Privacy

The Botany Codex, by Grove

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The Botany Codex has no accounts, no sign-in, no analytics and no advertising. It does not ask who you are, and it has no way of knowing.

This policy sets out the little that is processed, and why. Grove is the data controller. You can reach us at [email protected].

Reading the codex

Nothing at all. The thirty-three entries, their calendars and their illustrations are built into the app when you install it, so browsing the codex makes no request to us or to anyone else. It works with the aeroplane mode on.

Identifying a plant

When — and only when — you choose a photograph to identify:

• You pick the image yourself from your device's library. The app has no standing access to your photographs and never browses them.
• The app makes a smaller copy (at most 1536 pixels on its long edge), and strips the metadata off that copy before it leaves your device. A photograph from a phone commonly carries the coordinates of the place it was taken, along with the camera's serial number; the app removes all of it, keeping only which way up the picture is. What we send is the picture.
• Our server passes it to a specialist plant identification service, which returns its suggestions. It is processed under that service's own terms. We will name the service here once it is chosen.
• The suggestions come back to your device. We do not keep your photograph. It is held only for as long as the request takes, and is not written to any database or log of ours.

Please do not submit photographs of people. The app is for plants, and a photograph you send is passed to a third party for analysis.

Your identification count

Identifications are metered: a few are included and further ones can be bought in packs. To make that work we keep a count.

• The count lives on your device. A copy is held on our server so that a pack you paid for is not lost if the app is reinstalled.
• It is stored against a random installation identifier generated by the app. That identifier is not derived from your device, your account or anything about you, and cannot be traced back to a person.
• The record is a list of credits added and used. It holds no personal data.

Payments

Purchases are handled entirely by Apple's App Store or Google Play. We never see your card details, name or billing address. The store tells us only that a purchase was valid, so that credit can be added.

What we do not do

Accounts or sign-in	None. There is nothing to register.
Analytics or tracking	None. No third-party analytics, no advertising identifiers, no profiling.
Location	Never requested and never used. The app holds no location permission, and location data attached to a photograph is removed before it is sent.
Contacts, microphone	Never requested.
Selling data	We do not sell or share data with anyone, for any purpose.

Children

The app is not directed at children and collects no personal data from anyone, of any age.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction, objection and portability over personal data held about you. In practice we hold no data that identifies you, so there is usually nothing to disclose or erase — but if you would like the record attached to your installation deleted, write to us and say so and we will remove it.

If you believe we have handled something wrongly you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is processed, the app will say so before the change takes effect. The date below always reflects the current version.