Privacy Policy
Compliant with EU data protection and AI regulations
Your data is never sold to third parties
Core app data stored in europe-west1 region
🛡️ What We NEVER Do
- Sell your personal data to any third party, ever
- Share your data with advertisers
- Collect payment card details (handled by App Store / Google Play)
- Collect your precise GPS location
- Use your IP address to determine your country or share it with a third-party geolocation provider
- Access your contacts, microphone, or camera without your explicit action
- Use your data to build advertising profiles
- Process special categories of human personal data (health, biometric, financial)
Who We Are
PetNid is developed and operated by an individual entrepreneur registered in Portugal ("we," "us," or "our"). PetNid is a pet care companion app that helps pet owners organize health calendars, track vaccinations, and manage their pet's care records.
We act as the Data Controller for all personal data processed through the PetNid mobile application ("App").
📧 For all privacy matters: info@petnid.app
What Data We Collect
We collect only the data necessary to provide the App's features.
- Full name
- Email address
- Password (stored in encrypted form, never in plain text)
- Pet name, species, breed, date of birth or approximate age
- Gender and weight
- Pet photo (optional)
- Known medical conditions, allergies, medications (only what you choose to enter)
- Events you create (vaccinations, vet visits, grooming, etc.)
- Dates, notes, and reminders you set
- Completion status of events
- Photos you submit for AI analysis (stored in Cloud Storage in the EU)
- The area of concern you select (Skin, Eyes, Ears, Paws)
- The duration you select (less than 24 hours, 2-7 days, 1+ week)
- Optional description of symptoms you provide (max 200 characters)
- The AI-generated assessment output (confidence score, risk level, summary, recommendations)
AI analysis is optional. If you do not use the AI Health Check feature, no photos are sent for AI processing.
- Device type and operating system version
- App version
- Anonymous usage analytics (screens visited, features used)
- Crash reports and error logs
- Push notification token (for sending reminders)
- Device country or region signals used to suggest your country, such as SIM country, mobile network country, system region/locale, or time zone, depending on your device and operating system
- Country code, detected from your device or selected manually by you, and stored in your account
How We Use Your Data
We use your data exclusively for the following purposes:
- (a) To provide the App's core features — pet profiles, health calendar, reminders, and care history;
- (b) To send you push notifications and reminders you have requested or enabled;
- (c) To authenticate your account and keep it secure;
- (d) To provide the AI Health Check feature — processing photos you submit through Google's Vertex AI (Gemini) to generate preliminary health assessments. AI assessments are informational only and are never a substitute for veterinary care;
- (e) To improve the App — using anonymized, aggregated analytics to understand how features are used and fix issues;
- (f) To improve our AI system (only with your explicit consent) — anonymized photos and analysis results may be used to train future AI models. You can opt out at any time in Settings;
- (g) To communicate with you — responding to support requests, sending important service updates, and (with your consent) product news;
- (h) To comply with legal obligations applicable to us;
- (i) To show you offers, partner content, and information relevant to your country. We suggest your country using device-based country or region signals, such as SIM country, mobile network country, system region/locale, or time zone, depending on your device and operating system. You can review or change the country in the App. We store only the resulting country code in your account.
We do not use your data for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you. AI Health Check outputs are preliminary informational assessments and are explicitly labeled as such — see Section 13 for details on your rights regarding AI processing.
Legal Basis for Processing (GDPR)
We process your personal data on the following legal bases under Article 6 of the GDPR:
- 📋Contract performance (Art. 6(1)(b)): Processing necessary to provide the App and its features as agreed in our Terms of Service. This covers account data, pet profiles, calendar data, and AI Health Check processing when you choose to use it.
- 📋Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)): Push notifications, marketing communications, and use of anonymized data for AI model improvement. You can withdraw consent at any time through Settings — withdrawal is as simple as giving consent (GDPR Art. 7(3)).
- 📋Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)): Anonymized analytics, crash reporting, AI system monitoring and quality assurance, prompt injection detection logs for security purposes, and using your detected or selected country code to show you region-relevant offers and content.
- 📋Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)): Where we are required to process data to comply with applicable law, including retention of AI audit logs under EU AI Act.
Data We Do NOT Collect or Sell
🛡️ Our Commitments
- We do NOT sell your personal data to any third party, ever
- We do NOT share your data with advertisers
- We do NOT collect payment card details (all payments handled by Apple App Store or Google Play Store)
- We do NOT collect your precise GPS location
- We do NOT use your IP address to determine your country or share it with a third-party geolocation provider
- We do NOT access your contacts, microphone, or camera without your explicit action
- We do NOT use your data to build advertising profiles
- We do NOT process special categories of human personal data (health, biometric, financial data about you as a person)
Data Sharing and Third Parties
We use a small number of trusted third-party service providers to operate the App. These providers act as data processors on our behalf and are contractually bound to protect your data.
Purpose: Backend infrastructure — database (Firestore), authentication, file storage (Cloud Storage), and push notifications. All data stored in EU data centers (europe-west region).
View Privacy Policy →Purpose: AI processing via Gemini 1.5 Flash for the AI Health Check feature. Region: europe-west1 (Belgium). Photos and symptom data submitted for AI analysis are processed in the EU and are not used by Google to train their general-purpose models. A Data Processing Agreement is in place.
View DPA →Purpose: Anonymous, aggregated usage analytics and crash reporting. Data is anonymized before processing.
View Privacy Policy →Purpose: App distribution and in-app purchase processing. They handle all payment data independently. We never receive your payment card details.
Purpose: Sending transactional emails (welcome email, password reset). We share only your email address for this purpose.
To suggest your country, the App may check country or region signals available on your device, such as SIM country, mobile network country, system region/locale, or time zone. This happens on your device. We do not use IP geolocation and we do not send your IP address to a third-party geolocation provider. Only the resulting country code is stored in your account, and you can review or change it in the App.
Before any photo is sent to our servers for AI analysis, a lightweight machine learning model runs locally on your device (using TensorFlow Lite on Android or Core ML on iOS) to verify that a pet is present in the photo. This local processing happens entirely on your phone — no data is transmitted for this step. If no pet is detected, you will be asked to retake the photo or confirm sending it anyway.
We may disclose your data if required to do so by law, court order, or governmental authority, or if we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, your safety, or the safety of others.
Data Storage and Security
Your data is stored on Google Cloud servers in the europe-west1 region (Belgium). This applies to:
- Firestore database (account data, pet profiles, calendar, AI diagnoses)
- Cloud Storage (photos submitted for AI analysis)
- Vertex AI processing (Gemini model runs in europe-west1)
- Cloud Functions (AI analysis backend)
Data does not leave the European Union during normal processing. Google LLC provides appropriate safeguards under Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission for any residual administrative access.
- All data transmitted between the App and our servers is encrypted using TLS 1.3
- All data at rest is encrypted (AES-256) by Google Cloud default encryption
- Passwords are hashed and never stored in plain text
- Firebase Security Rules restrict data access — users can only read their own data
- AI diagnoses and photos cannot be written directly by the client — only through authenticated Cloud Functions
- API credentials are stored in Google Cloud Secret Manager, never in client code
- We regularly review access controls and security configurations
For the AI Health Check feature, we implement additional safeguards aligned with the EU AI Act Article 15 (accuracy, robustness and cybersecurity):
- Prompt injection defense — user-provided symptom descriptions are sanitized and isolated before being sent to the AI model, with multiple pattern-based filters
- Refusal protocol — the AI model is instructed to refuse processing and return a zero-confidence response if manipulation is attempted
- Audit logging — all attempts to circumvent AI safeguards are logged for security review
- No automated decisions — AI outputs are presented to you for your consideration; no decisions are executed automatically based on AI output
No system is 100% secure. In the event of a data breach affecting your rights and freedoms, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by GDPR (within 72 hours of becoming aware).
Data Retention
- 📁Account and pet profile data: Retained until you delete your account.
- 📁Health calendar and history data: Retained until you delete your account or manually delete specific records.
- 📁AI Health Check diagnoses (photos + results): Retained until you delete your account or manually delete specific analyses from your history.
- 📁AI system monitoring logs (anonymized): Retained for AI quality monitoring. Contain no personal identifiers (no userId, petId, or photo references).
- 📁Prompt injection attempt logs: Retained for 30 days for security review.
- 📁AI audit logs: Retained for 1 year (alignment with EU AI Act record-keeping best practices).
- 📁Technical logs and crash reports: Retained for up to 90 days, then automatically deleted or anonymized.
- 📁Country code: Stored in your account until you delete your account. It may be initialized from device country or region signals and can be changed by you in the App.
- 📁Anonymized analytics data: May be retained indefinitely as it cannot be linked back to you.
When you delete your account, we will delete or anonymize all your personal data within 30 days, except where we are required to retain certain data by applicable law. Anonymized AI monitoring data, which contains no personal identifiers, is not affected by account deletion.
Your Rights Under GDPR
As a resident of the European Union or European Economic Area, you have the following rights regarding your personal data:
Request a copy of all personal data we hold about you.
Correct inaccurate or incomplete data directly in the App settings.
Request deletion of your personal data ("right to be forgotten").
Request that we restrict processing of your data in certain circumstances.
Request a copy of your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
Object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us:
📧 info@petnid.app — Subject: "Data Privacy Request"
We will respond within 30 days. We may need to verify your identity before processing your request.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Portuguese data protection authority:
Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD)
📞 +351 213 928 400
📍 Av. D. Carlos I, 134 — 1200-651 Lisboa, Portugal
Children's Privacy
PetNid is not directed at children under the age of 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16. If you believe a child under 16 has provided us with personal data, please contact us at info@petnid.app and we will delete such data promptly.
Push Notifications
We send push notifications to remind you of upcoming calendar events and care activities you have scheduled. We will ask for your permission before sending push notifications.
You can disable push notifications at any time through your device's notification settings:
- iOS: Settings → PetNid → Notifications
- Android: Settings → Apps → PetNid → Notifications
Disabling notifications does not affect your account or data — it only means you will not receive reminders on your device.
Cookies and Analytics
The App itself does not use browser cookies. We use Firebase Analytics to collect anonymized, aggregated data about how the App is used (e.g., which screens are visited most, feature usage frequency).
This analytics data:
- Does not identify you personally
- Cannot be linked back to your account
- Is used solely to improve the App's features and performance
You can opt out of analytics data collection by contacting us at info@petnid.app with the subject line "Analytics Opt-Out."
AI Processing & Your AI Rights
When you use the AI Health Check feature, you are interacting with an Artificial Intelligence system. We make this clear throughout the feature:
- A one-time disclaimer is shown before you first use the feature
- Every AI Health Check result displays a persistent disclaimer card that cannot be hidden
- Shared results include a mandatory disclaimer that the content is AI-generated
AI Health Check outputs are preliminary informational assessments only. They are not veterinary diagnoses. Always consult a licensed veterinarian for health concerns about your pet.
We use Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model via Vertex AI (europe-west1). The model receives your photo, pet profile information, and selected context (area, duration, optional description) and returns a structured assessment. The model does not learn from individual user interactions in real time — your data is not used to modify Google's general-purpose models.
During onboarding, we ask whether you wish to help improve PetNid AI by allowing anonymized versions of your photos and analysis results to be used for training future AI models. This is optional.
If you consent:
- Your personal identifiers are removed (name, pet name, userId, petId)
- Any text description you provided is reviewed for personal information before use
- Photos are evaluated to ensure they do not contain identifiable human faces or home interiors
Withdrawing consent is simple: go to Settings → Privacy → toggle off "Help improve PetNid AI". Changes take effect immediately (GDPR Article 7(3)). Withdrawal does not affect past consent-based processing but prevents any future use.
If you disagree with an AI Health Check result or believe the assessment was inaccurate, you can:
- Contact us at info@petnid.app with the subject "AI Output Review"
- Request that the specific analysis be deleted from your records
- Provide feedback to help us improve the system
AI Health Check does not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects on you. The AI provides informational output; any decision about your pet's care remains with you and your veterinarian. Because no significant automated decisions occur, GDPR Article 22 rights to human review are not directly triggered, but we still provide the mechanisms in Section 13.4 above as best practice.
We maintain technical safeguards to ensure the integrity of AI outputs (detailed in Section 7.3 above):
- Prompt injection defense at multiple layers
- Server-side validation of AI responses
- Continuous monitoring of AI output quality
- Audit logs of security events
Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will notify you via in-app notification or email before the changes take effect, and update the "Last Updated" date at the top of this document.
For significant changes that affect your rights — for example, if we begin processing new categories of data or sharing data with new third parties — we will request your explicit consent where required by GDPR.
Contact and Complaints
For any questions, requests, or concerns regarding this Privacy Policy or how we handle your personal data:
Subject: "Privacy Request" or "Data Protection" — We aim to respond within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with:
Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD)
📞 +351 213 928 400
📍 Av. D. Carlos I, 134 — 1200-651 Lisboa, Portugal