Safety & legal

Safety notice

oswim provides information derived from forecast models and editorial content. This information may be incomplete, imprecise or wrong: the sea stays unpredictable, and models do not capture very local effects. The decision to get in the water is entirely yours, as is the assessment of your own fitness, ability and equipment. When in doubt, don't swim. Prefer lifeguarded areas, respect local bans and lifeguards' instructions, and never swim alone in difficult conditions. oswim is neither a safety device nor medical advice.

Terms of use (beta summary)

The app is provided "as is", with no guarantee of accuracy or availability. By using it you acknowledge that the displayed information is indicative and that the publisher accepts no liability for decisions made based on it. The field reports you send (observed sea state) are anonymous and used exclusively to improve forecast reliability. The maps' satellite view is provided by Esri: by using it, you agree to comply with the Esri terms of use that apply to it (the ArcGIS Location Platform agreement).

Contribution rules

What you publish and other swimmers can see — a jellyfish sighting, an ambassador's word about their beach, a swim you chose to share — follows three rules, with no exception: nothing insulting, hateful, sexual, violent or discriminatory; nothing targeting a person or exposing their private life without their consent; nothing made up, because a false sighting sends someone into the water on wrong information. Every contribution others can see carries a "Report this content" link. Each report is reviewed within 24 hours: anything breaking these rules is taken down, and a contributor who does it again loses the ability to publish, on every beach. You can also write to us through the form below. Photos attached to a report are never public: only their author sees them, and they can delete them at any time from "My contributions".

Personal data

You can use oswim without an account. Your field reports are then tied to an anonymous technical identifier specific to your device, unconnected to your identity, and your species collection stays on your device. If you create an account (by email code, Apple or Google), we keep your email address, the name and picture Apple or Google may pass on, your species collection and your ambassador requests. That is what lets you find them again on every device. Each sign-in opens a session, kept until you sign out or your account is deleted, with the IP address and the browser (or app) it was opened from. This data is hosted on our own servers in Europe. oswim's emails all go through Brevo, our email delivery provider, whose servers are located in the European Union: your sign-in code (and, for the oswim team, the code that opens the admin area), the reply about a beach you suggested to us, the message you write to us through the contact form, and the notice telling us you have become a beach's ambassador. Brevo receives the address and the content of the email, nothing else. Favourites and alerts: without an account your favourites stay on your device, and only their list travels with your visits so the page can show them; with an account they are kept on your account. An alert, on the other hand, always lives on our servers, since that is where the morning summary is sent from: the beach or place you follow, the hour, your time zone and your device's notification address — and your account, if you are signed in. The message reaches you through Apple's (iPhone), Google's (Android) or your browser's (Web Push) notification service, depending on your device. No data is sold or shared with third parties for advertising. To see all your data, download it yourself at any time from the “My data” page (account menu, or oswim.app/en/account); only alerts created without an account are missing from it, having nothing tying them to you — they are listed under “My notifications”. To delete your account, do it yourself from that same “My data” page — it is immediate and permanent. For a correction, the contact form further down this page is there for you. Data sources shown: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), which relays models from the Deutscher Wetterdienst (ICON, EWAM, GWAM), ECMWF, Météo-France (Licence Ouverte 2.0) and NOAA (public domain); MET Norway (NLOD 2.0 / CC BY 4.0) as a fallback; E.U. Copernicus Marine Service Information for water clarity; OpenStreetMap (ODbL), Wikimedia Commons and iNaturalist for species photos, GIP Littoral Nouvelle-Aquitaine (Licence Ouverte 2.0) and RNLI Open Data for beach lifeguarding. Audience measurement: visits are counted by Cloudflare, the service every visit passes through — with no cookie and nothing stored on your device. The app also counts anonymous actions of its own (a beach page opened, a search, a beach put aside): these counters hold no account, no device and no IP address, so they cannot be tied to you or linked to each other. They are erased after 90 days, like technical error reports. iPhone and Android apps. If you install the oswim app, it reads your swimming workouts — and nothing else — to show them in your log: from Apple Health on iPhone, from Health Connect on Android. What is read: date and time, duration, distance, lengths and stroke style, heart rate, calories, and the GPS route of your open-water swims where one exists and you allow it. On iPhone the app also reads the stroke count, SWOLF, effort (from iOS 18), the water temperature your watch measured and the heart rate of the three minutes after the swim. Health Connect carries neither water temperature, nor stroke count, nor SWOLF, and effort is not read there: on Android those stay empty rather than invented. Reading happens only after you allow it explicitly, it is read-only (the app never writes to Health or to Health Connect), and you can withdraw it at any time: on iPhone in Settings → Health → oswim, on Android in Health Connect. That data travels to our servers to build your log, so you find it again on the website and on your other devices; it stays private by default, and it only becomes visible to other swimmers if you share a swim yourself, field by field, from your sharing settings. The app also knows your approximate location if you allow it, to show you the beaches around you. Your location, on the website as in the apps, is only known to oswim if you allow it. It then travels to our servers, which look for the nearest beaches; it is stored neither in your account nor with your device. If oswim has not looked for beaches in your area for a month, our servers also send it, with nothing that identifies you, to OpenStreetMap (its Nominatim and Overpass services) and, in France, to the French State's mapping services (geo.api.gouv.fr and api-adresse.data.gouv.fr). What you type in the search box goes instead to Photon (Komoot), a place-search service built on OpenStreetMap, which receives your text and the page's language to complete the list — not your account, not your device, not your location. If you open the conditions at that spot, it also goes, without identity, to our forecast providers: Open-Meteo, the Copernicus marine service for water clarity, and MET Norway when Open-Meteo does not answer. So as not to repeat the same searches, our servers only note the areas already explored, with no link to you: the cell of about 25 km where beaches were looked for, and the area of about 5 km whose forecast was asked for. Maps. The background of oswim's maps is made of images (tiles) that your browser, or the app, requests directly from OpenStreetMap's tile servers and, for the satellite view, from Esri's (ArcGIS). Those servers receive your IP address and the area of the map you are looking at — never your account. On the home page, when you have allowed your location, the map shows the beaches around you: the area looked at is then close to your position. To read the sea and weather at the hour of a swim (“that day”), our servers send Open-Meteo, our forecast provider, the position of the beach the swim is linked to or, with no beach, the first point of its route, with its date — never your name, your email address or your account. This health and location data serves only to provide you that service. It is never used for advertising or marketing, never sold, never used for profiling, and never stored in iCloud. Retention and erasure. Your swims and their routes are kept as long as your account exists. You can delete your account yourself, immediately and permanently, from the “My data” page (account menu, or oswim.app/en/account): your account, swims, routes, favourites, beach alerts and collection go with it, and the Sign in with Apple grant is revoked with Apple. Your public reports (jellyfish, map positions) stay, without your name. Anonymous counters and error reports are erased after 90 days.

Privacy Policy

Legal notice

Publisher: Mouveo, a French limited liability company (SARL) with a share capital of €4,275,100.00. Registered office: Parc Pompidou, CP 3415, 56034 Vannes, France. SIRET: 539 803 775 00029 — Trade register: RCS Vannes B 539 803 775 — VAT: FR23539803775. Publication director: Olivier David.

Host: Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen, Germany. Phone: +49 (0)9831 505-0. Ansbach commercial register, HRB 6089. The site and its data are hosted in Germany, in the European Union.