Stinger Privacy Policy

What Stinger records

• Voice recordings. The audio you speak to Stinger is recorded and transcribed to build your inspection records and answer your questions.
• Location. Your precise location tags your spoken observations to the right apiary and hive. Location is used only while you are using the app — while Apiary Mode is running, including with the screen locked in your pocket. Stinger does not request background location.
• Photos. Photos you choose to take of colonies, frames, and blooming plants. Photos are only captured when you take them.
• Account details. Your sign-in identity — your name, email address, and phone number if you provide one. Your name is shown to your crew in your organization. If you choose Sign in with Apple, Apple shares only your name and either your email address or a private relay address that forwards to it (Apple's "Hide My Email").
• Operational diagnostics. Crash reports and device-state telemetry (for example battery, thermal, and audio-engine events) used solely to keep the service reliable. Diagnostics are never used for advertising and are never sold.

That data runs the features you use: transcription, extraction, coaching, and the apiary map. Stinger contains no advertising and no third-party analytics.

How your data is handled

• Your conversation log is yours. Each person sees only their own turns. In an operation with a crew, its owner and managers can see the turns where a crew member asked Stinger to do something (and hear that recording); the rest of what a crew member says is never shown to anyone else.
• Your observations are never sold, licensed, or traded — not to anyone, for any reason. We do not sell or share your personal information.
• If Stinger ever publishes anything from this data, it is a statistical result fitted across many beekeepers at once — a model, not a list of records.
• Published results are never tied to you, your name, your account, or your apiaries.
• A published result describes a wide area, never a point. Your exact location is used inside Stinger to work out which area a record belongs to, and is never itself published.
• An area is only published once enough observations support it, and never when most of them came from one beekeeper. A result that would really describe one person's apiary is not published at all.
• Nothing leaves Stinger today. If Stinger ever lets you send your records to open scientific databases, that is your choice to make, off by default.

Who processes it

Stinger runs on Google Cloud. Firebase provides sign-in, storage, and messaging; Cloud Run hosts our servers; and Vertex AI (Google's Gemini models) transcribes and interprets your recordings, while Google Cloud Speech-to-Text may listen to a recording a second time to check that what is saved matches what you said. These services process your data only on our instructions, as service providers — they are not free to use it for their own purposes. Data is encrypted in transit, and the app itself is never allowed to write records directly: every change passes through our servers and their access checks.

Retention and deletion

You can delete your account from inside the app at any time — the step-by-step guide is at StingerHQ.com/delete-account.html. Deletion starts a 30-day countdown. To cancel, sign back in any time before day 30 and choose Cancel Deletion on the Account screen — signing in alone does not cancel it. On day 30 your sign-in and personal contact details are erased (if you used Sign in with Apple, the deletion also revokes Stinger's access to your Apple ID), and if you are the organization's sole owner, its voice recordings and chat transcripts are erased too.

• Your name stays on an organization's historical records — inspections you logged are the organization's own business records, the way a signature stays in a paper logbook. Your contact details are removed from them.
• If you delete your account, your bloom observations stay so the statistics stay sound — permanently detached from you: what was seen, when, and a rounded area remain, while your identity and the exact coordinates are erased.
• Billing records (amounts and dates) are kept as business records, with your identity de-referenced.

Beta tester sign-ups

If you sign up on our beta page, we collect your name, email, phone type (Android or iPhone), your Google Play email if you give one, your number of colonies, your country and your main language. We use these details only to run the beta: to confirm your email, choose testers, and send your test invite. If we approve you, we pass your email to Apple (TestFlight) or Google (Google Play testing) so they can send the invite to the test app. A sign-up you never confirm is deleted after 7 days; before that we send up to two reminders and one last note. After approval, we may send up to three short setup tips for each stage you have not yet passed (signing in, setting up your first apiary, recording your first inspection). Every one of these emails has an unsubscribe link. We keep a record of which of these emails were sent, and a one-way fingerprint of your address if you unsubscribe or an email bounces, so we never send again. To remove your beta sign-up at any time, use the form at StingerHQ.com/beta.html or email support@StingerHQ.com.

Who Stinger is for

Stinger is intended for people 16 and over. It is not directed to children. A younger beekeeper should use Stinger with a parent or guardian, on the adult's account.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests: support@StingerHQ.com
Saber Corporation, 314 Oakland Avenue, Rock Hill, SC 29730, USA