address on your account: opening the app and signing in is enough to keep everything.

Two things expire much sooner, whatever happens to your account: a cat shared on the community map stops being served after 6 hours, and the cut-out image behind it is deleted from our backend within 7 days.

Your coarse area is not kept as a log. We store a single current value on your account and each update replaces it, so at any moment we hold one approximate area and nothing that came before it. It is deleted with your account.

You can delete your account and all associated data at any time from inside the app: Profile → Settings → Delete account. Deletion is immediate and permanent: your account row, your caught cats, your shared map pins, your leaderboard entries and your friendships are removed from our systems. You may also email contact@catopia.app to request deletion.

5. Your rights

Depending on your region (e.g. GDPR / CCPA), you may request access, correction, deletion, or portability of your data, and withdraw consent. Contact contact@catopia.app.

6. Children

Catopia is not directed to children under 13 (or the minimum age in your country). We do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has provided data, contact us and we will delete it.

7. Changes

We may update this policy; the "Last updated" date reflects the latest version. Material changes will be surfaced in the app.