Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

When you create an account, we store your email address and a hashed password. When you search an address or generate a report, we store the address and coordinates you searched. When you use the Garden Builder, we store your saved garden plans and bed configurations.

Report scenarios. On a report, you can draw a hypothetical change to the land — removing tree canopy, adding a structure or canopy — and set a height for anything you add. We store the shapes and heights you draw and the date you drew them, tied to that report and your account. This is your own what-if input, not a measurement: it does not change the report's underlying data, and it may describe land beyond the parcel the report covers (for example, a neighboring tree line), which we store only as the extent and location you drew, not as a claim of ownership or a statement of fact about that land.

We collect basic server logs — IP address, request timestamps, user agent — for security and debugging purposes. These logs are retained for no more than 90 days. Operational log lines can also carry details of what the system was doing at the time, which may include an address that was searched. We do not write email addresses or precise coordinates into these logs.

Access records. Separately from those logs, when a request is made for a specific report or a specific piece of feedback, we record that the request happened: the time, the account it was made from, the method and the route pattern, which kind of thing was requested and its identifier, and the response status we returned. This exists so we can answer one question after the fact — did anyone reach something that was not theirs. It is deliberately narrow: it holds no IP address, no browser user agent, no email address, no name, no coordinates, no address, and nothing from the page itself. Requests made while signed out are recorded too, with no account attached. See Section 5 for how long we keep these and what happens to them when you delete your account.

What may feed product improvement. Anonymized fragments of the data above — your hardiness zone, soil drainage class, sun exposure category, plant searches and selections, and report metadata such as state and county — may be used to refine plant matching, improve classifier accuracy, and tune our recommendation logic. See Section 6 for the full enumeration and the consent toggle. What we never use for improvement: your payment details, your name, your email address, your phone number, or precise coordinates tied to your identity.

2. What we do not do

• We do not sell your personal information for money.
• We do not run advertising on Growable Ground, and we do not run retargeting or advertising pixels.
• We do not share your name, email address, or contact information with third parties for their own marketing.

We do use Google Analytics to understand aggregate usage. That is a third-party analytics service and it sets its own cookies and identifiers — see Section 4 for exactly what that means and how to turn it off.

3. Third-party services

We use the following third-party services in the operation of Growable Ground:

• Stripe processes payments. We do not store credit card numbers. Stripe's privacy policy governs payment data.
• Google Places provides address autocomplete in the search bar. Google's privacy policy governs data entered into the autocomplete field.
• Render hosts our application servers and database. Your data is stored on Render's infrastructure in the US-West (Oregon) region.
• Anthropic powers our AI Growing Advisor chat feature. When you use the chat, your parcel data (derived from federal sources) and your messages are sent to Anthropic's Claude API. If you have drawn a scenario on that report, a summary of what you drew (the shapes, heights, and date — never a raster or image) is also included, labeled as your own hypothetical rather than measured data; this only ever happens in your own chat, never anyone else's. Anthropic does not use API inputs for model training.
• Google Analytics measures aggregate usage of the site (which pages are visited, general engagement). Google processes this data on its servers as our analytics provider. See Section 4 for the cookies this involves and how to opt out.
• Resend delivers our transactional and notification email (sign-up confirmation, password reset, report-ready notices). Resend receives your email address and the contents of those messages.
• Federal data APIs (USDA, USGS, FEMA, EPA, NOAA) receive coordinates for the parcels you analyze. These are public government services. We do not send your email, name, or account information to these APIs.

4. Cookies and analytics

To keep you signed in, we store a single authentication token in your browser's local storage. That token is ours, it stays in your browser, and it is not used to track you.

We also use Google Analytics 4 to understand aggregate usage — which pages people visit and how they move through the site. Google Analytics sets its own cookies and identifiers in your browser and sends that usage data to Google, which processes it as our analytics provider. This is a third party, and these are analytics cookies: we want you to see that plainly rather than discover it. We configure Google Analytics with its advertising features — Google Signals and ad personalization — turned off, so it is used only for aggregate site analytics, never for advertising, ad targeting, or cross-context behavioral tracking.

You can turn analytics off. Any of these works, and we honor all three: use our Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control; enable a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal in your browser or extension; or install Google's opt-out browser add-on. When you opt out through the first two, Google Analytics is never loaded on the page at all — nothing to block, because nothing runs.

5. Data retention and deletion

Your reports and garden plans are retained as long as your account exists. You can delete your account and its data yourself, at any time, from Settings → Account → “Delete my account and all data.” That takes effect immediately, and it removes your reports and the parcel geometry stored with them, your garden plans and beds, your saved plants, your subscription and purchase records, your chat usage records, any report scenarios you have drawn, your email subscription, and your account itself. It also now reaches three records that an earlier version of this process left behind: referral redemptions, and beta invitations and beta access requests filed under your email address. One record is not removed — see access records below. If you would rather we did it for you, email [email protected] and we will process your request within one month. If a request is complex and we need longer, we will tell you inside that window and why.

Feedback and contact messages. Messages you send us through the contact form or in-app feedback — including any screenshots you attach — are kept so we can respond to you and keep a record of what was reported. We do not delete them on a fixed schedule. If you delete your account, messages linked to your account go with it.

Feedback you sent without being signed in. That feedback is not linked to your account, so we cannot find it by looking you up. Instead, when you submit it we show you a reference code on the confirmation screen and ask you to keep it. Send that code to [email protected] and we will delete that feedback, along with any screenshot attached to it. The code is the only way to identify which submission was yours — if you did not keep it, we have no way to find it.

Access records are the one thing deletion does not remove. Deleting your account removes your reports, plans, messages and credentials, as described above. The access records in Section 1 are the exception: we keep them for 180 days from the request, and account deletion does not clear them early. We keep them because they are how we could investigate a suspected unauthorized access after the fact — including one that affected you, and including one discovered after the account involved was closed. We think that is only a fair thing to ask of you because the limit is short and fixed: those 180 days are the erasure mechanism for this record, not an exception to erasure. And once your account is gone, what survives is an account number with nothing behind it — no email, no name, no address of yours remains for us to attach to it.

6. Data contribution & aggregate use

What behavioral data we collect

When you use Growable Ground — generating a site report, searching for plants, building a garden layout, or browsing the platform — we log activity events that describe what happened, not who you are. Specifically, we collect:

• Report events: The type of report generated (grower or land buyer), the state and county where the parcel is located, your subscription tier, and a timestamp. We do not log your name, email address, or precise coordinates in this record.
• Plant selection events: Which plants you search for, select, or place in a garden bed, along with the USDA hardiness zone, soil drainage category, and sun exposure category associated with your parcel. We do not log PII alongside plant selections.
• Session activity: General platform usage patterns for product improvement purposes, equivalent to standard product analytics.

These records locate you no more precisely than your state and county. They do not contain your address, your coordinates, a parcel identifier, your name, or your email address.

What we do with this data

Behavioral event data is used for three purposes: (1) product improvement, (2) understanding aggregate grower demand patterns at regional scale, and (3) potential third-party licensing in anonymized form. Aggregate licensing looks like: “In USDA Zone 6b, the five most-searched vegetable crops in 2026 were tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, kale, and cucumbers.” Not: “Jane Smith searched for tomatoes.” We will never sell or license data that identifies you.

Your consent choices

Behavioral logging is standard platform analytics disclosed here for transparency. Data contribution is a separate, opt-in preference you set when you create your account and can change at any time in Settings → Data & Privacy. No feature on Growable Ground currently contributes data under it. If we build one, this policy will say what it collects before it collects anything, and your setting will govern it.

We will never: sell your name or contact information, link your personal identity to parcel or plant event records in any third-party disclosure, or serve third-party advertising within the platform.

Selling and sharing

We do not sell your personal information for money, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising — the activity California law calls “sharing.” Google Analytics can involve “sharing” when its advertising features are enabled; we turn those off (Google Signals and ad personalization disabled), so it runs as analytics only. You can still opt out of analytics entirely at any time using our Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information control, or by enabling a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal in your browser — we honor GPC.

Our position on the aggregate licensing described above is that it does not involve personal information, because what would be licensed is counts and patterns at state and county scale — not records about you. That is our position, not a determination anyone has made for us.

Your rights (CCPA and GDPR)

Right to know, right to access, right to deletion (of personal data — anonymized contributed records are not personal data under either framework; the one record deletion does not clear is the access record described in Section 5, which ages out on its own fixed limit), right to data portability (you may request a machine-readable export of your reports and garden plans), right to opt out of the selling or sharing of personal information (see above), and right to non-discrimination — using any of these never costs you access or a worse price. Contact [email protected] to exercise any of these rights. We respond within one month. If a request is complex and we need longer, we will tell you inside that window and why. California residents may submit a verifiable consumer request via the same address.

7. AI and automated processing

We use automated systems in two ways, and they work differently.

Scoring your parcel. Your parcel's federal-data profile is scored by rules-based algorithms to produce suitability ratings and interpretations. This is automated, but it is not a black box — the general logic is written out at our methodology page, and what we do when the data is missing or uncertain is at editorial standards.

The AI Growing Advisor chat. When you use the chat, your messages and your parcel's derived data are sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate a response. If you have drawn a scenario on that report, a summary of it (the shapes, heights and date you drew, always labeled as your own hypothetical, never as a measurement) is included too, and only ever in your own chat. Anthropic does not use API inputs to train its models. You can avoid this processing entirely by not using the chat.

We do not keep a copy of your conversation. The chat is stateless: the conversation lives in your browser for as long as the tab is open, and your browser sends it back to us with each new message so the advisor has the thread. We do not store it. What we do keep is a usage record for each message — message counts and lengths, timing, the state your parcel is in, and, when the advisor looks something up for you, which lookup it ran and what it asked for. That record is deleted when you delete your account.

What we do not do with it. We do not use your data or any AI output to make legal, financial, credit, employment, insurance, or housing decisions about you, and we do not provide it to anyone else for those purposes.

8. Children

Growable Ground is intended for adults (18+) and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, email [email protected] and we will delete it.

9. Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify registered users by email. The effective date and version at the top of this page will be updated. Corrections we publish to reports we have already delivered are listed at Corrections.

10. Contact

Questions about this policy: [email protected]