Privacy Policy

1. Scope

This Privacy Policy explains how My Garden collects, uses, discloses, and protects information when you use the My Garden website and related features. By using the service, you acknowledge the practices described in this policy.

2. Information we collect

Depending on how you use My Garden, we may process:

• Account information, including your email address, sign-in provider, and display name.
• Your generated or chosen community nickname.
• Garden information, including plant names, photos, locations, notes, dates, care schedules, and care history.
• Information about private invitations, caretaker access, reports, blocks, notifications, and email-notification preferences.
• Information you submit to AI features, including plant photos and the plant-care context you provide.
• Technical and usage information sent through the website, including page-view analytics, device or browser information, and the approximate city inferred from your IP address when you sign in.

3. How we use information

We use information to:

• Provide authentication, your private garden, plant-care tools, reminders, and account support.
• Store and display the garden information and photos you choose to save.
• Provide Community sharing and private caretaker collaboration when you choose to use those features.
• Send optional caretaker invitations and care notifications by email when email notifications are enabled.
• Provide plant identification, care-guide drafting, and visible-health guidance when you request those features.
• Maintain security, administer accounts, prevent misuse, diagnose technical problems, and understand aggregate service usage.

4. Sharing and visibility

Your garden is private by default. If you share a plant with Community, the public view may include that plant’s species information, your community nickname, a public note, and the profile photo or additional photos you have selected for sharing. Private notes, locations, watering history, schedules, and private health evaluations are not part of the Community view.

If you invite a caretaker, that person receives only the plant access and permission you grant. A caretaker may see private information needed to care for that plant, depending on the permission level.

5. Service providers

My Garden uses service providers to operate its features. Supabase provides authentication, database, and file storage. Vercel provides hosting and Web Analytics. If you enable email notifications, Resend delivers those messages. These providers process information as needed to provide their services and under their own terms and privacy documentation.

6. AI features

When you request plant identification, care-guide drafting, or visible-health guidance, My Garden sends the relevant photo, plant information, and context to OpenAI through its API and uses the response to provide the requested feature. The application requests non-storage for Responses API requests, but OpenAI may process API content under its own data-control and abuse-monitoring policies. Do not submit information that you do not want processed by OpenAI.

7. Analytics and cookies

My Garden uses authentication session cookies that are necessary for sign-in and private access. It also uses Vercel Web Analytics to understand website usage in aggregate. My Garden does not use analytics to create a public profile of your garden.

8. Retention and deletion

We retain information for as long as necessary to provide the service, maintain security, resolve disputes, comply with legal obligations, and enforce applicable agreements. You can delete your account from Profile. Account deletion removes your account and associated private garden data and uploaded files. Contributions to another gardener’s shared plant may remain in that gardener’s history in anonymized form so the history remains usable.

Deletion from third-party services or backups may follow those providers’ retention and deletion processes.

9. Security

My Garden uses access controls intended to limit private garden information to the account owner and authorized caretakers. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

10. Your choices and rights

You may review and update certain account and garden information in the service, control Community sharing, manage email notifications, and delete your account. Depending on your location, you may also have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, object to, or receive a copy of personal information. To make a privacy request, contact us using the address below. We may need to verify your identity before completing a request.

11. Children

My Garden is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from a child who is not permitted to use the service under the laws that apply to them. If you believe a child has provided personal information, contact us so that we can review and address it.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy when the service or applicable requirements change. We will post the updated policy on this page and change the effective date.

13. Contact

Questions about this policy or a privacy request may be sent to contact@plants.example.com.