FloraSense – Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 20, 2026  ·  Version 1.1.1
Developer: Saleem Khan  ·  https://florasense.websaleem.com

FloraSense identifies flower species from a photograph using a deep learning model. This policy covers both the FloraSense website and the FloraSense Android app, which send photos to the same service. It explains exactly what data is collected, what leaves your device, how long anything is kept, and what controls you have.

1. Data Collected

FloraSense processes only the following:

• The flower image you choose — the photo you select or capture, resized in your browser before it is sent.
• Ordinary request metadata — the IP address, timestamp, and browser user-agent that accompany any HTTPS request on the internet, as handled by Amazon CloudFront and AWS Lambda.

Identifying a flower requires no personal information at all. There is no sign-up, no login, and no user profile, and FloraSense does not collect your location coordinates, contacts, or device identifiers.

The one exception is the Contact Support form, which is optional and only sends anything if you choose to fill it in. See section 7.

2. What Happens to Your Photo

When you press Identify:

• Your browser resizes the image so its longest edge is at most 1024 pixels and re-encodes it as JPEG. The original full-resolution file never leaves your device.
• The resized image is sent over HTTPS to the classification service.
• The service writes it to a temporary file, runs the model, and deletes that file before returning the response — including when classification fails with an error.
• The species names and confidence scores are returned to your browser and displayed. They are not recorded anywhere.

Your image is never written to a database, an object store, or any durable storage. It is not retained after the request, not reviewed by a human, and not used to train or improve any model.

3. Where Data Is Processed

Classification runs on AWS Lambda in the ap-southeast-2 (Sydney, Australia) region. The web page is served from Amazon S3 through Amazon CloudFront, whose global edge network may terminate your connection at a location closer to you. The image itself is only processed in Sydney.

4. Logs and Retention

• Application logs — the service writes logs to Amazon CloudWatch. These record service start-up and any error messages. They do not contain your image, your predictions, or the contents of your upload. These logs are currently kept without a fixed expiry.
• CDN access logs — CloudFront access logging is not enabled for FloraSense, so no per-request log of your visits is written to storage under our control.
• Your image — retained only for the duration of the request, as described in section 2.

AWS may process request metadata as part of operating its services, under its own terms.

5. Cookies and Tracking

FloraSense sets no cookies and uses no analytics, tracking pixels, fingerprinting, session storage, or advertising technology. Nothing about your visit is persisted in your browser between page loads. The Android app contains no analytics or advertising either, and stores nothing beyond the scan history described in section 9.

6. Third-Party Services

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, content delivery, and compute (S3, CloudFront, Lambda, CloudWatch).
• cdnjs (Cloudflare) — the page loads an icon font stylesheet from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. Your browser's request for that file reveals your IP address to Cloudflare, as with any third-party asset on the web. No FloraSense data is sent with it.
• Formspree — receives the contents of the Contact Support form, and only if you submit it. See section 7.

No data is sold, rented, or shared with advertisers or data brokers. There are none involved.

7. The Contact Support Form

If you send a message through Contact Support, the name, email address, topic, and message text you type are submitted to Formspree (formspree.io), a third-party form delivery service, which forwards them by email to the developer. This is the only place on the site where you are asked for personal information, and nothing is sent unless you complete and submit the form.

• Your email address is used solely to reply to you. It is not added to a mailing list, and there is no mailing list.
• Messages are handled under Formspree's privacy policy and retained in the developer's email account for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry.
• Please do not include sensitive personal information in a support message.

Submitting the form does not attach any photo you identified, and the form is entirely separate from the identification service described above.

8. Camera Permission

On the website: if you use "Take Photo", your browser asks for camera access and hands the resulting picture to the page as a normal file selection. You can revoke this permission in your browser settings at any time.

In the Android app: the app asks for camera access the first time you use it, and requests no permission beyond that. Alongside the camera it holds only INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, which let it reach the service and notice when the connection drops, and VIBRATE, which it uses for feedback on a tap. Choosing an existing photo instead uses the Android system photo picker, which grants access to the single picture you pick and needs no storage permission. You can revoke camera access in Android Settings at any time; the gallery option keeps working without it.

In both cases FloraSense does not stream video, does not access the camera in the background, and receives nothing until you take or choose a photo.

9. Scan History in the Android App

The app keeps a history of your identifications so you can look back at them. Each entry holds a copy of the photo and the species list that came back.

• It is stored in the app's private storage on your device only. It is never uploaded, and the service holds no record of it.
• It is excluded from Android's automatic backup, so it is not copied to Google Drive.
• It keeps the 50 most recent identifications; older entries and their photos are deleted automatically.
• "Clear All" in the History screen deletes every entry and its photo immediately, and uninstalling the app removes all of it.

10. Your Controls

• Do not upload an image, and nothing is transmitted at all.
• Press Retake before identifying to discard a selected photo — it is removed from the page and never sent.
• In the Android app, "Clear All" on the History screen deletes every saved scan and its photo from the device, and uninstalling removes all of it.
• There is no account to delete: none is created, and no photo or prediction is retained, so a data access request about your use of the identifier would return nothing.
• If you have sent a support message, you can ask for it to be deleted from the developer's inbox by replying to it or writing to the same address.

11. Children's Privacy

FloraSense is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, including children under 13.

12. Accuracy and Intended Use

FloraSense recognises 102 flower categories and is correct roughly 86% of the time on its test set. It is a demonstration project. Do not rely on its output for medical, foraging, agricultural, or conservation decisions, or to judge whether a plant is safe to eat or handle. See the Terms of Service.

13. Changes to This Policy

If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date above changes with it. Material changes to how data is handled will be reflected here before they take effect.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent through Contact Support, or raised at github.com/websaleem/FloraSense/issues.

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