Effective 2026-10-06, updated 2026-10-24 (accounts, community groups) · 4DAT LLC, Panama City, Florida · hello@ai4dat.com
A public-service reporting and education tool for suspected New World Screwworm. It gives a triage, not a diagnosis. It does not replace the official report to your state animal health official or USDA APHIS, and nothing in it should delay veterinary or medical care. Confirmed cases are published only by officials.
Picket Line is made by 4DAT LLC, a private company in Panama City, Florida. It is not a government agency and is not affiliated with USDA or any state. Reports you share are stored and analyzed by 4DAT LLC to build the surveillance picture and improve triage. The official report is the one you make to your state animal health official or USDA APHIS.
When you attach photos, a separate switch, off by default, lets you release them under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0) so that anyone, including researchers, agencies and companies, may use them to recognise screwworm, with credit to the name you give or to "a Picket Line reporter". By switching it on you confirm that you took the photos and that no person, ear tag or licence plate can be identified in them. Released photos are published at 1600 px with all metadata removed; alongside each one we publish only the date, the same rounded map cell (about 1 km) as the public map and only if the report is also on that map, what you reported seeing, your triage result and, when a reviewer has looked at it, the reviewer's call. Never your exact location, your notes or any contact detail. They feed our open photo library and the public dataset at /learn/photos/dataset.json, and the gallery at /learn/photos/.
Withdrawal. A CC BY licence cannot be revoked for copies that others have already taken. On request (hello@ai4dat.com with the report ID) we remove the photo from our own gallery, dataset and library within 30 days, and we stop serving it; we cannot recall copies already distributed. Photos you did not release are deleted with the report on the same request.
None required. Signing in with Apple or Google is optional and is needed only for community groups. It stores your name, the provider's user ID and, if you allow it, your email, so group members can be told apart; no password is ever held. Reports you share while signed in are linked to the account. Delete the account and everything linked to it any time from the app or by emailing hello@ai4dat.com.
Reports you share to a group are visible to that group's members (name and the report's stored location, rounded unless you shared the exact one). Group organizers can remove members and shared reports. Groups are run by their members, not by 4DAT LLC or any agency; see the terms.
We do not sell personal data. We may share aggregated, de-identified counts with animal health agencies and researchers.
Picket Line trap nodes report insect counts, images of insects they capture, battery and temperature, and their own location. They do not record people.
Reports are kept while the surveillance program is active and for 24 months after. To delete a report or ask what we hold, email hello@ai4dat.com with the report ID shown in the app; we delete within 30 days.
Picket Line is not directed at children under 13 and collects no information knowingly from them.
Use of Picket Line is governed by the terms of service, which cover what the Service can and cannot do, community groups, voluntary support and the limits of our liability. In short: provided as-is for public benefit, without warranty. Identification guidance is drawn from USDA APHIS, CDC and university extension sources cited on the Learn page and is reviewed by a veterinary entomologist before each major release. You are responsible for reporting suspected cases to officials. Content © 2026 4DAT LLC; the node hardware design is proprietary to 4DAT LLC.
We will post changes here with a new effective date.