Privacy policy

The short version

Safe to Plant has no accounts, no logins, no newsletter and no contact form. It sets no cookies of its own and runs no analytics. It does not build a profile of you, does not sell or share anything about you, and has nothing to sell in the first place.

Three things are worth knowing anyway, and the rest of this page explains them: the web server keeps ordinary access logs, the page fonts are loaded from Google's servers, and the site carries advertising which uses cookies of its own.

What is collected

Nothing you are asked for, because you are never asked for anything. This site collects no name, no email address, no postal address, no phone number, no payment details and no account of any kind. There is no form on the site that submits data anywhere.

What exists is what any web server unavoidably receives when it answers a request, described below.

Server logs

The hosting provider's web server records each request in a standard access log: your IP address, the time, the page requested, the referring page if your browser sent one, and your browser's user-agent string. Errors are recorded the same way.

These logs exist to keep the site running and to deal with abuse — working out why a page is failing, or why one address is requesting ten thousand pages a minute. They are not analysed for marketing, not linked to anything else, and not shared. They are held by the hosting provider under its own retention schedule, which is typically a matter of weeks, and then discarded.

One consequence worth stating plainly: a search you run on this site travels in the URL, so the words you searched for appear in that log alongside your IP address for as long as the log is kept. If that matters to you, the same page can be reached by browsing rather than searching.

What is stored in your browser

Safe to Plant sets no cookies. It stores exactly one thing on your device, using your browser's local storage rather than a cookie:

• frostline.risk — which of the three risk postures (cautious, balanced or bold) you last chose, so the site keeps showing the one you picked. Its value is a single word. It never leaves your browser, is never sent to the server, and clearing your browser data removes it.

Advertising cookies are a separate matter and belong to third parties; see advertising below.

Location

Some pages offer a button that finds the nearest computed town for you. It uses your browser's built-in location feature, which means your browser asks your permission first and nothing happens unless you agree.

If you do agree, your coordinates are rounded to roughly a kilometre before they are used — town-level precision is all the site needs — and sent to this site's own server to look up the closest match. They are not stored in the database, not passed to anyone else, and not used for anything but that one lookup. As with every other request, the rounded coordinates do pass through the server access log described above. Declining the prompt costs you nothing: search by name instead.

Third parties on this page

Two external services are involved in delivering the site, and both can see your IP address as a result of your browser fetching from them.

• Google Fonts — typefaces are loaded from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com. Google states that it does not use these requests to create profiles or serve ads, but the request itself does reveal your IP address to Google. See Google's font privacy notice.
• The hosting provider — operates the servers and keeps the access logs described above.

The climate and place data behind the site comes from NASA POWER and GeoNames, but those are contacted only by scheduled jobs, long before you arrive. Reading a page here never causes a request to either of them, so neither ever learns that you visited.

Advertising

This site is not currently serving advertising. If that changes, this section will describe the advertising cookies involved and how to control them, and the date at the top of this page will move.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, data protection law — the UK and EU GDPR, the CCPA in California, and comparable rules elsewhere — gives you rights to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the processing of personal data about you, and to complain to a regulator.

In practice there is very little here for those rights to reach. This site holds no account and nothing that identifies you; the only personal data involved is the IP address in the hosting provider's access logs, kept for security and troubleshooting on the basis of legitimate interests, and discarded on a short schedule. Safe to Plant does not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in the CCPA, and has no financial incentive programme, because it holds nothing to trade.

For rights that reach the advertising cookies, use the Google controls linked above — those cookies are Google's, and Google is the party able to act on them.

To ask anything about this policy, write to contact@safetoplant.com or use the contact page.

Children

This site is a reference work for gardeners and is not directed at children. It knowingly collects nothing from anyone, of any age, and no part of it asks a visitor to identify themselves.

Changes to this policy

If what the site does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. The date is taken from the file itself rather than typed in, so it cannot fall out of step with the text above it. There is no mailing list to notify, so the date is how you tell.