Privacy
Last updated November 7, 2026
Leal exists to help families and their pets find each other. Many people who use it are going through something hard, so we collect as little as we can and protect what we keep.
What we ask for
Your email address, so we can send you sign-in codes and tell you about possible matches. Information about the pet: photos, the kind of animal, a name, a description, their story, and the city and month where you were separated or found them. We never ask about immigration status, nationality, identity documents or a criminal record.
What other people can see
When you post a pet, you choose who can see it: everyone, or only people who post a pet that might match it. Either way, a listing shows the animal’s photos and description, a city or region, and a month. It never shows your name, email, phone number, an address or an exact date, and we don’t allow contact details in descriptions. If you start a conversation, what you share in it is up to you. Leal’s moderators can see every listing, including private ones, so they can look into reports.
Photos
Photos from phones can contain hidden data showing where they were taken. We remove it from every photo you upload. Nothing can remove what the picture itself shows, so check it doesn’t show your house number, a street sign or a car plate. To help spot possible matches, Leal sends the photos of two pets that might be the same animal to Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI, which compares them. Only the photos are sent, never your name, email or the description. Under Anthropic’s terms for businesses, it doesn’t use them to train its AI.
Getting in touch
Your contact details are never shown on the site. When a listing might be a match, messages go through Leal. You share your own email or phone number only if you choose to. If someone in a conversation reports it, a Leal moderator can read that one conversation to look into it. Moderators can’t read any other.
What we don’t do
No ads, no tracking and no outside analytics. Our server doesn’t log visitors’ IP addresses. To stop abuse, it keeps them in memory for about an hour when someone asks for a sign-in code or sends a report, and never writes them down. We use two cookies: one to remember your language, and one to keep you signed in. We never sell your information, and we share it only with the services that run Leal, listed below.
Where it’s kept
Leal runs on servers in Montreal, Canada, provided by Amazon Web Services. Emails are sent through Amazon’s email service. Photo comparisons run on Anthropic’s servers.
Deleting your information
You can delete a listing or your whole account at any time, and it is removed right away. Copies in our backups are erased within 30 days. If a moderator deletes an account for abuse, we keep only a scrambled form of its email address, which can’t be turned back into the address, so it can’t sign up again.
Questions
Write to us at hello@leal.dog.