Privacy

DendroLog keeps a record of a tree collection for the person who owns it. This page says what that record contains, where it is kept, who can see it and how to have it removed.

What is stored

• Your account: your email address and the name you are known by in the app.
• Your collection: each tree’s name, the location recorded for it, its photographs, notes, dated history, and the areas you have drawn.
• Your settings: such as whether accession numbers are shown and where the map opens.

Photographs are kept at the full size the camera took them. Each has a private link that opens it without signing in. The link is long and unguessable, appears only in your own collection and in a spreadsheet you export, and anyone you give it to can open that photograph.

What is not collected

The app and the website contain no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Your location is read only while the app is open on the screen, to place a tree, mark the corner of an area, or show where you are on the map. It is never read in the background, and it is never stored except as the location of a tree or area corner you have chosen to record.

Where it is kept

Records and photographs are stored in Google’s Firebase service, which DendroLog uses as its database and file store. The app also keeps a copy on your phone so it can work without a signal.

A few other services see requests from the app or website as part of their normal work:

• Apple Maps draws the map in the iPhone app, and Google Maps in the Android version.
• OpenStreetMap and Esri supply the map and satellite pictures on the website.
• Expo delivers updates to the app, so fixes arrive without a reinstall.

These services receive the ordinary details of a web request, such as your address on the internet and the area of map being shown. None of them receives your trees, your photographs or your account.

Records sent to be brought in

If you send your existing records so they can be set up in the app, they arrive by email in a Gmail inbox, which is run by Google, and stay there.

They are read and turned into the app’s format with the help of Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, so the contents of the file are sent to Anthropic to be processed. Its handling of them is set out in Anthropic’s own privacy policy. Checking the names against Kew’s list happens on a computer here, with a copy of the list, and sends nothing anywhere.

Ask, and the email and its attachments will be deleted once your collection is set up.

Who can see it

Only your account. The database is set to refuse every other account, so this is not a sharing setting that could be switched on by mistake. There is no public map and no way to publish a collection.

Anthony Crisp, who runs DendroLog, can reach the stored data as its administrator. That access is used only to set up a collection you have asked to have brought in, or to put right a problem you have reported.

Keeping and deleting it

Records are kept for as long as your account exists. You can export the whole collection as a spreadsheet from the website at any time.

To delete your account and everything in it (trees, photographs, history and areas), write to jagc.uggeshall@gmail.com. It will be done within 30 days and you will be told when it is.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask to see what is held about you, have it corrected, or have it deleted. Write to jagc.uggeshall@gmail.com. If you are not satisfied with the answer you may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Changes

If what is collected changes, this page changes first, and its date above changes with it.