The Field Guide has no account, so there is almost nothing to collect. No name, no email, no sign-in, no advertising, no tracking, nothing sold or shared with anybody. It does count which screens get opened and it does report when it falls over, and there is a switch in Settings that turns that off. What follows is the whole of it.
What stays on your phone
- Your location, if you allow it. It sorts the directory by what is nearest, it works out whether you are planning a trip or already on the road, and it tells you how far you are from the stretch of canyon with no signal. It is never sent anywhere.
- Places you save, and your trip list. In a file on the device.
- Whether your subscription is current. A date, kept on the phone, so the guide keeps working in the canyon where the App Store cannot be reached.
The map is inside the app rather than on a server, so panning around does not tell anyone where you were looking. That is not a promise, it is how it is built, and there is a test that fails the build if the map ever tries to reach the network.
What the app sends about itself
One thing, and you can turn it off in Settings under “Helping fix it”. It is on when you install the app.
We make this on a phone in Montana and you are reading it on a phone we have never seen. What comes back is what tells us the guide is broken on your one:
- Which screens get opened, and for how long. Screen names, not what is on them. Which place you looked at is recorded as its kind and its village, never its name.
- Your phone’s model, as
iPhone17,1rather than a marketing name, along with how much memory it has and which version of iOS. - How fast the drawn valley runs on your phone. Frames a second, the worst single frame, and how long the drawing took to load. It is the heaviest screen in the guide and the one most likely to be slow on a phone we have not tried.
- A crash, or an error the app caught, with the stack trace and a short name for what went wrong.
No location goes with any of it. Not a coordinate, not a city, not a country. The measurement kit has a location feature and it is switched off in the code.
The id is a random number the app made up the first time you opened it. It is not your phone’s identifier, not your Apple Account, not the advertising id, and it is not shared with any other app. Delete the guide and it is gone; install it again and you are a new number.
This goes to a server we run ourselves, at stats.pantuso.com. It is not a service anybody else has access to and there is no third party in the path.
Turn it off and nothing is sent at all: no screen names, no session, not even a crash.
What gets sent, and only when you send it
Three things, all optional, all started by you.
- A correction to a listing. Which place, what kind of correction, and whatever you type in the note.
- A wildlife sighting. Which stretch of road, which animal, and the day. No location. The database has no column for one, so there is nowhere to put it even by accident.
- Your hours, if you run a business here. The place, the hours, and an email address if you want us to be able to write back.
None of it carries your name, your email, a device identifier, or an account, because there is no account.
What the web server records
Like every web server, ours writes an ordinary access log: the IP address, the time, what was asked for, and which app or browser asked. It is kept for 90 days and then deleted. It keeps the service running and it does nothing else.
Buying the guide
The App Store handles the purchase. We never see your card, your name, or your address. What the app is told is whether this Apple Account has an active subscription, which is all it needs to know. Apple's own policy covers what Apple collects: apple.com/legal/privacy.
What we do not do
No advertising. No third-party trackers. No advertising id and no cross-app profile. Nothing is sold, rented, or shared with anybody. There is no data broker in here and there is not going to be one. Nothing we collect is joined to you, because there is nothing to join it to.
Children
The guide is not directed at children, and it collects nothing that would identify anybody of any age.
Asking us to delete something
If you sent a correction or a sighting and want it gone, write to hello@bigskyfieldguide.com and say what it was. Nothing is tied to you, so you will have to tell us enough to find it.
For the screen counts and crash reports, the switch in Settings is the answer: turn it off and the guide stops sending. What has already gone is not attached to anything that could find you again, which cuts both ways.
Getting in touch
Anything at all, including the two things above: hello@bigskyfieldguide.com. A person reads it.
Changes
If this changes, the date changes with it.
Last updated 23 August 2026.