What Magpeye is
Magpeye is a game about birdwatching. You log a bird you have seen and you get a card for it. How rare that card is depends on where you were standing and what month it is — the same White Stork is Rare in London and Common in parts of Spain.
It is also a record. Your sightings are a list of what you saw and where, and the parts of the app that feel most like a game — badges, the metal ladder, the conservation export — are all built on the claim that you really saw those birds. That is why a few of the rules below are firmer than a game needs.
These terms are an agreement between you and us. Making an account means you accept them. The community rules and the trading rules are part of them. The privacy notice is not something you agree to — it tells you what happens to your data, and you should read it.
Who can have an account
You must be 13 or over to hold your own Magpeye account.
Thirteen is the age at which somebody in the UK can agree on their own behalf to a service like this one handling their data. Below it we would need a parent’s consent, and we have no way of collecting that which would be worth anything. Other countries draw that line themselves, and two of them change what is written here: the United States and Quebec, both below.
If you are under 13, and you are not in the United States or in Quebec, you can still play. The account has to belong to a parent or guardian, who accepts these terms and is responsible for what happens on it. Where the date of birth on an account is under 13, friends, groups, battles, clues and trading stay switched off for that account permanently. Nothing else changes: logging birds, the collection, walks, sound identification, photo identification, metals, badges, quests and Magpiedal all work exactly as they do for everybody else.
In the United States, Magpeye is not for children under 13 at all: not on an account of their own, and not on a parent’s. US federal rules on children’s privacy put the line at 13, and ask for a parent’s verifiable consent before personal information, a position on a map included, is collected from a child below it. We have no way of collecting that consent. So if you are a parent in the United States, the account is yours to use and not one for a child under 13 to play on.
From 26 October 2026 the app applies part of that rule itself, and you should know which part. It goes by two things an account holds: its date of birth and its home region. Where the date of birth is under 13 and the home region is in the United States, the app says at the top of the game’s screens that Magpeye is not for that account and how to delete it, and it refuses to save a new sighting, a correction to an old one or an imported list, or to start a walk. It does not delete the account, and what the account already holds stays until somebody deletes it. It also cannot see what it has not been told. An account with no date of birth, with a false one, or with a home region somewhere else is not stopped, and a home region can be changed in Settings. So this is still a rule we are asking you to keep, and one we act on by hand as well. If we learn that an account in the United States is being used by a child under 13, we delete the account. A parent can ask us to do that at any time, by email.
In Quebec the age is 14, not 13. The law there asks for the consent of a parent or tutor before personal information is collected from anybody under 14, unless collecting it is clearly for the child’s own benefit. We have no way of collecting that consent either. So in Quebec, Magpeye is not for anybody under 14: not on an account of their own, and not on a parent’s. From 26 October 2026 the app applies this in the same way and with the same limits. Where the date of birth is under 14 and the home region is Quebec, it says so in the same place, refuses the same things, and switches off friends, groups, battles, clues, parties and trading for that account, as it does for an under-13 anywhere. It is also a rule we are asking you and your parents to keep.
Give us a real date of birth. It is set once and you cannot change it yourself, because a date you can rewrite whenever a feature refuses you is not an age check, it is a form. If you entered it wrongly, contact us.
If you are 13 to 17
Four things work differently, and they stay that way until your eighteenth birthday.
Your account does not appear in a handle search, so an adult cannot find you by typing names. Your picture is one of the app’s bird icons rather than a photograph. You have no bio. And the clues you send describe an area rather than an exact spot.
That last one is not about protecting the bird. An exact clue is a record of where you were standing, to the metre, at a known time. An approximate clue is a circle of at least 500 metres — it still tells your friend where the Kingfisher is without telling anybody where you were.
You can still be added by anybody you give your handle to. Treat your handle the way you would treat a phone number.
What it costs
The game is free and it stays free.
Logging a bird, your collection, bird walks, sound identification, photo identification, the metal ladder, badges, quests, Magpiedal and the conservation status on every card are free, and they are not going to become paid. Those are the parts you contribute to. Selling them back to you would be a poor trade.
What premium buys
One thing: the map’s memory.
A free map shows the last 24 hours of birds, yours and the community’s, which is a complete product on its own. Premium remembers everything before that. Specifically it adds the map with no time limit on it, the ability to choose your own date range, the routes of walks you have finished, your own imported eBird records as pins, and the species distribution layer underneath the pins.
Premium buys no cards, no advantage in a trade, no rarer birds and no head start. It cannot: rarity is computed from where you are standing, and paying does not move you.
Premium is not on sale, and nothing described above is behind a payment today. The whole app, including the map with no time limit on it, is free for everyone at launch.
If premium ever does go on sale, every account that already existed on the day it does keeps it — free, for as long as Magpeye runs, and marked on your profile as such. You will not be asked to pay for something you already had. That is written into these terms rather than announced in a post, because a promise you cannot check later is not a promise. It is also carved out of Changes to these terms below: a later version of this document cannot withdraw it.
When premium does go on sale, the price, the billing period, how to cancel and your cancellation rights, which in the UK are those under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, will all be set out before you pay.
Your records are yours
We do not claim ownership of your sightings, your walks or your photographs.
You can see everything you have logged, at any time, in the app. If you want a copy of your data in a portable form, ask us and we will send you one — that right and how to use it are covered in the privacy notice.
Cards have no monetary value
A card is a picture and a record. It is not money, not a security, not a token, and not property with a price.
You cannot buy one and you cannot sell one. There is no currency in Magpeye, no paid packs, and no random draws of any kind. There is no way to cash anything out, and there is no exchange rate to anything outside the app.
Trading is barter between two people who have already added each other, and only two kinds of thing can move: a copy of an event card, and a promise to send a clue about one of your own sightings. Species cards never move, ever. The trading rules set all of this out in full.
If Magpeye shuts down, your cards do not turn into anything. There is nothing to redeem, because there was never anything to redeem.
What you agree not to do
Do not log a bird you did not see, or log somebody else’s bird as your own.
Do not try to recover an exact location from one the app has deliberately blurred — by comparing circles, by repeated requests, or by any other means.
Do not scrape the app, run it automatically, or make accounts in bulk.
Do not share, sell or buy an account.
Do not lie about your age to get past the age gate, and do not help anybody else to.
Do not break the community rules or the trading rules.
Do not use Magpeye to do anything illegal, and in particular do not use it to find, disturb, take or harm a bird.
Content you put in
You keep everything you write and upload. You give us permission to store it and to show it to the people you have shared it with inside the app — and, if you have left the conservation share switched on, to include your sightings in an anonymised export of observations. That permission ends when you delete the content or the account, except where a copy is kept for a reason set out in the privacy notice.
You are responsible for what you put in. Do not put in anything you do not have the right to.
Closing your account
You can close your account whenever you like, from the account settings screen.
Closing it deletes it, there and then. Your sightings, walks, photographs, collection and everything social go when you press the button, and there is no undo. The privacy notice lists exactly what goes, what little is kept, and the one step that can be left for a person to finish. If you cannot sign in, you can ask by email instead, and that route takes as long as a person takes: up to one calendar month.
When we can suspend or remove an account
We can suspend or remove an account if you break the community rules, and in particular the wildlife ones.
If you make up records, or systematically log birds you did not see.
If you buy, sell or advertise cards or accounts for money or for anything else of value, whether inside Magpeye or anywhere else.
If you harass somebody, impersonate somebody, or approach a child in a way you should not.
If you post illegal content.
If you attack, scrape or attempt to break the app, or try to recover locations it deliberately blurred.
If you hold your own account while under 13, or give a false date of birth to get past the age gate.
If the account is used in the United States by a child under 13, or in Quebec by somebody under 14.
Normally we will tell you what happened and why, and you can complain — the community rules explain how. For the most serious things, which means anything involving a child, a credible threat to a person, or the location of the nest of a Schedule 1 bird or of one of the birds the app withholds all year round, we will remove the account first and explain afterwards.
What we do not promise
Magpeye is not guaranteed to be available. It is a small app and there is no uptime promise attached to it.
The rarity model is a model. The underlying reporting rates are estimates rather than measurements, and the app’s own documentation says so. A tier is a game mechanic, not evidence of anything.
Sound and photo identification are suggestions. Both run on your phone, both are wrong a good deal of the time, and neither is a determination of what a bird is. You decide what you saw, and you are the one who signs the record.
Maps and positions are approximate, and most positions you see of other people’s birds have been moved on purpose. Do not navigate by them.
Nothing in Magpeye tells you whether you are allowed to be somewhere. Access, permission, and the law are yours to get right.
Our liability to you
The part we cannot limit, and do not try to. We do not exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights, including those under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. If anything else in these terms reads as though it cuts across this paragraph, this paragraph wins and the other wording has no effect.
The part we do limit. Beyond that paragraph, we are not liable for loss that was not reasonably foreseeable when you started using Magpeye, or for lost profits or lost business. If we are liable to you, our total liability is limited to the greater of £100 and the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
What happens in the field is yours. Where you go, whether you are allowed to be there, what the weather is doing, and what you decide to do on a cliff path or a riverbank at dusk are your decisions. Magpeye is not a navigation tool, not a safety device and not advice about access — the positions it shows you of other people’s birds have been deliberately moved, and it never tells you that somewhere is safe or that you may be there. We are not responsible for the consequences of the decisions you take out there. That is a statement about your decisions, not an exclusion of ours: if we caused you injury by our own negligence, the first paragraph applies and nothing here touches it.
Magpeye is for personal use. If you use it for a business purpose, the liability limits above are the whole of our liability to you.
Changes to these terms
We can change these terms, and this section is the limit on that, because a right to change an agreement in any way at any time is not worth agreeing to.
We tell you first. A change is announced in the app before it takes effect, and by email to the account if it is a significant one. The new version is published with its own date at the top and, beside it, the date it takes effect; for an account that already existed, the earlier version goes on applying until then. The app asks you to accept the new version from the day it is published. If you have not switched the social features on, you accept it before you can. If you already have them on, the app shows you a notice that a document has changed, and they carry on working while it waits for you. We would rather say that than describe a lock that is not there. We keep a record of which version you accepted and when — that is the whole reason the version has a date on it.
A change is never retrospective. It applies from the day it takes effect and no earlier. Nothing written into a later version changes the rules that applied to something you did under an earlier one.
A change needs a reason. We will change these terms to reflect a change in the law or in what a regulator requires, to describe a feature that has changed or arrived, to make something clearer, or to deal with a security or safety problem. Those are the reasons. We will not use this section to take back something you already have.
The founder grant cannot be withdrawn by changing these terms. If premium ever goes on sale, every account that already existed on the day it does keeps it free for as long as Magpeye runs, as set out under What premium buys. That promise survives every future version of this document. We cannot end it by publishing a new version, and if a later version appears to end it, this paragraph overrides it. A promise that a variation clause can eat is not a promise, and we would rather be held to this one.
If you do not want to accept a change, you can close your account. Playing the game does not depend on accepting a change. Switching on friends, groups, battles, clues and trading does.
Law, and where a dispute goes
These terms, and any dispute arising out of them, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.
If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of the country you live in.
If you are a consumer living outside the UK, that clause takes nothing away from you. That is so wherever you live: in the EU, in the United States, Canada or Mexico, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia or Egypt, or anywhere else. Where the law of the country you live in gives you consumer protections that cannot be contracted out of, you keep every one of them, and nothing in these terms overrides them. You can bring proceedings in the courts of the country you live in, and any claim we bring against you goes to the courts of the country you live in. The governing law above decides which law fills the gaps; it does not decide which protections you have.
The language of these terms
These terms are written in English, and English is the only language they exist in. The app itself can be used in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. These terms, the privacy notice, the community rules and the trading rules have not been translated into any of them, and nothing in Magpeye is in Arabic.
We know that is a gap for a good many of you, and we would rather name it than leave you to find it. If a sentence here is not clear to you in English, write to us and ask before you rely on it.
Who we are, and how to contact us
Magpeye is run by Flinn Gilroy-Evans, an individual trading as Magpeye. There is no company. “We” and “us” throughout this document mean him, and these terms are an agreement between you and him.
Email support@magpeye.app. Tell us what the problem is and which account it concerns. A person reads it.
No postal address is published, because Magpeye is free and its developer is therefore declared a non-trader on the app stores. The privacy notice sets that out in full, including how to get an address if you need to write to us on paper and what changes if premium ever goes on sale.