Operator: HydroComplete LLC. Effective November 14, 2026
With your explicit consent through Ring's account linking, Feeder Log receives Ring's motion alerts for the cameras you share. It stores each camera's name. At linking you give us your email address and ZIP code. We use these for one purpose: to tell you which birds visit your feeder or yard, and to keep your own log and life list of them.
Ring motion alerts that Ring itself labels as a person, a vehicle or a package delivery are ignored: nothing is downloaded or analysed for them. Feeder Log looks only at other motion alerts, the kind a bird or animal sets off.
In short: for a motion alert that is not a person, vehicle or package, Feeder Log downloads about 10 seconds of Ring video, finds the small moving spot on our own server, and sends two close-up pictures of that spot plus one small picture of the whole view to Anthropic's Claude AI to name the bird. The video is deleted within seconds; one picture may be kept as the visit's photo (see below).
Step by step: Feeder Log downloads a recording of about 10 seconds from your Ring account and processes it on our own server. A fixed, rule-based procedure first compares frames to find something small that moved; if nothing moved, or only something large (a person, a car, a swaying branch filling the view), nothing is sent for analysis. Otherwise two close-up crops of the moving spot, taken at two moments, and one reduced picture of the whole frame are sent to an AI vision service (see below). It answers only: which birds it sees, how many, how confident it is, whether a non-bird animal such as a squirrel is there, which close-up shows the bird best, and whether any part of a person is visible (used only to discard the picture). The recording is deleted as soon as that answer arrives, usually within seconds.
Each camera has a daily allowance of 150 checks, and the service as a whole has a daily allowance of 5,000. Past either allowance a motion alert is not analysed, and your dashboard says so.
When you press Test a camera on your dashboard, Feeder Log asks Ring for that camera's most recent picture from the last 10 minutes (one picture, no video) and has it identified the same way, so you can check that a camera works without waiting for a bird. The result is shown only on your dashboard, never sends an alert and never adds to your log or life list. If a bird is seen and no person is detected, the picture is kept for 24 hours so you can see it; otherwise it is deleted at once. One test a minute.
Birds are identified by Anthropic's Claude (model claude-haiku-5-5), a general-purpose AI model, through Anthropic's commercial API. It receives the pictures described above and an instruction to report only birds and animals, never anything about people, plates or addresses; its answer can only take the values listed above. Anthropic processes the pictures on our behalf and does not use data sent through its commercial API to train its models. Feeder Log does not train any model, and your data and photos are never used to train any model, ours or anyone else's.
Identification is automated and will sometimes be wrong, especially for small, distant, blurred or night (infrared) birds and for species that look alike. A doubtful name is shown as "Possibly …", or as a group such as "a sparrow". You can mark any visit right or wrong, or give the right name; your correction replaces the AI's and updates your life list.
Your email identifies your account and is where new-species alerts and, if you turn it on, the evening digest are sent (you can turn email off). Your ZIP code is looked up on our own server to find your time zone, so your day and the digest time match your clock; it is not sent to anyone.
We do not sell, share or disclose your data or photos to any third party for their own purposes. Your dashboard is visible only to you, through your private link. Three sub-processors act on our behalf, all in the United States: Fly.io, Inc. (cloud hosting), which stores data and does not use it for anything else; Anthropic, PBC (AI vision), which receives only the pictures described above; and Resend (email delivery), which receives your email address and the text of each alert.
Deletion is self-service. Delete all my data on your dashboard removes everything above, including every photo and your life list, from the live service at once. Encrypted host snapshots age out within 5 days, and copies held by Anthropic or Resend follow their retention periods described under What we keep. Removing Feeder Log from your Ring app does the same automatically. You may also request deletion, or a copy of your data, by email (below); we respond within 30 days.
Analysis is fully automated. No person ever views your Ring video recordings: they are deleted within seconds of analysis, so they do not exist to be viewed, and we have no tool to fetch your recordings for a person to look at. Your kept photos are shown only to you; the developer's administration page cannot display them.
No person, including the developer, views your account data in routine operation. If you ask for support or for a copy of your data, the developer may look at your text records only (camera names, and the visit, life-list and alert lines described above), and only to answer that request.
Nothing is collected until you complete Ring's account-linking consent. You choose which cameras are watched, can turn new-species alerts, the digest and email off, correct any visit, stop all collection by removing Feeder Log in the Ring app, and remove all stored data with the delete control. There is no advertising, data sale or AI training to opt out of: those uses do not happen.
Feeder Log is for adults aged 18 or over and is not directed at children. It does not collect information about anyone seen on camera.
If we ever change what is read from your recordings or which pictures are kept, we will update this page with a new date and show a notice on your dashboard before the change takes effect.
Access to your Ring account uses Ring's account-linking system; Feeder Log never sees your Ring password. Data travels over HTTPS and is stored on access-controlled, encrypted infrastructure.
Anyone, including people who are not Feeder Log customers, can report a suspected misuse of Feeder Log (for example, a camera pointed at property its owner is not entitled to monitor) as described on our support page.
Questions, data requests or deletion requests: michaelbflynn@gmail.com