1. Who we are
Thalo (referred to here as "the app", "we" or "us") is an independent, personal plant care application for Android, distributed on Google Play. This policy explains what data the app collects, why it does so, and how that data is handled.
Thalo is operated by its developer, an individual based in the United Kingdom, who is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy and can be reached at sem.merzlikin@gmail.com. Because we are established in the United Kingdom, the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply to our handling of your data, and the EU GDPR applies in addition where you are in the European Economic Area. If you use Thalo, this policy applies to you.
2. Information we collect
We collect only what the app needs in order to work. This includes the following.
Account information
- Your email address and, if you use Google Sign-In, the basic profile (your name) associated with your Google account.
- A username and display name of your choosing, and either an avatar colour or a profile photograph that you optionally upload.
Content you create
- Gardens you create or join, together with their descriptions.
- Plants you add, including names, species, watering schedules, notes and photographs.
- Watering logs, which record when a plant was watered, snoozed or skipped and by whom, along with care assignments.
- Friend connections and garden invitations that you send or accept.
- Reports you submit about content or another user. A report records what you reported, any note you add, and the fact that you were the person who filed it, so that we can review it.
Photographs
- Photographs you take or select for a plant, a health check or your profile. Please see section 5 for how these are processed.
Technical and device information
- A device notification token, provided by Firebase Cloud Messaging, so that we can send you push notifications.
- Basic diagnostic and stability information provided by our infrastructure providers.
- An advertising identifier used to serve advertisements. Please see section 6.
What we do not collect. Thalo does not track your precise location, does not read your contacts, and does not sell your personal data to anyone.
3. How we use your information
- To create and secure your account, and to sign you in.
- To store and synchronise your gardens, plants and care history.
- To let you share gardens and connect with the friends you invite.
- To send watering reminders and notifications about friend requests, garden invitations and watering requests. Watering reminders are scheduled on your device, so they do not require us to track your activity on a server.
- To identify plants and assess plant health from the photographs you submit, as described in section 5.
- To review reports of inappropriate content or behaviour, and to act on them.
- To display advertising, which helps keep the app free.
- To operate, debug and improve the app.
Our lawful bases
Under the UK GDPR we must have a lawful basis for each use of your personal data. Ours are as follows.
| What we do | Lawful basis |
|---|---|
| Creating and securing your account, storing and synchronising your gardens, plants and care history, sharing gardens with the people you invite, and sending notifications about friend requests, garden invitations and watering requests | Performance of our contract with you, that is, providing the app you asked for |
| Identifying plants and assessing plant health from photographs you submit | Performance of our contract with you, at your request each time you run a scan |
| Showing personalised advertisements, and storing or reading the identifiers on your device that make them possible | Your consent, which you give or refuse in the choice described in section 6 and may change at any time |
| Showing advertisements that are not personalised, in order to fund a free app | Our legitimate interest in keeping Thalo free, together with your consent for anything stored on or read from your device |
| Keeping the app working and safe: diagnostics, App Check, rate limiting, and reviewing reports of abuse | Our legitimate interest in a service that functions and is not misused |
| Answering your emails and handling requests about your data | Our legal obligations, and our legitimate interest in supporting the people who use the app |
4. Sharing and third party services
We do not sell your data. We do rely on trusted service providers to run the app, and the data you provide is processed by the following.
| Service | Purpose | Data involved |
|---|---|---|
| Google Firebase (Authentication, Firestore, Storage, Cloud Messaging, App Check) | Accounts, data storage, photograph storage, push notifications | Account information, your content, photographs, device token |
| Google Sign-In | Optional sign-in method | Email address, basic Google profile |
| Plant identification and health API (Plant.id) | Identifying species and assessing plant health from photographs | Plant and health check photographs you submit |
| Google Cloud Functions (Europe) | Server side handling of friend and garden invitations, watering requests, notifications and account deletion | Account identifiers, the invitation or request being processed |
| Google AdMob | In-app advertising | Advertising identifier, advertisement interaction data |
These providers process data under their own privacy policies. Google's policy is available at policies.google.com/privacy.
Where your data is processed. Our server side functions run in Google's Belgian region (europe-west1). Google and Plant.id are international organisations, and your data may therefore be processed outside the United Kingdom, including in the United States. Where that happens, the transfer is covered by the safeguards those providers offer for international transfers, such as the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. If you would like more detail about a particular transfer, please email us.
Sharing with other users. When you join a shared garden, the other members of that garden can see the plants, photographs, watering history, care assignments, your display name and your avatar within that garden. Please share gardens only with people you trust.
What other Thalo users can see. We want to be straightforward about this. Gardens and the plants inside them are readable only by the members of that garden. Some other records are readable by any signed-in Thalo user, not only by your friends or fellow garden members. This applies to your profile (your username, display name, avatar and care statistics), to your health check results, to watering log entries, and to the images the app stores, which include plant photographs, profile photographs and health check photographs. Someone would need to know where to look rather than simply being handed a list, but the rules do not stop them. Please treat anything you upload as visible to other people using the app, and do not put anything private in a photograph or a plant note.
Share links. The app can produce a link to a garden or to a profile, which you may send to whomever you choose. Anyone who holds a garden link and has a Thalo account can join that garden and then see everything in it. A garden keeps the same link once one has been created, and there is at present no way to expire it, so please pass it only to people you mean to invite. If a link has gone astray, contact us and we shall help.
5. Photographs and AI processing
When you use plant identification or a health check, the photographs you take (which may be combined into a single image) are uploaded to our secure storage and sent to a third party plant analysis service, which returns a result. To reduce cost and repeat processing, the app may keep a local cache of recent results on your device, so that re-scanning the same photograph does not call the service again.
Photographs you attach to a plant or to your profile are stored in Firebase Storage. They are shown to you and, in the case of garden plants, to the members of that garden, but the storage rules currently allow any signed-in Thalo user to retrieve an image if they know where it is kept. Please see section 4 before you upload anything you would not want another user to come across. We do not use your photographs to build advertising profiles.
6. Advertising
Thalo shows advertisements through Google AdMob in order to keep the app free. There are two kinds: a banner on some screens, and rewarded videos that unlock plant identification and health checks. AdMob may use a device advertising identifier and limited interaction data to serve, cap and measure advertisements.
Your choice about personalised advertising. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, the app asks for your choice before it serves advertisements, using Google's consent form. You may accept personalised advertising, or refuse it and see advertisements that are not personalised. Either of those keeps the whole app available to you.
If instead you refuse advertising altogether, so that we may not serve you any advertisement at all, then plant identification and health checks stop working, because a short video advertisement is what pays for each of those. Everything else in Thalo carries on as normal: your gardens, plants, watering reminders, history and friends are all unaffected. If you try to identify a plant or run a health check, the app tells you why it cannot and offers to reopen the choice there and then, so nothing is a dead end.
You can change your mind at any time from the advertising privacy option in the app's Settings screen, which reopens the same form. You can also reset or delete your advertising identifier in your Android settings, under Settings, then Privacy, then Ads. Where we rely on your consent, withdrawing it is as easy as giving it, and withdrawal does not affect anything done beforehand.
We do not build advertising profiles ourselves, and we do not give AdMob your email address, your photographs or the contents of your gardens. You can learn more in Google's AdMob data disclosure.
7. Data retention and deletion
We keep your account data and content for as long as your account exists. You may do any of the following.
- Delete individual plants, photographs, gardens and your profile photograph from within the app at any time.
- Delete your entire account at any time from inside the app, under Settings, then Danger zone, then Delete account. This immediately and permanently deletes your profile, photographs, health check history, watering history, and any gardens that only you own, together with their plants and photographs. Gardens you share with others are handed to another member rather than deleted, so that their shared history is not wiped out by your leaving.
- Alternatively, email sem.merzlikin@gmail.com and we shall delete your account on your behalf, normally within a few days.
When you sign out or delete your account, your device notification token is removed, so the device no longer receives notifications for that account.
8. Security
Your data is transmitted over encrypted connections (HTTPS and TLS) and stored on Google Firebase infrastructure. Access rules keep your data away from the general public: reading anything at all requires a Thalo account, only you can write to your own profile, only the members of a garden can read that garden and its plants, and only you can upload or delete your own photographs. We also use Firebase App Check to help ensure that requests come from the genuine app.
Those rules are not as tight as they could be, and section 4 sets out honestly which records other signed-in users are able to read. We intend to narrow them. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information, and we would rather tell you where the limits are than imply protection we do not yet provide.
9. Children
Thalo is not directed to children under 13, or under the minimum age of digital consent in your country, whichever is higher. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe that a child has provided us with data, please contact us and we shall remove it.
10. Your rights
Under the UK GDPR, and under the EU GDPR if you are in the European Economic Area, you have the right to:
- ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and to have it corrected if it is wrong;
- have your data deleted, which you can also do yourself at any time from inside the app;
- ask us to restrict how we use your data, or object to processing we carry out on the basis of our legitimate interests;
- receive the data you gave us in a portable form;
- withdraw consent where we rely on it, such as for personalised advertising, without affecting anything done before you withdrew it.
To exercise any of these rights, please email sem.merzlikin@gmail.com. We shall respond within one month, and shall tell you if we need longer because the request is complex. Exercising these rights is free.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first. If you are in the European Economic Area, you may instead complain to the supervisory authority in your own country.
11. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the app evolves. When we make material changes, we shall update the "last updated" date at the top of this page. Continued use of the app after such changes means that you accept the updated policy.
12. Contact
If you have questions about this policy or about your data, please email sem.merzlikin@gmail.com.