Privacy Policy
By This privacy policy in short
Short version. You can read every guide and use almost every free tool without an account — only My Garden and the Plant Doctor photo diagnosis ask you to create one. We only hold data you give us. We do not sell it.
- No account needed to read, and none for the calculators and planners.
- What data we collect: an email if you sign up, and what you save in your garden.
- Advertising and analytics partners set their own cookies. See the cookie policy.
- Want it gone? Ask, and we delete it. Use the contact page.
- Rules such as the GDPR and India’s DPDP Act give you rights here. We apply the stricter one.
The full privacy policy follows. It is longer because it has to be exact.
Last updated: 30 June 2026
At Gardening Guider (gardeningguider.com), we respect your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains what personal data we collect when you read our guides, subscribe, or take part in our community, why we collect it, how we use and protect it, and the rights you have. It is written in keeping with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and applies to everyone who uses the site. The business operating the site, Gaurav Kumar Pandey, of 9KH, Bejha, Rajapaker, Hajipur, Vaishali, Bihar 844124, India, is the data fiduciary responsible for your data and the data controller for the purposes of the GDPR.
Information we collect
- Account and profile data: when you create an account, we collect your name, email address, a username, and your password (stored only in encrypted form). You may optionally add a short bio.
- Community content: the topics, replies, reactions, and any images you post in the forum, along with the time they were posted.
- Newsletter and contact data: your name and email if you subscribe, and any message you send through our contact form.
- Information collected automatically: like most websites, our servers and analytics tools may record your IP address, browser and device type, the referring page, the pages you view, and the date, time and length of your visit. We also record a recent “last seen” time to show who is active in the community.
- Tool inputs and photos: anything you enter into our free tools — a plant photo in the Plant Identifier, symptoms in the Plant Doctor, or a location, bed size or crop in a calculator — so that a result can be produced for you.
- Cookies and similar technologies: small files that help the site function, remember preferences, measure traffic, and support advertising, as described in our Cookie Policy.
How and why we use your information
We use your data on the basis of your consent and of our legitimate need to run the site, and only for these purposes:
- To create and manage your account and community profile.
- To publish and moderate the content you post, and to keep the community safe.
- To send newsletters and updates — only if you have opted in, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
- To respond to your questions, comments and requests.
- To understand how the site is used so we can improve it.
- To keep the site secure, prevent abuse, and meet legal obligations.
Photos and our free tools
Our free tools run on what you enter, so this section explains exactly what happens to it.
- Photos you upload for plant identification are passed straight to Pl@ntNet, an external image-recognition service, so that a species match can be returned to you. We do not save these photos: they are never added to our media library or written to our servers, and they exist only in temporary memory for the few seconds your request takes.
- Results are generated automatically. Identifications, diagnoses and explanations are produced by software and are not checked by a person before you see them. They can be wrong, so treat them as guidance, not as professional, medical or veterinary advice.
- Calculator inputs such as your city, bed size or chosen crop are used to work out your result. Some are remembered in your browser so the tool still shows your last result when you return.
- Results you choose to save — for example a plant added to My Garden — are stored against your account until you delete them or close your account. You can remove any saved item yourself at any time.
- Please do not upload photos of people, faces, documents or number plates. The tools are for plants, and we would rather you never sent us personal information you do not need to share.
Artificial intelligence: where it is and what it receives
Artificial intelligence sits inside most gardening websites now, usually without a word to the reader. We would rather list it plainly. AI is used in exactly four features on this site. Everywhere else — the guides, the calculators, the planting calendar, the companion chart, the frost dates — is ordinary software and human editing with no AI in the request path. If you never use these four features, none of your data reaches an AI provider at all.
| Feature | What leaves our server | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|
| AI Assistant (question box under articles) | Your typed question and the article context | Anthropic (Claude API, United States) |
| Plant Identifier | The photo you upload | Pl@ntNet (France, EU) |
| Plant Doctor photo diagnosis | The photo you upload | Kindwise (Czech Republic, EU) |
| Explain My Result (calculators) | Your tool inputs and the result | Anthropic (Claude API, United States) |
Your data is not training data. This is the commitment that matters most, so we will be exact about it. We use these services through their business APIs, not their consumer chat products, and under those terms submissions are not used to train the providers’ models. We do not sell, license or hand over your questions, photos or tool inputs to any AI company as a dataset, and we do not train a model of our own on anything you type or upload.
One honest caveat about photos. Pl@ntNet is a scientific botanical project, and its own terms allow observations contributed through its own apps and website to enter its research collection. We send your photo only as a one-off identification request and do not contribute it as an observation. Even so, if a photo shows anything private in the background, please do not upload it. The same applies to Kindwise.
What we keep after an AI request is less than you may expect. Our usage meter records one row per request: the model used, token counts, the cost, whether it succeeded, how long it took, your user ID if you were signed in, and a salted hash of your IP address rather than the address itself. It exists only so we can enforce the free limits and keep the feature affordable. That record does not contain your question, the answer, or your photo.
Automated decisions. Nothing here makes a legally significant or similarly consequential decision about you by automated means. AI on this site writes advice; it does not approve credit, refuse service, price you differently, or profile you for advertising. Free-usage limits and anti-abuse rate limits are simple counters, not profiling. Because there is no consequential automated decision-making, there is nothing to opt out of under Article 22 of the GDPR or its US state equivalents — and you can avoid AI entirely by not using the four features above.
AI output is not checked by a person before you see it, and it can be confidently wrong. A species match is a probability, not a verdict, and some deadly plants closely resemble common food crops. Never eat, brew or medicate with a plant on the strength of an automated identification. Please read the safety section of our Disclaimer before acting on any tool result.
Advertising and cookies
We may display advertising, including ads served by Google and its partners. These partners may use cookies to show ads based on your previous visits to this and other sites. You can manage this in our cookie banner and through the controls described in our Cookie Policy. We do not sell your personal data.
Do Not Sell or Share, and Global Privacy Control
We do not sell your personal data for money, and we never have. US state privacy laws also treat some advertising as “sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising”, so we want to be precise rather than clever about it: if you allow advertising cookies, our advertising partners may use that data to personalise ads across other sites, which those laws count as sharing.
You can stop it in one click, and you do not need an account to do so:
- Use the Cookie Settings link in our footer, or the 🍪 badge, and switch Advertising off. That is our opt-out of sale and sharing.
- We automatically honour Global Privacy Control (GPC) and Do-Not-Track browser signals. If your browser sends one, advertising and analytics are switched off before anything loads and we do not ask you again.
- Rejecting every optional cookie leaves the whole site — including all fifteen free tools — fully working.
We do not knowingly sell or share the personal data of anyone under 16.
Who we share data with
We share personal data only where needed: with trusted service providers who help us run the site (such as web hosting, email delivery, analytics, and advertising partners), and where required by law or to protect our rights and the safety of our users. We require these providers to protect your data and use it only for the services they provide to us.
The main categories are our web host, our email delivery service, analytics, advertising partners, the AI and image-recognition providers named above, and our payment provider. Payments are handled entirely by our payment provider as merchant of record — card numbers never reach our servers and we never store them. We hold only what we need to recognise your subscription: the plan, its status, and the provider’s transaction reference.
We may also disclose data where the law requires it, to respond to a lawful request, or to protect the rights and safety of our users. We do not hand over member data on an informal request.
How long we keep your data
We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we remove or anonymise your personal data within a reasonable period, except where we must keep certain records to meet legal requirements. Public discussion posts may remain visible in an anonymised form to keep conversations intact.
In practice:
| What | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
| Account and profile data | While the account is open, then deleted or anonymised within 30 days of closure |
| Newsletter subscription | Until you unsubscribe; we keep the fact of the unsubscribe so we do not email you again |
| Saved tool results (My Garden, journals, reminders) | Until you delete them, or the account closes |
| Photos uploaded to the tools | Not stored — held in temporary memory for the seconds the request takes |
| AI usage meter (no question text, hashed IP) | 13 months, for billing and abuse control |
| Server and security logs | Up to 90 days |
| Payment and tax records | As long as tax and accounting law requires |
| Contact-form and support messages | 24 months |
How we protect your data
We use reasonable security measures, and we would rather describe them than gesture at them:
- In transit: the whole site is served over HTTPS/TLS.
- Passwords: stored only as salted hashes. Nobody here can read your password, and we will never ask you for it.
- Payments: card details never touch our servers.
- Access: administrative access is limited to accounts that need it and protected by strong authentication.
- Data minimisation: we hold as little as each feature needs — hashed IP addresses in the usage meter, and no stored tool photos.
- Backups: taken regularly and restore-tested, so a failure does not become a loss.
- Abuse controls: rate limits, bot filtering and spam screening.
No system is perfectly secure and we will not pretend otherwise. What we promise is that we hold little, patch quickly, and tell you honestly if something goes wrong.
If a breach happens. We will contain the incident, assess it, and notify the people affected without undue delay — by email where we hold an address, and by a notice on the site where we do not. We will notify regulators within the deadlines the law sets, including the 72-hour rule under the GDPR and the reporting duty to the Data Protection Board of India under the DPDP Act. Our notice will say what happened, what data was involved, what we have done about it, and what you should do.
Reporting a vulnerability. If you are a security researcher, please report privately to security@gardeningguider.com. We aim to acknowledge within 72 hours and will not pursue legal action against good-faith research that follows the rules set out in our Terms of Use. We will never email you asking for your password, a one-time code or payment details — any message that does is a phishing attempt.
Your rights
Under the DPDP Act, you have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you.
- Ask us to correct, complete, or update it.
- Ask us to erase it, where there is no legal reason to keep it.
- Withdraw your consent at any time (this will not affect processing already done).
- Nominate another person to exercise your rights in case of death or incapacity.
- Raise a grievance with us and, if unresolved, with the Data Protection Board of India.
To use any of these rights, contact our Grievance Officer below. We will respond within the time allowed by law.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, the GDPR additionally gives you the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing, to data portability in a machine-readable format, and to complain to your national supervisory authority.
If you are in the United States, state privacy laws — including those of California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas and others — give you the right to know what we collect, to obtain a copy, to correct it, to delete it, and to opt out of targeted advertising, sale and sharing. We do not use sensitive personal information for inference or profiling, and we do not discriminate against anyone who exercises a privacy right: the site, the tools and the prices stay exactly the same.
Where we apply more than one law, we apply the stricter standard to everyone. It is simpler than sorting readers by passport, and it is fairer.
How we verify a request. For account holders, we verify through the email address on the account. For a request about data we hold without an account, we may ask for enough detail to match the record, and we will not create new data about you just to run the check. An authorised agent may act for you with your written permission, and we may still confirm the request with you directly.
If we say no, you can appeal. Reply to our decision with “Appeal” in the subject line. A fresh review is carried out and we will give you a written answer, with our reasons, within 45 days. If you are still unsatisfied you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India, to your EU or UK supervisory authority, or to your state attorney general, depending on where you live.
Children’s privacy
Accounts are intended for users aged 18 and above. Anyone under 18 may use the site only with the consent and supervision of a parent or guardian. We do not knowingly collect data from children without such consent, and we do not show them targeted advertising.
We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13 (under 16 in the EU and UK), as required by the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the GDPR and India’s DPDP Act. Reading a guide requires no account and no personal data, so a child can use the site to learn about plants without giving us anything at all. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us data, contact the Grievance Officer below and we will delete it promptly and confirm when it is done.
Gardening with children is something we actively encourage — please read the child-safety section of our Disclaimer first, because berries, bulbs and garden chemicals are the most common causes of childhood poisoning.
Where your data is processed
Our website and some service providers may store or process data on servers located outside India — principally in the United States and the European Union, as shown in the AI table above. Where personal data leaves its home jurisdiction we rely on the safeguards the law provides: Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum for transfers from the EEA and UK, and contractual commitments that bind each provider to the standard of protection described in this policy. Some destination countries have privacy laws less protective than your own; we do not use that as a reason to lower what we do.
Grievance Officer
For any privacy question, request, or complaint, please contact:
Grievance Officer: Gaurav Kumar Pandey
Address: 9KH, Bejha, Rajapaker, Hajipur, Vaishali, Bihar 844124, India
Email: privacy@gardeningguider.com — for access, correction, deletion, consent withdrawal and appeals
We aim to acknowledge requests within 48 hours and resolve them within the period required by law.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The “last updated” date above shows the latest version, and we encourage you to review it occasionally. By continuing to use Gardening Guider, you accept the current policy.
