Privacy Policy

PlantScanner.ai provides plant identification and care tools without requiring an account. The synced virtual garden supports email and password, Google, or Apple sign-in. Firebase Authentication processes your sign-in details and assigns an account identifier. When you choose Google or Apple, that provider may share your email, account identifier, and profile name with Firebase. Apple offers a private relay email option. We do not receive your Google or Apple password.

Photos you upload

When you use the plant scanner, plant doctor, the pruning assistant, or the light analyzer, your photo is sent to our servers and passed to an AI service to generate the identification, diagnosis, pruning guidance, or light analysis you requested. Optional symptom and pruning-goal text is included only when you provide it. Before upload, the web tool re-encodes the image to remove EXIF, location, and other embedded metadata. Photos submitted to these tools are used to produce your requested result. Garden photos are stored separately when you explicitly save them. We do not use your photos for advertising or sell them. AI outputs can be uncertain, so do not rely on PlantScanner as the only source for decisions involving valuable, protected, toxic, or rapidly declining plants.

Virtual garden and reminders

Your synced plants, locations you enter, notes, care history, health observations, and photo follow-up requests are stored in Firebase Firestore under your account identifier. Garden photos are re-encoded to remove embedded metadata and stored privately in Firebase Storage. They are sent for a health analysis only when you choose that action. Temporary photo copies may be cached on your device and are cleared on sign-out. The garden shows care checks and photo requests when you open it; it does not currently send cloud push reminders. Previous device-only gardens remain on the original device until imported or removed.

Permissions

Camera access is requested only when you choose to take a plant photo. Notification access is requested only when you enable care reminders. The mobile app uses the operating system photo picker and does not ask for broad access to your media library.

Analytics

We use Vercel Analytics to understand aggregate site usage -- which pages are visited and how the site performs. It is a privacy-friendly, cookie-free analytics tool that does not track you across other websites or build a personal profile of you. The native mobile app does not include advertising or third-party behavioural analytics.

What we do not do

We do not sell your data. We do not run third-party advertising trackers. Identification tools do not require an account. Garden sync collects your email, account identifier, and profile name when supplied by your sign-in provider; room and outdoor location labels are optional text you enter. We do not request GPS access.

Service providers

The site is hosted on Vercel. AI requests are routed through Vercel AI Gateway to OpenAI models, which process the prepared image and return the requested result. OpenAI states that API data is not used to train its models by default. Depending on the service settings, providers may retain limited request data for abuse monitoring under their published terms; we have not promised zero-retention mode. Firebase, a Google service, provides garden account authentication, database storage, and private photo storage. Synced garden data remains until you delete the plant or account; uninstalling the app does not delete cloud data. In My Garden → Account, you can delete your account, synced garden, and photos after confirming your password or signing in again with your connected provider. Deleting an Apple-connected account also revokes PlantScanner’s Apple sign-in access. A content-free deletion marker remains to prevent still-signed-in devices from recreating deleted data. Previous device-only data remains until imported, removed, or cleared from that device.

Children

PlantScanner is a general gardening utility and is not directed specifically to children under 13.

Questions

If you have questions about this policy or want something looked into, contact us at privacy@plantscanner.ai.