GardenbellPrivacy Policy
In short: Gardenbell stores your plants, photos and care history so it can remind you and keep them in sync between your devices. There is no advertising, no tracking, no analytics SDK, and we never sell or share your data for marketing. You can delete everything from inside the app.
1. What we collect and why
| Data | Why | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Your Apple sign-in identifier (a code Apple gives us; your email only if you choose to share it) | To know which garden is yours and restore it on a new phone | Our servers |
| Plant photos you take or choose | To identify the plant and assess its health, and to show them in the app | Our servers; analysed by an AI model we run in our own cloud account (see §3) |
| Plant names, care plans, tasks, notes and dictated observations | The app’s core function and the context that makes advice personal | Our servers |
| Plant and zone locations (from a photo, your phone at the time of a photo, or entered by hand) | To place plants on your garden map and check the weather where they grow | Our servers; rounded coordinates are sent to the weather service (see §3) |
| Your town and, optionally, your first name | Climate context for care plans; a greeting on the Today screen | The town goes to our servers with each analysis; your name never leaves the phone |
| Compass heading when you set up a zone | Which way a bed faces (sun exposure) | Stored as a direction with the zone |
| Sprinkler account credentials (Aiper), only if you connect one | To fetch completed watering runs | Encrypted in our cloud; used only for that |
| Subscription status | To unlock Gardenbell Pro | Apple or Stripe handle payment; we store only whether a plan is active and until when — never card numbers |
Dictation is transcribed on your device when iOS allows it; audio is not sent to us. Microphone, camera and location are used only when you tap the corresponding button, and iOS asks your permission first.
2. What we do not do
- No advertising, no ad identifiers, no cross-app tracking.
- No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDKs.
- No selling, renting or sharing of your data for marketing.
- Your photos and notes are not used to train AI models.
3. Service providers
- Amazon Web Services (United States, N. Virginia region) hosts our servers, database and photo storage, and runs the AI model that analyses your photos inside our own account. AWS does not use this content to train models.
- Apple handles Sign in with Apple, App Store purchases and notifications on your device under Apple’s privacy policy.
- Stripe processes web purchases of Gardenbell Pro under Stripe’s privacy policy. We receive the subscription status and a customer reference, not your card.
- Open-Meteo receives rounded coordinates (about 1 km) to tell us whether it rained near your plants. No account or identifier is sent.
- Aiper (only if you connect it) receives your Aiper login so we can read your sprinkler’s run history.
4. Where your data lives and for how long
Your garden lives on your phone and in our AWS account in the United States, so it can sync between your devices. We keep it as long as your account exists. Photos that no plant or health check refers to any more are removed from our storage automatically.
5. Deleting your data
In the app, open Settings → Account → Delete account. This erases your plants, care plans, photos, history, sprinkler credentials and subscription record from our servers and this phone, and cancels any web subscription immediately. Signing out instead keeps your data on the phone and stops syncing. You can also write to support@gardenbell.app to request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data; we answer within 30 days.
6. Children
Gardenbell is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data.
7. Security
Data travels over HTTPS, is encrypted at rest, and photos are reachable only through short-lived signed links. Sign-in tokens live in the iOS Keychain. No system is perfect; if we learn of a breach affecting you, we will tell you.
8. Your rights
Depending on where you live (including under Québec’s Law 25 and the GDPR) you may have rights to access, correct, port or delete your personal information and to withdraw consent. Use the in-app deletion or email us. Our person in charge of personal information can be reached at support@gardenbell.app.
9. Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app and update the date above.