Privacy policy

The three-line summary

No account is needed to use Herbarium. We do not collect your name, email or location. There is no advertising, no third-party trackers, and we sell nothing to anyone.

The only thing that leaves your phone is the photo you submit in identification mode, and before it leaves it is rewritten to strip its metadata, GPS coordinates included.

The photo you send to identify

When you use identification mode, the photo is sent to our server and from there to Pl@ntNet, a plant identification service run by a consortium of French public research institutes (INRAE, CIRAD, IRD and Inria). That service returns the species guesses you see on screen.

Before it leaves your device, the photo is redrawn on a browser canvas. That step erases all the original file's metadata: phone make and model, date, time and GPS coordinates. What travels is only the image.

We do not keep the photo. It is not written to disk, not stored in a database, and not used to train anything of ours. Pl@ntNet has its own privacy policy covering the processing it does on its side, and you can read it at plantnet.org.

What stays on your device

We store two preferences and nothing else: the language you chose, in a cookie, so the site opens in the right language next time; and the light or dark theme, in the browser's local storage. Neither identifies you, and neither leaves your device.

If you install the app, the plant catalogue and its photos are stored on the device so it works without a network. That data is just a copy of what is already public on this site, and it is deleted when you uninstall.

Who else touches the data

The site is hosted by Vercel, which logs requests in order to operate and to defend against abuse, as any host does. Species content comes from a Supabase database that your browser never touches directly. Species photos load from Wikimedia Commons, where they are published under free licences.

We do not use Google Analytics or any equivalent service. If we ever start measuring usage, it will be with a cookieless tool that does not identify individuals, and this page is updated before that happens.

Children

Herbarium is not specifically directed at children and collects no data from anyone, of any age. That said, several plants described here kill children precisely because their fruits look inviting, which is why dangerous entries open with the warning rather than the photo.

Your rights and how to reach us

The General Data Protection Regulation gives you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection over personal data. Since we collect no personal data and keep no photos, in practice there is nothing in our possession to access or delete. If you want to confirm that, or have any question about this policy, write to wabackpackers@gmail.com.

The data controller is Rui Miguel Cardoso Vieira, sole trader, tax number 248808877, based in Leiria, Portugal, trading as Backpackers World Adventures.