Why do I have to provide ANY information about me and my pet?

Before you get going in our world, we ask you tell us some things about yourself and your pet. You might ask, "Why can't I be completely anonymous? I just want to know where my dog is." We understand. But we ask these things for one simple reason: so that we can provide our service to you.

Because we have quite a wide range of services (including location tracking, activity monitoring, weight management, feeding guidance, insurance, and other things), there is quite a lot of information that might be relevant – depending on which services you want. But in general, you only have to give the information you WANT to give.

There are a few exceptions of course:

• We need your name, and your pet's name, so that we can refer to you when we need to. Nobody likes to receive an email addressed to "Dear Mr <blank>". And it would feel rubbish if we said (about your dog) "<blank> is 25 metres to your left".

• We need to know the country you and your pet live in because our services are different in different countries. This is not just us being nosy. Sometimes there are legal reasons why we can't offer certain things in certain countries, and we believe in and obey the law.

• We might ask for certain information to help us be sure about your identity if we ever need to confirm it with you (say if you call us to ask about your dog, when we need to be sure you have a right to that information - in accordance with our security protocols). This might be something like your dog's birthday (which also helps us make recommendations about activity and feeding, but you can ignore those if you're not interested in that).

• And of course we do need to ask you questions to establish if you give us consent to do various things (such as send you emails, or include your pet in our leaderboards). We can't just assume your answers to those things.

So although perhaps it might seem that we're impertinently asking you for too much information, we're really just making sure we know the things that make our service to you work properly. And you can always skip the ones that don't matter to you.