Privacy Policy

This page explains what agripure.org collects, why, and which third parties are involved, in plain language. Questions or requests: email hello@agripure.org.

Server logs

Like every website, our server records the technical details of each request: your IP address, the page requested, the date and time, and your browser’s user agent. We use these logs to keep the site running, diagnose errors and block abuse. The site is hosted on a server operated by Hetzner in Germany.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages are read and where visitors come from. Google Analytics sets cookies and processes data such as your IP address (we turn on IP anonymisation) under Google’s privacy policy. We look at aggregate numbers — pages, countries, search terms — not individual visitors. You can opt out with Google’s browser add-on.

Advertising

agripure.org uses Google AdSense to show ads. Google and its partners are third-party vendors that use cookies, including advertising cookies, to serve ads based on your previous visits to this site and to other sites on the internet. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites. Google, not us, decides which ads appear. We do not give advertisers your name, email address or any other detail that identifies you.

You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google’s Ads Settings, or opt out of some third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info. To see how Google uses data from sites that use its services, read How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Newsletter and downloads

If you give us your email address through a newsletter or download form, we use it to send you the newsletter or the download you asked for, and for nothing else. We do not sell, rent or share subscriber addresses. You can ask us to remove your address at any time.

Location tools

The frost-date tool needs a place. If you type a place name, your browser sends that text to Open-Meteo’s geocoding service to find matching locations, and the chosen coordinates go to our server, which fetches historical weather data from Open-Meteo. If you choose “use my location”, your browser asks your permission first. We do not store the location against your identity. Once you unlock the full calendar, your browser remembers that in local storage so the tool stays unlocked.

The chat assistant

The “Ask agripure” assistant answers planting questions from agripure articles and plant profiles. Your question goes to our server, which first masks email addresses, phone numbers, US social security numbers and Pakistani ID card numbers. It does not catch other personal details, so please do not type any. The masked question, the page you asked it on, and the region and zone you chose then go to Google Cloud, which searches our pages and writes the answer. Each conversation carries a random id that we create for it alone; it does not identify you and is not reused. Google handles this on our behalf under the Google Cloud Data Processing Addendum. Google uses these requests only to answer them for us and does not use them to train its models. Anything Google stores for us, such as the conversation thread, is deleted within 180 days after we delete it or stop using the service.

We keep a log of each chat for 180 days so we can check answers and fix mistakes, and we read chats individually. The log holds the masked question, the answer the assistant wrote (even when we chose not to show it), the pages it cited or looked at, the page you asked on, your region and zone, a thumbs vote and an optional note you add, which is masked the same way, plus how the assistant handled the question: the reply type, the topic and any words that matched our safety lists. Backups of our database can hold a chat for some time longer than that.

A keyed hash of your IP address is stored to count how many different people ask; your address itself is held in server memory for about 10 minutes to limit how fast one address can ask, and is not stored in the log. We also store the page you first landed on and the site that sent you there.

For a question about an emergency that matches our filter we keep only the words that matched, not the question. For a question about using plants as medicine that matches our filter we keep neither, only the topic. A sensitive question that our filter does not recognise may be stored like any other.

We may use a question, with personal details removed, to improve an agripure guide, for example as an entry in its frequently-asked-questions section; those entries are public and are not deleted with the chat log. Questions about using plants as medicine, preserving food or foraging are not used this way.

The chat also sends usage events to Google Analytics: the topic area of a question, the type of reply, how the question was entered, the type of page you were on, your region, and whether you clicked a source or gave a thumbs up or down. They never contain the text of a question.

Your browser keeps three small items for the chat, in its own storage rather than in cookies: whether the assistant is switched on (ap-chat-status, for five minutes) and the current conversation (ap-chat-conversation), both cleared when you close the tab, and the zone you picked in the chat (ap-chat-zone), kept until you clear it.

Cookies

Cookies on this site come from three places:

• Google Analytics — measurement cookies (for example _ga).
• Google AdSense and its advertising partners— advertising cookies, as described above.
• Our own — agripure_region and agripure_currency, set only when you pick a region or a currency, plus a short note if you dismiss the region suggestion. They last up to one year and exist only to remember your choice.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. The site works without them; it just will not remember your region or currency.

Your data, your call

You can ask us to show you or delete anything we hold about you, such as a newsletter address or a chat. For a chat, send the text of your question and roughly when you sent it, so we can find it. Deleting a chat does not remove a published frequently-asked-questions entry, or anything Google keeps on its side. Email hello@agripure.org. Requests are handled within 30 days.

Questions about how content on this site is produced are covered separately in editorial honesty. Our terms and contact details are on their own pages.