Privacy Policy — Deno’s Garden

Effective 1 November 2026

This policy explains what Amir Abed ("we", "us"), who runs Deno’s Gardenat denosgarden.com, collects about you, how it is used and shared, and the choices you have. It is part of our Terms of Service.

What we collect

Account details. Your email address, and your name and profile picture if you sign in with a provider such as Google. Clerk holds these for us.
Profile. The display name and ZIP code you choose to save. The ZIP code is used to look up local frost dates.
Usage of limited features. How many free identifications you have used, whether you have had a free trial, and when your account was created and last changed.
Payments. Your plan, billing dates and payment status, and for a lifetime plan the Stripe payment reference, amount and date. Card details go straight to Stripe; we never see or store your full card number.
Photographs. Photographs you upload for identification. We pass them to Pl@ntNet and do not keep them.
Identification history. For each identification: when it was made, how many photographs and which plant part, and the matches Pl@ntNet suggested. If you choose to add it, where the photograph was taken: a place you type, and coordinates taken from the photograph or from your device. Only you can see your history, and you can edit or delete any of it.
My Garden. The plants you add to My Garden and what you record about them: planting dates, what each was started from, where it grows, how many, its status, your notes, and its growth log. Only you can see them, unless you turn on "Show My Garden to my friends" in Community. Then your Community friends can see each plant's species, planting date, what it was started from, what it grows in, how many, its status and the dated stages in its growth log, but never where it grows or your notes.
Quiz Mode leaderboard. If you have the paid plan and play a ranked quiz: your answers are checked on our server, and we keep each ranked quiz's settings, score, number right, time taken and the week it counts for, and the leaderboard name you choose. Anyone who visits Quiz Mode can see that name and your best score for the week. Until you choose a name you appear as "Gardener" and a number, never under your real name. Practice quizzes stay in your browser and are not sent to us.
Community. The public username and discovery setting you choose, friend requests, friendships, blocks, private messages, when they were sent, and which messages you have read. Someone who searches for your exact username sees only the username. Your display name is shown to your friends, to people you have a conversation with, and to people you send a friend request to. Confirmed friends also see your profile picture if you set one in Clerk. Your email address and profile picture are never searchable. Messages are stored on our servers and are not end-to-end encrypted. We do not read them, except to look into a report about a conversation, and then only that conversation, or when the law requires it. If we restrict someone's Community access after a report, we keep a note of that and why until their account is deleted. Desktop notifications, if you turn them on, say only that a new message arrived, never who sent it or what it says, and that choice is saved in your browser, not sent to us.
Community photos. Photos you send in a Community message, with their size and when they were sent. Before a photo leaves your device, the page shrinks it and removes its location and other metadata, and our server refuses a photo that still has any. Only the two people in the conversation can see it. Cloudflare stores it and compares it with lists of known child sexual abuse material kept by child-safety organizations. A match is blocked, and we report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as the law requires.
Germination trials. The trials you record: the species, the protocol you followed, when you started, each stage (what it was, how long, the temperatures, humidity, where the seed was kept and in what light), what you sowed in, where the seed came from, the counts and dates of what came up, your notes and tip, what you say about the plant, any photos and captions, and the name and place you choose to be credited with. You choose for each trial whether to keep it private or share it. A private trial is stored in your account for you alone: it is not reviewed or published, the site shows it to no one else, and making a published trial private takes it off the site and out of the germination records. We review each shared trial before it is published. Once approved, everything in it except your account details is public on the species page and the Germination trials page, under the name and place you gave, or "a reader" if you gave none. A change you make afterwards is reviewed again, and the approved copy stays up meanwhile. While reviewing, we can see your account's name and email address, so that we can find your trials and write to you about them. Photos are prepared on your device as Community photos are, with their location and other metadata removed, and Cloudflare checks them in the same way. We may also add a published trial to the site's germination records: its stages, results, notes, tip and what you say about the plant then appear on the species page, credited the same way, and the entry is removed within a day of the trial being deleted. Your badges are worked out from your published trials and the kind of plant we note for each one; they appear only on your own account page.
Technical data. Your IP address, browser and device type, and the pages you request, recorded by our host Cloudflare to deliver and protect the site.
Your browser. The site stores your theme and unit choices, and the name it greets you by, in your own browser. Clerk sets cookies to keep you signed in. Google sets advertising cookies, as described under Advertising. We do not use third-party analytics.

Location

We may collect and use location information: the ZIP code you save, the approximate location implied by your IP address, and location data that photographs can carry, such as GPS coordinates stored by a phone camera. We may use location from photographs to improve identification and to understand where plants are grown.

The identification page removes location data from every photograph in your browser before it is uploaded, so it never reaches Pl@ntNet. Your browser can read the location stored in a photograph and offer to save it in your identification history; it is saved only if you choose "Use the location stored in the photo". "Use my current location" asks your browser for your position and saves it the same way. Either is rounded to about 11 meters, kept with that identification, shown only to you, and never sent to Pl@ntNet. You can remove it from any identification at any time.

Advertising

We show ads served by Google AdSense. Visitors who are not signed in see the most ads, signed-in accounts on the free plan see fewer, and accounts with the paid plan see none: for them the advertising code is never loaded.

Google and its partners, as third-party vendors, use cookies and similar technology to serve ads based on your visits to this and other websites, and to measure them. Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads to you based on those visits. You can turn off personalized advertising in Google's Ads Settings, opt out of some other vendors at aboutads.info, and read how Google uses information from sites that use its services. Where the law requires it, such as in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and some US states, a consent or opt-out message from Google appears before personalized ads are shown.

We do not give advertisers your name, email address, ZIP code or photographs. What Google collects through its cookies is governed by Google's privacy policy.

How we use it

to run your account, the paid plan, My Garden, Community, germination trials, the Quiz Mode leaderboard and the free identification limit;
to identify plants from your photographs and to fill in frost dates;
to email you about your account, payments and changes to these policies;
to email you about our other websites and services;
to share your email address with partners for their own marketing, as described below;
to keep the site secure, prevent abuse, and fix problems;
to meet legal obligations and enforce our terms.

Who we share it with

Services that work on our behalf, each receiving only what its job needs:

Clerk — sign-in, account details and subscriptions.
Stripe — payment processing: subscriptions through Clerk, and the lifetime plan directly. Stripe receives your email address with a lifetime purchase.
Cloudflare — hosting, the account database, pictures, and photos sent in Community messages or added to germination trials, which it checks against lists of known child sexual abuse material.
Google AdSense — advertising for readers without the paid plan, as described under Advertising.
Pl@ntNet (France) — receives the photographs you submit for identification, under its own terms.

Partners. We may share your email address with other companies so they can send you their own offers, for example about gardening, plants and seeds. Once shared, their use of it is governed by their privacy policies. We do not share the email address of anyone we know to be under 16. You can opt out at any time, as below.

We may also disclose information when the law requires it, to protect people's safety or our rights, or to whoever takes over the site if it is transferred. We do not sell your photographs, ZIP code, garden records or payment details.

Your choices

Promotional email: use the unsubscribe link in any such email, or email us.
Partner sharing: email support@denosgarden.com with the subject "Do not share my email". We stop sharing it from then on; we cannot recall an address a partner already has.
Profile: change or clear your display name and ZIP code on your account page.
My Garden: edit or remove any plant or growth log entry on the home page while signed in. You can still see and remove them after a paid plan ends. Sharing your garden with friends is off unless you turn it on, and you can turn it off at any time in Community.
Germination trials: edit or delete any trial, or any of its photos, on your trials page. Deleting a trial removes it from the site and from our storage.
Leaderboard name: change it under the leaderboard on the Quiz Mode page.
Community: turn username discovery off, cancel or decline requests, remove friends, block people and delete messages and photos you sent; deleting a photo removes it from our storage. A lapsed paid plan can still read and delete existing Community data.
Delete everything: "Delete account" on your account page removes your sign-in, profile, My Garden, Community friendships and messages, germination trials and their photos, and quiz scores at once. Deleting a private conversation removes it for the other participant too.

California residents

You may ask us what personal information we have collected about you and shared, ask us to delete or correct it, and opt out of our sharing it with partners for marketing. Under California Civil Code §1798.83 you may also ask, once a year, which categories of personal information we shared with third parties for their direct marketing in the previous year, and with whom. Personalized ads may count as "sharing" personal information under California law; you can opt out through the message Google shows, through Google's Ads Settings, or by emailing us. Email us to make any of these requests. We will not treat you differently for making one. We do not respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals; we do not track you across other websites.

How long we keep it

We keep your account information until you delete your account. Deleting it removes your profile, My Garden records, Community friendships and messages, germination trials (published ones included) and their photos, identification history and quiz scores from our database and your sign-in from Clerk straight away, including any lifetime plan. One thing is kept after deletion: a one-way hash of your email address (a fingerprint that cannot be turned back into the address, only matched against an address that is already known) with the number of free identifications used and whether a free trial was taken. It exists so that deleting an account and signing up again does not renew the free offer. Payment records are kept by Clerk and Stripe for as long as tax and financial law requires. Server logs are kept by Cloudflare for its usual short periods. We do not keep your photographs after identification; Pl@ntNet's handling of them is set out in its terms. A photo sent in a Community message is deleted from our storage when its message, or either person's account, is deleted, and a trial photo when it, its trial or your account is deleted. The one exception is a photo the law requires us to preserve, such as one reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which we keep for as long as that law requires.

Children

The site is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

Security and where data is held

Data is sent over encrypted connections and held by the services above, which may store it in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise that yours will never be exposed.

Changes

We will update the date at the top when this policy changes and, for a significant change, email account holders before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions or requests: support@denosgarden.com.