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 Android 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 with email and password. 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, and the answers and notes you type during a health check.
• Photos: the photos you take for identification and health checks and the photos you add to a plant. They are stored with your account so you can see your history. Photos are resized before upload, which removes camera metadata such as the GPS position. Stored photos sit at unlisted web addresses that are not protected by sign-in: anyone who has the exact address can open that photo.
• Location: only if you tap “Use my location” or “Use current location”. We round the position to about 1 km before it is stored or sent anywhere, and use it for local weather, your hemisphere and season, and the place name shown on a plant. You can decline; the app works without it.
• Contact form: if you write to us from the website, we store the name, email address and message you enter.
• Usage and errors: which pages you open, which features you use, how long requests take, and error reports that include your account id and your browser type, so we can keep the service working. We do not use advertising trackers or third-party analytics scripts.
• Android app identifiers: the GrowGuard Android app runs inside an app shell provided by our platform, Base44, which includes Google Firebase components. These can create an identifier for your app installation that is sent to Google, for example to deliver notifications and to measure app stability. We do not use it for advertising.

How photos and plant data are processed

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

• Pl@ntNet (France) for species identification. Pl@ntNet states that the photos are not stored in its database and are kept only in its server memory during identification.
• Our own model server on Hugging Face Spaces (United States), which runs BioCLIP-2 for species, Grounding DINO for finding plants in a photo, and a leaf-disease classifier for a small set of crops. It fetches the photo from its stored address and keeps nothing on disk; Hugging Face’s own records of the request are governed by Hugging Face’s privacy policy.
• An AI language model provided through Base44 (OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, chosen by Base44) for the written health assessment and, when other methods are not confident, for identification and care guides. Along with the photo, it receives your plant’s care history (watering dates, light, pot, recent journal entries, previous health checks, your answers and notes) so the assessment can use context. These providers state that they do not train on API data by default and may keep inputs for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring. 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).
• World Flora Online for checking plant scientific names against the WFO Plant List (worldfloraonline.org, data CC0). Only plant names are sent, never personal data.
• OpenWeather (United Kingdom) for local weather. Only your rounded coordinates are sent; OpenWeather states that it does not store request locations.
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim for turning rounded coordinates into a place name when you add a location to a plant.
• Google Fonts serves one typeface; that request carries your IP address and browser type.

The image-based plant species identification service used, is based on the Pl@ntNet recognition API, regularly updated and accessible through the site https://my.plantnet.org/

Model training

We do not sell your data. GrowGuard itself does not train models on your photos or notes. Our platform provider, Base44, states that data in workspaces on plans other than its Enterprise plan can be used to train its AI models, and offers no opt-out setting. If we ever want to use your photos or health-check outcomes to improve GrowGuard’s own models, we will ask you first.

Emails

• A weekly care digest, on by default. Switch it off in Settings (Weekly digest) or with the unsubscribe link in the email.
• A daily reminder email, only if you turn it on in Settings.
• We may send an occasional “we miss you” email if you have not opened the app for a while; the Weekly digest switch turns that off too.

Emails are sent through Base44’s email service.

Where data is stored

Your account, plant data and photos are stored by Base44 on servers in the United States (Base44 uses hosting providers such as MongoDB, Render and Supabase, and is owned by Wix.com Ltd., Israel). Your data may therefore be processed outside Canada. Requests to growguard.me pass through a content-delivery network. The operator of GrowGuard (admin role) can view plant data to give support.

How long we keep it

• Account and plant data: until you delete them or delete your account.
• Identification, usage, vision and error records GrowGuard keeps under your account id: deleted when you delete your account. Page-view logs are held by our platform provider, Base44, and are removed on its schedule.
• Weather lookups are cached for a short time without any link to you.
• Administrative records of actions on your account (for example that it was deleted, or support actions taken on it) are kept for our records.
• Backup copies held by our hosting provider expire on the provider’s schedule after deletion.
• Photo files: we remove every record that points to your photos when you delete them or your account. The files themselves are held by our hosting provider at unlisted addresses; we are asking the provider for a way to delete them and will update this page when it is in place.

Cookies and local storage

The app keeps your sign-in token, your theme choice and, if you used it, your rounded location in your browser’s local storage. We set no advertising cookies.

Security

All connections use HTTPS. Data is stored with per-user access rules so that other users cannot read your plants, photos or notes.

Your rights

• You can view and edit everything you have added, inside the app.
• You can delete your account and your data at any time from You → Delete account, or by following the steps on our delete your account page. Live data is removed at once; backup copies expire later.
• 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.