The short version
Here’s the whole privacy stance in a nutshell. The full policy below is the authoritative version — this box is just the honest summary.
Privacy Policy
Moon Phase Garden is built around a simple privacy promise: we collect the absolute minimum data we need to make the app work, and we do not collect anything we don't need. This page tells you exactly what we do collect, what we don't, and what we do with it.
1. What we collect
When you create an account in the community feature, we store:
- Username — the one you pick. Keep it pseudonymous if you want.
- Password — stored as an Argon2id hash. We cannot read or recover your password.
- 12-word recovery phrase — stored as an Argon2id hash so we can verify it during recovery. We cannot read it back.
- USDA hardiness zone (optional) — used to filter posts and recommendations to your region.
- Recovery email (optional, opt-in) — used only to send password-reset links if you forget your password. Add or remove it any time from the Account page.
- Session tokens — stored as a SHA-256 hash on the server. The raw token lives only on your device.
- Posts and photos you publish — visible to other users if public, hidden if private.
- User agent string — the kind of device/browser you used when signing in. Helps us debug. No advertising use.
2. What we do not collect
- Your real name.
- Your phone number.
- Your precise location. We use only the USDA zone string you provide.
- Your full IP address. The community backend never records it at all, and our website analytics masks it before storage — see section 4.
- Advertising identifiers. No ad SDKs run in the app.
- EXIF metadata on photos. We strip it on the server before storage, so embedded GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers, and timestamps are removed.
3. How we use what we collect
- To authenticate you (password / passphrase / recovery email).
- To show your posts to other community members per the visibility you choose.
- To filter content to your USDA zone when relevant.
- To prevent abuse (rate-limiting on signup, login, and posting).
We do not sell, rent, or share your data with advertisers, analytics companies, or third-party brokers. Period.
4. Third-party services and website analytics
The community feature uses our web host's standard email infrastructure to send password-reset emails when you request one. If you have not provided a recovery email, no email is ever sent on your behalf.
The app does not contain Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, Crashlytics, Facebook SDK, or any advertising SDK. Moon phase calculations and plant data run entirely on your device.
How we count visits to this website
This website — not the app — counts visits using Matomo, an open-source analytics program running on our own server at moonphasegarden.com/analytics. Nothing is sent to Google, Meta, or any analytics company, because there is no third party in the arrangement to send it to. The data sits in our database and nowhere else. We run it for one reason: so we can tell which pages people actually read and which ones nobody ever finds.
What it records: the pages you view, the site or search engine you arrived from, your approximate country and region, your device type, browser and screen size, and how long you stayed.
What it does not do. It sets no cookies — none, not even a “functional” one — so there is nothing to consent to and nothing that can follow you to another website. It honours Do Not Track: if your browser sends that signal, your visit is not recorded at all. And it masks IP addresses — your full address is used for a fraction of a second to work out an approximate country and region, then the last two blocks are zeroed before anything reaches the database, so 73.42.118.9 is stored as 73.42.0.0. We cannot identify you from what is stored, and neither could anyone who ever got hold of the database.
5. Data retention
- Sessions expire automatically after 30 days of inactivity.
- Password-reset tokens expire after 60 minutes.
- Posts and photos remain until you delete them or your account.
- Deleted account data is purged from our database within 30 days. Photos are deleted immediately.
- Individual analytics visit records are deleted automatically after 180 days. Only the aggregate counts — how many people read a given page in a given month — are kept beyond that.
6. Your rights
You can, at any time:
- Edit or remove your recovery email from the Account page.
- Delete individual posts you've published.
- Delete your entire account by emailing us (see contact below). Account deletion is permanent.
- Use the app without ever creating a community account. Most features work entirely offline.
7. Security
Passwords and recovery phrases are hashed with Argon2id (memory 64 MB, time cost 4). Session tokens are hashed with SHA-256 on the server; only the hash lives in the database, never the raw token. All web and API traffic is forced over HTTPS. On Android, your session token is stored in the Keystore-backed EncryptedSharedPreferences.
No system is perfect. We follow standard practices and continue to update them as the security landscape changes. If you discover a vulnerability, please report it to the contact email below.
8. Children
Moon Phase Garden is intended for users 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe a child has signed up, contact us and we'll remove the account.
9. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we will update the "last updated" date at the top. Material changes — anything that changes what data we collect or how we use it — will be announced inside the app and on the community feed at least 14 days before they take effect.
10. Contact
Questions, account deletion requests, or security reports: brian@iamgeek.com
See also: Terms of Service · Attribution