Privacy policy

The field notebook stays on your phone

The observations you keep in the notebook stay in your own device storage. They are not sent to any server of ours, we have no way to read them, and there is no account for them to be attached to. If you clear site data in your browser, or lose the phone, they are gone without us ever knowing they existed. That is why the export button is in plain sight.

Coordinates are read only if you press the button to add the place, one observation at a time. They are never read on page load or in the background, and they too stay only on the device. The browser asks your permission first, and you can refuse without losing anything else in the notebook.

The account: only to contribute, and only your email

All of Herbarium works with no account at all: reading entries, searching, saving to the notebook, collecting stickers and using the app offline. The account exists for one thing only, writing a contribution on an entry, and it is needed because a correction with no author cannot be clarified, answered, or have a report about it assessed.

What we collect is your email address, and nothing else. There is no password for you to choose or for us to store: you sign in through a link sent to that address on the website, or a six-digit code sent to the same address in the app, and both the link and the code work once and expire after an hour. We do not ask for a name, we do not ask for an age, there is no public profile, and the text of published contributions does not show who wrote it. If you attach a photo, the credit name you choose appears under it, and it can be a pseudonym.

Having an account does not sign you up to any list. Inside the account there is a switch, off to begin with, to receive occasional Herbarium news by email. Only if you turn it on does your address start being used for that, we store the date you turned it on and the date you turned it off, and turning it off is one tap in the same place. We never pass your email to third parties, nor add it to lists for other projects.

The text you write is stored linked to your account, even if it is refused, because that is what lets us give reasons for the decision and reply if you disagree. You can ask at any time for your account and what you wrote to be deleted, through the contact page. What we do not delete is the record of a moderation decision about content reported to us as illegal, because we are required to be able to account for it.

If you attach a photo to a contribution, we remove the data hidden in the image on our server before storing it, including the coordinates of where it was taken: for a protected species, that would be a map for anyone who wants to dig it up. The photo stays private until a person approves it, and if it is refused it is deleted. By sending it you declare that you took it and you license it under the open licence you choose (CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0 or CC0), with the credit name you give, which can be a pseudonym. Creative Commons licences cannot be revoked for those who already reused the photo, but we take it off Herbarium whenever you ask.

Reporting a contribution requires no account at all, and leaving contact details is optional. That is because article 16 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 requires a mechanism that is easy to use, and forcing someone to register first would be exactly the barrier that article forbids.

What we measure: fruitless searches and identifications

We do not use Google Analytics or anything like it. We do not count visits, we do not follow anyone between pages, and there is no analytics cookie at all. We measure one thing: when someone types a name in the search box and the catalogue returns zero results, we store that text and a counter. That is how we learn which plants we are missing, and it comes from the person who had them in front of them.

What is stored is the search term, the language, how many times it appeared and the date it last did. Not your IP address, not a session identifier, nothing that links two searches to the same person. Two people searching for the same plant are indistinguishable from one person searching twice, and that is by design rather than a limitation.

We also count photo identifications: the date, whether the request came from the website or the app, whether it returned a result, and the scientific name of the guess. That is what tells us how many identifications fit in the budget of the service that processes them, and which plants people bring us that have no entry. The photo is not kept, the IP address is not kept, and neither is who made the request, not even when you are signed in: an identification is never linked to an account.

There is a daily limit of identifications per person, and counting it means telling one person from another for a day. We do it without knowing who you are: what is stored is a counter tied to a code scrambled with a secret of ours, remade every day, from your account if you have one, or from a random number the app makes up on your phone, or from the IP address if there is neither. Today's code and tomorrow's are different and cannot be linked, and the row is deleted after two days. It exists to stop anyone using the app as a tap, and for nothing else.

Searches shorter than three letters are not stored, nor text with characters that do not belong in a plant name. If you type something personal into the search box by accident, write to us and we will delete it.

When you write to us

The contact, error report and plant suggestion forms send what you write by email to our address, and nothing else. We do not store the message in a database, we do not use it for marketing, and we do not sign you up to any list. Your email address is there so we can reply and for nothing else. If you would rather we delete the exchange once it is settled, just ask.

The three-line summary

No account is needed to use Herbarium, and without one we collect no name, email or location. The account is optional, it exists so you can contribute, and all it asks for is an email address. 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.