Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 19, 2026

FixFishTank ("we", "us", "our") runs fixfishtank.ai. This policy explains what we collect when you use the chat assistant, your tank notes, the community pages, and our guides, and what we do with it. It is written to be read, not skimmed past.

1. What We Collect

• Account data: your username, a one-way hash of your password (never the password itself), an email address if you choose to add and verify one, whether you signed up with a password or with Google, and the dates your account was created and last used.
• Tank profile: what you tell us about your setup — tank size, water type, inhabitants, equipment, and how long it has been running.
• Conversations: your messages, the assistant's replies, test readings you type in, and photos you attach.
• Saved work: the notes, shortlist, and cart the Service builds for you.
• Feedback: what you send us through the feedback tool or by email, together with your account id so we can reply.
• Technical data: IP address, request time, browser and device type, and the visitor cookie described in Section 8 — used to keep the Service running, enforce rate limits, and stop abuse.

2. What We Do Not Collect

We do not take payments, so we never see card or bank details. We do not buy personal data from brokers, and we do not run third-party advertising or analytics scripts on the site.

3. How We Use Your Data

• To run the chat and produce answers, notes, and gear shortlists.
• To save your tank profile, sessions, and cart so you can pick up where you left off, on any device you sign in from.
• To send your messages to our AI provider so it can generate a reply (Section 5).
• To keep the Service secure: rate limits, abuse prevention, debugging.
• To understand which features work, using aggregated usage counts.
• To answer your support and privacy requests, and to comply with the law.

We do not sell your personal data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use your conversations to train models.

4. Legal Bases (EEA and UK)

If you are in the EEA or the UK, we rely on: performance of a contract (providing the Service you asked for), our legitimate interests (keeping the Service secure and improving it), your consent (adding an email address, uploading photos), and legal obligation (when we must keep or disclose something). You can withdraw consent at any time.

5. AI Processing

To answer you, your messages — and photos you attach — are sent to the DeepSeek API (deepseek.com) and processed there to generate a reply. DeepSeek handles that data under its own privacy policy, which we do not control; please do not send sensitive personal information in a chat. We do not use your conversations to train models, and we do not sell them.

6. Photos

When you attach a photo, we shrink and compress it, store it on our servers alongside that conversation, and use it only to answer your question. A photo is not published anywhere unless you share the conversation it belongs to. Deleting the conversation or your account deletes the stored photo.

7. Sharing and Public Conversations

You can share a conversation through a private link, which only people with the link can open. If you make a conversation Public, it appears on our Community pages and can be found by search engines such as Google and Bing. Public shares use the conversation title, which you can edit at any time. Turning Public off removes the conversation from the Community pages and from future indexing; search-engine caches may persist for a while.

8. Cookies and Local Storage

We set one first-party cookie, fixfishtank_vid, which lasts up to a year. It gives this browser an anonymous identifier so that activity from before you signed in can be attached to your account when you do sign in. It is not used for advertising, and we do not track you across other websites.

Your sign-in token, the last conversation you opened, and a small cache of your account details are kept in your browser's local storage so the page loads signed in. Clearing site data signs you out.

We do not use advertising cookies, cross-site tracking pixels, or third-party analytics scripts.

9. How Long We Keep It

Your account, tank profile, conversations, photos, and saved items stay while your account is active. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete that data; residual copies may remain in backups for a limited period before they are overwritten. Basic security logs are kept briefly. Aggregated usage counts, which no longer identify you, may be kept for longer.

10. Security

Passwords are stored as one-way hashes — we never keep the plain text. Traffic is encrypted in transit, and access to production data is limited. No service is perfectly secure: use a password you do not reuse elsewhere, and tell us if you suspect your account has been accessed.

11. Your Rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to: show you the data we hold about you; correct it; delete it; export it in a machine-readable file; or stop processing it, including withdrawing consent. Email [email protected] and we will verify the request and answer within 30 days, usually much sooner.

California (CCPA/CPRA): we do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not knowingly sell or share the data of anyone under 16, we offer no financial incentive for your data, and we will not treat you differently for exercising these rights.

12. Children

The Service is not for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children; if we learn we have, we delete it.

13. Where Your Data Goes

We and our providers may store and process data in the United States and other countries. Where the law requires safeguards for transfers out of your country, we rely on the provider's contractual protections.

14. Changes to This Policy

If this policy changes materially, we update the date at the top and tell you in the app or by email.

15. Contact

For privacy questions and data requests, contact us at [email protected].