Privacy Policy

GrowGuard (“we”, “us”) is a plant-care app operated from Canada. This policy explains what we collect when you use the app at growguard.me or the GrowGuard mobile app, why, and what you can do about it.

What we collect

• Account: your email address and display name, provided when you sign in with Google or email. Sign-in is handled by our platform provider, Base44.
• Your plants: the nicknames, species, photos, care settings, tasks, journal notes and health checks you add.
• Photos: the photos you take for identification and health checks. They are stored with your account so you can see your history.
• Location: only if you tap “Use my location”. We use the coordinates for local weather and to work out your hemisphere and season. You can decline; the app works without it.
• Usage and errors: which features are used, how long requests take, and error reports, so we can keep the service working. We do not use advertising trackers.

How photos are processed

To identify a plant or assess its health, a photo is sent to one or more of these services and processed only for that request:

• Pl@ntNet (plantnet.org) for species identification.
• Our own model server hosted on Hugging Face Spaces (BioCLIP-2 for species, Grounding DINO for finding plants in a photo, and a leaf-disease classifier for a small set of crops).
• An AI language model provided through Base44 for the written health assessment. Along with the photo, it receives your plant’s care history (watering dates, light, pot, your answers and notes) so the assessment can use context. Health assessments are estimates and are labelled as such in the app.
• Perenual for species care facts (no photo is sent; only the species name).
• OpenWeather for local weather (only your approximate coordinates are sent).

We do not sell your data and we do not use your photos to train models without asking you first.

Emails

We send a weekly care digest and, only if you turn it on in Settings, a daily reminder email. You can switch both off in Settings at any time. Emails are sent from our domain, growguard.me.

Where data is stored

Your account and plant data are stored by Base44, our hosting provider, in data centres they operate. Photos sent for identification or health checks are transmitted to the services listed above and are not retained by them beyond the request, except where their own policies state otherwise.

Your rights

• You can view and edit everything you have added, inside the app.
• You can delete your account and all your data at any time from Account → Delete account, or by following the steps on our delete your account page. Deletion is immediate and permanent.
• You can ask us for a copy of your data, or ask questions about this policy, at info@growguard.me.

Children

GrowGuard is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will note it in the app before the change takes effect.