Privacy

Reading the site takes nothing from you

Browsing gardentrack.app — the guides, the plant database, the tools — does not require an account and does not identify you. There are no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics on this site at all. Not a light-touch analytics script: none.

Two things happen in your own browser and never reach us. Plants you add from a plant page are saved in that browser and are not sent anywhere — that is why they are there when you come back on the same device and absent on a different one. A ZIP you type into a tool is used to work out an answer and is not stored against you.

Our host, Cloudflare, processes ordinary request data — IP address, which page, when — to serve and protect the site, as every host on the internet does.

What we hold if you use the app

The app keeps your garden on your device so it works without signal. If you sign in, it also syncs to our server, which is what lets it survive a lost phone and appear on a second one. That copy is:

• Your email address, when you joined, when you last opened the app, and your time zone so dates land on the right day. No name, unless you type one into a garden.
• Your garden — beds, trays, plants, varieties, the dates you did things, what you harvested, and anything you wrote in the journal.
• Where your garden is — coordinates and, if you gave one, a ZIP. We keep the coordinates and the dates, not the address. A street address is used to find the frost record for the roughly 800-foot square around your plot, and is then thrown away rather than stored.
• Your photos, kept in private storage that is never on a public web address.
• Your conversations with the app, so it can remember what you just asked it.
• Notification settings, if you turn alerts on.
• Anything you send us through the feedback box, along with which screen you were on when you wrote it, so we can work out what went wrong.
• A count of the questions and photos you send the app, and what answering them cost us. There are limits on a free product and this is how they are counted.

If you never sign in, none of that leaves your device. The trade is the honest one: signed out, we cannot lose your garden because we do not have it — and neither can we give it back to you.

Signing in has no password

You type your email, we send a six-digit code, you type it back. The code is short-lived, works once, and is stored scrambled rather than as the digits themselves — so even we cannot read it back out. There is no password for you to reuse and no password of yours for us to lose.

Who else sees any of it

Four companies, each doing one job:

• Cloudflare — runs the site, the app and the database, and stores the photos. Everything above lives on their infrastructure.
• Anthropic — the model behind the app's answers. When you ask a question or send a photo, that question and that photo go to the model to answer you. They are not used to train it.
• Resend — sends the sign-in code to your inbox, so it sees your email address.
• Google Workspace — our own mailbox, so it holds any email you send us.

That is the whole list. Nobody buys this data, nobody rents it, and it is not passed to advertisers — there are no advertisers.

The counting we do, named

We count how many people open the app, how many start setting up their garden, how many finish, and how many make an account. That is four numbers, and it is the whole of it.

What a single one of those records is: a random number, which of those four things happened, and when. Nothing else. No name, no email, no location, no plants, no photos and nothing about your phone. We do not put your IP address in it — though Cloudflare sees one on every request to every website you have ever visited, ours included, and always did.

It stops the moment you make an account. By then it has done its job, and every question we might ask about a signed-in gardener is answerable from their account — so the app stops sending it, and the number is never in the same breath as your email. We did not want that to rest on us promising not to look.

The random number is one we invent on your device the first time you open the app and keep next to your garden. It is not worked out from anything about you or your phone — that is what makes it a random number rather than a fingerprint. 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 connect them with.

Where it lives. In our own database, and — because it travels as part of the web address our app calls — in Cloudflare's request logs, which they keep for their own operational purposes. Two places, and we would rather say so than have you find the second one.

Why we do it at all. Because until we did, somebody who opened GardenTrack, looked at the setup questions and left again was completely invisible to us — and that is the person we most need to hear from. It is not for advertising, it is not sold, it goes to nobody, and it cannot be tied back to you or to any account.

No analytics company ever sees it, because there is not one. No script from anywhere else, no pixel, nobody we send it to. We count it ourselves, on our own server, in the request the app already makes. The one exception is named above and it is Cloudflare, who run that server for us and log the web addresses it is called with — the same as they do for every request to every site they host, counting or no counting.

What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent anything about you, to anyone, at any price.
• We do not run ad trackers, third-party analytics, pixels or fingerprinting. We do count opens and how far people get through setting up — see below.
• We do not use your garden or your photos to train models.
• We do not store the street address you type in to get your frost dates.
• We do not put your photos on a public address, ever.

Getting it back, or getting rid of it

Deleting your garden is built in: Restart my garden, on your profile in the app, clears your plants, beds and journal from your device and from our copy.

Deleting your account itself, and getting a copy of your data to keep, are things you have to ask us for. There is no button for either yet, and rather than describe one that does not exist: email hello@gardentrack.app and say which you want. It is a small team and we will not pretend otherwise about how fast, but neither request is a fight. The whole picture is here.

Who on our side can see it, and what happens when they do

We have a support tool for answering "I lost my garden" without guessing. Three things about it are true and worth knowing:

• It cannot change your garden. Not by policy — by construction. There is no path from that tool to your plants at all, so nobody on our side can quietly edit your records while looking into a problem.
• Every look is recorded — who looked, at whose account, and when. If you ever ask us who has opened your account, that is a question with a real answer rather than a reassurance.
• It sits behind a separate sign-in from any GardenTrack account, and it is not reachable from the app or this site.

The reason to open your account is a problem you have written to us about. Beyond that, the people who build GardenTrack can reach the database, as at any service you use.

Children

GardenTrack is not built for children and we do not knowingly hold an account for anyone under 13. If one exists, tell us and it goes.

Questions, and changes to this page

Ask us anything about the above at hello@gardentrack.app. If what we hold changes, this page changes with it and the date below moves — and the interesting changes get written up in the updates log rather than quietly amended.