Privacy Policy

How Plantulus handles privacy

1. Information we collect

Plantulus does not ask for your name, email address or an account. We collect only:

• Feedback you choose to send through “Was this right?” (see section 3)
• Request counts: your IP address is used to limit how many analyses and care suggestions can be requested, and those counts expire within a day
• Anonymous usage statistics: page visits and how many people use each step of the app, without cookies (see section 4)

2. Image processing

When you upload plant images for analysis:

• Images are processed temporarily in memory for analysis
• Images are not stored unless you choose to share one (see section 3)
• Images are automatically deleted after processing
• We do not associate images with any user identity

3. Result feedback

Answering “Was this right?” is optional. If you answer, we store it to measure how accurate Plantulus is and to train future versions of the model. Each answer includes:

• Your answer, and any plant name, description or comment you type
• What Plantulus predicted and how confident it was
• A fingerprint of the photo (a SHA-256 hash), which can't be turned back into the photo
• A keyed hash of your IP address, used only to spot abuse. The IP address itself is not stored
• Whether you used the desktop or mobile site

Please don't type personal information into the plant name, description or comment fields.

Sharing your photo is a separate, optional choice: the “Share this photo” box is never ticked for you. If you tick it, we store a copy of the photo with your answer to train future versions of the model:

• The copy is resized to at most 1024 pixels and saved as a new JPEG, which removes location, camera and other details stored in the file
• It is kept in private storage that only Plantulus maintainers can access, and is never published
• It is sent when you submit your feedback. Plantulus has no accounts or sessions, so a shared photo isn't linked to you and can't be withdrawn later. Only tick the box if you're happy for us to keep it

Please only share photos of plants, without people, faces or anything personal in view.

4. Cookies and analytics

Plantulus does not use cookies and does not identify you. To understand how the site is used, we use Vercel Web Analytics, which counts visits without cookies and without storing your IP address. Visits from the same browser are grouped using a value that is discarded after a day, so you can't be followed across days or other sites.

It records:

• The page you visited (without anything after a “?” in the address), the site that linked you here, and your country, browser, operating system and device type
• Counts of steps in the app: a photo being analysed, a result being shown (only whether the leaf looked healthy and whether the confidence was high, medium or low), feedback being sent (only Yes, Not sure or No), a photo being shared, care suggestions being unlocked (only the language), the app being installed and the “Share Plantulus” button being used (only whether it opened the share menu or copied the link)

It never receives your photos, the plant or condition found, anything you type, or your password. Admin pages are not counted.

5. Third-party services

We use the following third-party services with strict privacy protections:

• Hugging Face: for model hosting (no user data shared)
• Mistral AI: for care suggestion generation (no user data shared)
• Kaggle: for dataset references (no user data shared)
• Neon: database hosting for result feedback
• Vercel Blob: private storage for photos you choose to share
• Upstash: temporary request counts for rate limiting
• Vercel Web Analytics: anonymous, cookieless usage statistics (see section 4)

All interactions with these services are anonymous and do not include any personal information.

6. Data security

We store as little as possible, and nothing we store identifies you by name or email. Photos are only stored when you choose to share one. All communications between your browser and our servers are encrypted using HTTPS.

7. Children's privacy

Our service is not directed to children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

8. Your rights

• You can use Plantulus without an account and without sending feedback
• You have no obligation to provide any personal information
• Feedback isn't linked to your name or email, so we can't look up the answers you sent

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date.

10. Contact us

No contact address is currently published.