The short version
We hold what is needed to reunite an animal with its owner: your contact details, your pet’s record, and photographs of it. A pet’s photographs and basic details are shown to anyone who scans its tag — that is the point of the tag. Uploaded photographs are used to improve our identification software, and you can turn that off. We do not sell personal information.
1. Who is responsible
Kinmarq LLC is the controller of the personal information described here. Contact: admin@kinmarq.com.
Where an organization — a town, a veterinary practice — uses Kinmarq to keep its own register, that organization is a controller of the records it holds, and we process them on its behalf.
2. What we collect
You give us:your name, email, phone, and optionally a postal address; your pet’s name, species, breed, markings, date of birth and neuter status; photographs; vaccination and microchip records; and payment details, which go to Stripe rather than to us.
Comes from use:scans of your pet’s tag, including approximate location when the person scanning shares it; sightings reported by finders; messages sent through the finder feature; and ordinary technical logs kept for security and diagnosis.
From others: a vet, shelter or town may add records to an animal you own, and a finder may report a sighting. The record shows who added what.
3. What is public
Scanning a pet’s tag opens a page showing the pet’s name, description, and photographs, plus a way to contact you. That is what the tag is for. Anyone holding the tag, or the link, can see it.
You control how much contact detail appears. Your postal address is not shown unless you choose to show it.
Marking a pet as lost widens this deliberately: the record may be shown to nearby users and to local organizations so people can look out for it.
4. Photographs and identification software
We are building the ability to identify an animal from a photograph, so a pet found without a tag can still be returned. That requires learning from real photographs of real animals.
Photographs uploaded to Kinmarq are used to develop and improve our animal-identification models. This is on by default.
What we use: the photographs, and the fact that several of them show the same animal. That pairing is what the software learns from.
What we do not use: your name, address, contact details, or anything that identifies you rather than the animal. We do not sell photographs and do not publish them beyond section 3.
Your choice: you can turn this off at any time in your account settings. It applies to photographs you have already uploaded as well as future ones. It cannot reverse what a model has already learned, because a trained model does not keep the pictures it learned from — an honest description of a real limit rather than a loophole.
5. Who we share it with
- Whoever scans a tag — as described in section 3.
- Organizations you have registered your pet with, limited to that relationship.
- Service providers who run parts of the service for us: Stripe for payments, and our hosting and email providers. They may use it only to provide those services.
- Authorities, where the law requires it.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
6. How long we keep it
- Pet records and photographs: deleted when you delete the pet or your account.
- The event log: kept. Kinmarq records that things happened — a scan, a transfer, a licence issued — and those entries remain after the record they refer to is gone. This is what makes the register trustworthy, and it is stated plainly rather than buried.
- Payment and tax records: as long as the law requires.
7. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, export, or restrict use of your information, and to object to processing. Most of this is available directly in your account; anything else you can ask us for at admin@kinmarq.com.
You will never be charged more or given a worse service for exercising a right.
8. Children
Kinmarq is not for children under 16. We do not knowingly collect their information; tell us if you believe we have.
9. Security
Access is restricted, traffic is encrypted in transit, and payment details never reach our servers. No service is perfectly secure, and we will tell you and the relevant authority about a breach affecting you as the law requires.