What stays on your device
Your beds, plants, projects, notes and photos are saved in your browser's local storage on the device you use. Clearing that storage, or the browser, removes them. GardeningLab cannot see this data and cannot recover it for you unless you have chosen to keep your garden online (below).
What leaves your device, and to whom
Each row is triggered by an action you take. None happens on its own.
| When you | What is sent | To whom |
|---|---|---|
| Identify a plant from a photo | That photo only. GardeningLab's own server forwards it and does not keep a copy. | Pl@ntNet (a plant-identification service run by a French research consortium). Their handling of the image is governed by their terms. |
| Ask a question in the app | Your question and a text summary of your garden (bed names, plant names, conditions) so the answer is about your garden. No photos. | An AI provider (currently Anthropic) via GardeningLab's server, which does not store the exchange. |
| Keep your garden online | Your email address, and the garden data you built: beds, plants, projects, notes, and the garden's location as recorded (see the Location row), which syncs with the record. Photos are not sent; they stay on your device and travel only in your own backup file. | Supabase, the database and sign-in provider GardeningLab runs on. Your email is used to send you a sign-in code, delivered by Resend, an email service, and for nothing else. If you choose "Continue with Google" instead, Google handles that sign-in under its own terms and GardeningLab receives your email address only. |
| Publish your garden page, or share your garden by link | What the page shows: the beds, plants, notes and photos it draws on. A shared link carries beds and plants only. Both are choices you make in Settings, and both can be taken down there. | Supabase storage. Anyone who has the address can open it; it is not listed or indexed. A garden appears on this site's Gardens page only when its gardener asks for that, and it comes off the same way. |
| Location (opt-in) | Only if you choose it: your device's GPS fix (the browser asks first) or the town or ZIP you type. What is kept, on your device and with your record when you keep it online, is the town-level point, the ZIP area, not the fix itself. It is never sold, and anything ever shared or aggregated is at ZIP level, never finer. | The lookups in the next two rows, and nowhere else. |
| Set up your garden's climate | Where the garden is: the town or ZIP you type, or, if you tap "Use my location", your device's position, once. GardeningLab's server turns it into a town-level point and keeps nothing; your device stores the town, never the position. The "use my location" option on the first-run "Name your garden" sheet does the same: it suggests a name from your street and sets the garden's town, and again only the town is kept. | GardeningLab's server, which forwards it to public geocoding and climate services: OpenStreetMap Nominatim, the US Census geocoder, phzmapi.org for the USDA hardiness zone, and Open-Meteo for frost history. |
| Estimate a bed's soil from the USDA survey | Your device's position, once, so the survey can be read for your area. It is not stored. | GardeningLab's server, which forwards it to the USDA Soil Data Access service. |
| Play a film on the home page (the one-minute film, or an Academy lesson) | Your browser asks YouTube for the video, which tells YouTube your IP address and browser type, as watching any video there does. Nothing is asked of YouTube until you press play, and its no-cookie address is used. | YouTube (Google), under its own terms. GardeningLab receives nothing from it. |
| Browse this site's Plants page | As each plant's card scrolls into view, your browser asks Wikipedia for that plant's photo, which tells Wikipedia your IP address and browser type, as reading any page there does. One request per plant, only for the plants you scroll to (opening one you have already seen asks nothing more); nothing is asked for the rest of the catalog. | Wikipedia (the Wikimedia Foundation), under its own privacy policy. GardeningLab receives nothing from it. |
| Load any page | Standard web-server access logs (IP address, browser type, time). | Netlify, the hosting provider. GardeningLab does not run analytics or tracking scripts. |
What is counted
We count gardens, not gardeners: how many are started, kept and still written to. We never sell your records. Concretely, a garden kept online carries three dates on its own record: when it was started, when it was last written to, and when it was last exported to a file. Those dates are read once a year, added up across all gardens, and used for one thing: to tell whether people keep their records. Nothing is counted about any person, and no visit, tap or reading is timed or tracked.
| What | Wording |
|---|---|
| Counts (everyone) | Gardens started, kept and still written to. Nothing about what is in them. |
| Regional totals (only if you opt in) | Your plant notes and conditions, combined with other gardens by ecoregion. No name, no location, no photos. Totals may be licensed. Switching off stops future contribution; totals already published cannot be unmixed. |
The opt-in is a separate question, called “Contribute to science”. It is asked once, after you have kept your garden online and written something of your own in it, and it is off unless you say yes. Only notes dated after you opt in are ever used, and a total is published only once it combines many gardens. You can change your answer in Settings at any time.
What is never collected
- Your exact location. GardeningLab asks for your position only when you choose "Use my location" to set up the garden's climate or a bed's soil, and then it keeps the town, not the position: no street-level coordinates are stored, for you or your garden. Photos you attach are re-encoded in the browser, which removes embedded location data before they are stored.
- Your name, address, or contacts.
- Anything for advertising or profiling.
The demo garden
When you first open the app you see a real garden in Irvington, New York, loaded as an example. It is the owner's, shared deliberately. Anything you do to it stays in your browser until you start your own garden, which replaces it.
Deleting your data
- On your device: clear the site's data in your browser, or start a new garden in the app.
- Online: in the app, open Settings and choose "Delete my garden". It removes the online copy from your account together with the copy on the device, and no copy is kept. If you can no longer get into the app, write to hernan@gardeninglab.eco from the address you signed in with and the online copy is deleted, usually within a week.
You can also ask, at the same address, for a copy of everything held online about you. The app's own backup export gives you the same thing at any time without asking.
Age
GardeningLab is for adults. It is not directed at children under 18 and does not knowingly hold data about them.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes and the previous version stays available on request. Any change that sends new data to a new recipient will be announced in the app before it takes effect.
Contact
Hernan Pisano, Irvington, New York. hernan@gardeninglab.eco