PRIVACY POLICY

Last Updated: July 2026

Sproutly collects information you provide directly, including your display name, email, and gardening preferences. During onboarding we ask for your ZIP code, which we use to look up your USDA zone and approximate city and state. We also collect usage data to improve our app.

Grow Circle Community: When you participate in Grow Circle, we collect your profile information (display name, avatar), community posts, comments, and interactions. The location values associated with your profile are your city, state, and USDA zone (see Section 3 for what is visible to others). We never collect or display your street address, and your ZIP code is never shown to other users.

Your information is used to personalize your gardening experience, provide recommendations, and improve our services. Community data in Grow Circle is used to:

We do not sell your personal data to third parties.

Location visibility. Your profile's city, state, and USDA zone are visible to other users on your profile and in gardener discovery. There is no profile-level privacy setting to hide these fields; if you do not want a value shown, leave the field blank in My Profile (you can update it at any time). Your ZIP code is never displayed publicly.

Per-post control. When you create a community post, you can choose a per-post location visibility of Public, City/State, Zone only, or Private. This control applies only to that individual post; it does not change what is shown on your profile or on other surfaces. Reposts display the original post's location according to the original post's visibility setting.

Other surfaces. Harvest Shares you create display the city and state you enter for that share to other users; there is no per-share visibility setting. Group pages display whatever location text the group creator entered.

Messages. Private messages are stored and are intended to be visible only to conversation participants. Messages may be reviewed by Sproutly administrators if reported for safety, moderation, or legal reasons.

Deletion and editing. You can delete your community content at any time. Editing community posts or comments is not currently available in the app.

We take reasonable measures to help protect your personal information, including authenticated access to your data and encryption in transit. We have not undergone a formal security certification or third-party audit, and no method of transmission or storage is fully secure. Community data is handled under the same measures as your garden data.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The "Last Updated" date above reflects the most recent revision. We do not commit to notifying you of changes through a specific channel; please review this page periodically.

Account deletion is processed as a multi-step job and is designed to be resumable: if a step fails partway, some of your data may already have been removed while your account remains active so you can retry. When you delete your account, Sproutly removes your editable profile, preferences, community posts, comments, messages, social connections (follows, friends, blocks, mutes), sent and received notifications, gardening data, gamification history, and Bud memory, and then removes your sign-in identity.

Reposts that copied your text, display name, or media are anonymized (the copied content and media are removed); the reposting user's own comment is kept.

If your account is banned at the time of deletion, Sproutly retains the minimum moderation evidence needed for trust and safety: your ban record (UserModerationStatus), reports filed against you, and moderation audit entries. Your editable profile is still deleted—only the moderation evidence is retained. If your account is not banned, reports and your moderation status are deleted, and moderation audit entries about you are retained as an immutable admin audit with your display name anonymized.

Sproutly does not currently provide an automated way to delete uploaded photo objects from object storage. Before deleting your database records, Sproutly inventories the uploaded object URLs associated with your account and records them as a pending manual-purge work item. Sproutly does not represent that uploaded objects are automatically deleted. You may request a manual purge of your uploaded files at any time by emailing budsproutly@gmail.com. We do not guarantee a specific retention duration for residual uploaded objects or provider-side backups.

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at budsproutly@gmail.com.