What we count

Common questions

What exactly is in one of these records?

**A random number, which of four things happened, and when it happened.** That is the entire row. **No name, no email, no location, no plants, no photos, nothing about your phone.** We do not put your IP address in it either — though our host sees one on every request to every website you have ever visited, ours included, and always did. The four things are: you opened the app · you started setting up a garden · you finished setting it up · you made an account.

Where does the random number come from?

**We invent it on your device the first time you open the app** and keep it next to your garden. ⚠ **It is not worked out from anything about you or your phone.** That is the difference between a random number and a fingerprint, and it is the reason we can say we do not fingerprint anyone. Clear your browser data and it is gone and a new one starts. Open the app on a second phone and that is a second number, because there is nothing to join them with.

Does it follow me around after I sign in?

**No — it stops the moment you make an account.** By then it has done its job, and anything we might want to know about a signed-in gardener is answerable from the account itself. **We could have written "we do not connect it to your account" and left it there.** But after you signed in it would still have been traveling alongside your session, so that would have been a promise about what we choose to do rather than about what is possible. **We stopped sending it instead.**

Why count anything at all?

**Because until this shipped, somebody who opened GardenTrack, looked at the setup questions and left again was completely invisible to us.** The server first heard about anybody at the email screen — so the people who never got that far left no trace, and those are exactly the people worth hearing from. It is not for advertising, it is not sold, and it goes to nobody. There is no analytics company involved, no script from anywhere else, and no pixel: **we count it ourselves, in a request the app was already making.**

Your privacy page used to say you ran no analytics. What changed?

**We started counting, so that sentence stopped being true, and we changed the page in the same breath as the code.** A privacy page describing counting we did not do yet would be exactly as wrong as one denying counting we did. **The replacement is more specific rather than vaguer** — "no analytics" sounds strong and tells you nothing, because you have to guess what we mean by it. What is there now names the four numbers and what a record holds. What has not changed: **no ad trackers, no third-party analytics, no pixels, no fingerprinting**, and nothing sold to anyone.

Can you tell it was me?

**No, and not because we promise not to look — because there is nothing to look at.** The number is random and the record holds nothing else. There is no name on it, nothing about your device, and no address of any kind. **If you want everything we hold about you, ask us and we will send it.** These records are the one thing we could not pick out of the pile for you, because there is nothing in them that says which ones are yours.

More on this

• Privacy
• Your data
• What shipped and when