Last updated: 21 April 2026
My Trail Camera Pro is an online service for trail camera management and anti-theft protection. When a trap file on an SD card is opened, the service collects data about the device that opened it and sends it to the account owner at mytrailcamera.pro.
When a trap file is opened, the following data is sent to the mytrailcamera.pro REST API:
The trap-file data above only concerns people who open a trap file from a stolen SD card. Regular website visitors are covered in the sections below — see Cookies & Local Storage (the Meta Pixel) and Website Analytics.
All collected data is stored in the service database on My Trail Camera's servers. Data is automatically deleted after the configured retention period (default: 90 days). The account owner can delete individual records at any time.
The service connects to external services depending on the page and the features used: Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. (Facebook/Instagram advertising pixel — loaded on the public pages, the dashboard and the sign-in pages), Open-Meteo (weather for battery estimation), Overpass API (settlement proximity), ip-api.com (country/ISP geolocation for site analytics), Mailgun (email delivery), Freemius (PRO licensing & payments).
When you visit the public pages of this site (home, pricing, story, learn, blog posts, privacy) the Meta (Facebook) Pixel is loaded and sets a cookie — see the table below. Nothing else is written to your browser unless you create an account and log in (a session cookie) or you are the site operator (the admin-panel cookie).
Everything in use:
| Storage | Name | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cookie (third-party — Meta) | _fbp, fr, … |
Set by the Meta (Facebook) Pixel loaded on this site, to measure ad performance and enable retargeting on Facebook / Instagram. Your IP address, the page URL, your browser and (if present) Facebook cookies are sent to Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd. Not strictly necessary — you can block it with your browser's tracking protection or an ad blocker. | _fbp ≈ 90 days; Meta's own cookies per Meta's policy |
| Cookie | PHPSESSID |
PHP session for your dashboard at /app — keeps you signed in. Only set if you create an account and log in. Strictly necessary. |
30 days, or until logout / password change |
| Cookie (operator only) | mtcadmin |
PHP session for the operator's internal admin panel at /admin. Only set if the site owner logs in there. Strictly necessary; not relevant to visitors. |
Browser session (≤ 24 h idle) |
The session and admin cookies are strictly necessary (ePrivacy Directive, Art. 5(3) exemption) — the sign-in feature and the operator panel cannot work without them, and they are never set for an anonymous visitor just browsing the website. The Meta Pixel cookie is not strictly necessary; for what Meta does with the data see Meta's data policy.
Beyond the Meta Pixel above, this site uses no Google Analytics, no other advertising or analytics trackers, no social-media embeds that track you, and no A/B testing or browser-fingerprinting scripts.
Separately from the Meta Pixel described above, this website keeps first-party, server-side access logs to understand how visitors find it — these logs use no cookies and no JavaScript of their own. Data recorded per page view: IP address, page URL, referring URL (e.g. the search engine you came from), browser user agent, any campaign (UTM) parameters present in the link, and a timestamp. From your IP and browser we also derive a short hash that is re-keyed every 24 hours, used only to count distinct visitors within a day — this is not an anonymisation, the raw IP is kept alongside it. IP addresses are geolocated to country/city for aggregated statistics using the free ip-api.com service (only the IP is sent, no personal details). The log data never leaves the website server and is not shared with anyone.
Lawful basis (EU GDPR): Art. 6(1)(f) — legitimate interest in understanding audience and improving the website. The data is retained for a maximum of 12 months and then deleted. You can request deletion of your data by contacting us via the support forum (identify yourself by approximate visit time and IP range).
PRO accounts can register or update a trail camera by emailing <your-username>@mytrailcamera.pro from the address they signed up with. A server-side mail poller reads such messages, takes the camera ID (and an optional location) from the subject line, reads GPS coordinates from any attached photo's EXIF data, and creates or updates that camera in the account. The sender is checked against the account's verified login email (with DMARC), so only mail genuinely from the account owner is acted on; mail addressed to free-tier accounts is ignored.
For each such email we store one audit-log row: the message ID (so the same email is never processed twice), the sender address (the account owner's own email), the subject line, the outcome (created / updated / rejected, and the reason), the affected camera, and a timestamp — used only for de-duplication, rate-limiting (20 imports / 24 h) and troubleshooting. When a camera is created this way the owner also receives a confirmation email containing a single-use link, valid 72 hours, to undo it. Lawful basis (EU GDPR): Art. 6(1)(b) — necessary to provide the feature you used.
The service processes personal data (IP address, GPS coordinates, device fingerprint) only from people who open a trap file on a stolen SD card. The lawful basis under Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR is the legitimate interest of the account owner in recovering their stolen property and identifying the thief. No personal data is collected from regular website visitors.
The account owner is the data controller for their detections. They decide what to do with detections, how long to keep them, and whether to share them with law enforcement. My Trail Camera, as the infrastructure operator, acts as the processor.
Since the data processed belongs to a person who accessed stolen property, the practical application of GDPR rights (access, deletion, portability) is limited — but the site owner may honour them on a case-by-case basis.
For privacy-related questions, email hello@mytrailcamera.pro.