Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 April 2026 (raised minimum age to 18 following Apple age-rating system change; added PostHog product-analytics sub-processor disclosure, expanded the Sentry disclosure to cover mobile-app breadcrumb capture, and clarified that the in-app "Send anonymous usage data" toggle controls product analytics only)

FarmAsk ("we," "us," or "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you use our mobile application.

Information We Collect

Account Information

Age Attestation

At onboarding you confirm that you are 18 or older. We store only a timestamp proving you gave that confirmation. We do not collect or store your date of birth — keeping a DOB would be unnecessary data and we do not need it to enforce the age gate.

Farm Profile

Conversation Data

Farm Notebook Facts (Optional Feature)

If you enable Farm Notebook:

Content Reports

If you report a problematic AI response from the chat screen, we store your user ID, the ID of the reported message, the reason you chose (harmful, inaccurate, offensive, dangerous, privacy, other), any free-text details you provide, the review status, and any admin notes made during review. Reports are retained as part of our safety audit trail and to demonstrate compliance with Apple's App Store content moderation requirements.

Usage Information

How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

Farm Notebook (Optional Feature)

Farm Notebook is an opt-in feature that is OFF by default.

What It Does

When enabled, FarmAsk learns farming-related facts from your conversations to provide more personalized advice. For example, if you mention you have 150 dairy cows, we'll remember this for future conversations.

Your Control

Privacy Protections

Anonymous Farming Intelligence (Opt-In)

FarmAsk has an optional feature that collects anonymised, aggregated data about farming conditions mentioned in conversations. This helps us identify regional trends in farming.

This feature is OFF by default. We do not extract any anonymous intelligence from your conversations unless you explicitly turn it on in Settings → Privacy → Help improve FarmAsk. You can turn it off again at any time.

What We Collect (only if you opt in)

If you enable the feature, when farming topics are discussed in chat we may record:

What We Do NOT Collect

Preventing Duplicate Counting

To ensure data accuracy, we use a one-way cryptographic hash to prevent the same issue being counted multiple times from the same account on the same day. This hash cannot be reversed to identify you — it simply tells our system "this has already been counted today." These hashes are automatically deleted after 7 days.

Why We Collect This

How This Data Is Different

This data is truly anonymous under GDPR (Recital 26). Unlike your farm profile and conversation history, this data:

Opt-In and Opt-Out

This feature is OFF by default for everyone. To enable it, go to Settings → Privacy → Help improve FarmAsk. To disable it again, turn the same toggle off — this stops any new data being extracted from your future conversations, and takes effect within a few seconds.

Because anonymous intelligence data contains no user identifier of any kind, we cannot retroactively identify or remove data extracted while the feature was enabled. That is inherent to the anonymisation model and is the whole reason the data is anonymous under GDPR. If that trade-off isn't right for you, leave the feature off.

Data Sharing and Licensing

Because anonymous farming intelligence data does not identify any individual farmer or farm — it is not personal data under GDPR Recital 26 once extracted and aggregated — we may:

Safeguards applied to every external dataset or publication:

What we will never do, under any circumstance:

Your control: You can withdraw your consent to anonymous intelligence collection at any time in Settings → Privacy → Help improve FarmAsk. Withdrawal immediately stops future reports from being extracted from your conversations. Previously-extracted anonymous reports remain in our aggregated dataset because there is no user identifier that would allow them to be found and removed — this is the basis on which the data is classed as anonymous under GDPR Recital 26 and is disclosed above.

Third-Party AI Services

FarmAsk uses third-party AI services to generate farming advice.

What We Send to the AI Provider

Important Privacy Protections

AI Provider

We currently use Anthropic's Claude AI service under Anthropic's commercial API terms, which prohibit Anthropic from using your prompts or responses to train their models. For more information about how Anthropic handles data, see Anthropic's Privacy Policy.

AI Content Labelling

Every AI response is delivered to the app with an "AI-generated" flag and is labelled as such in the chat interface. Responses are not presented as the work of a human expert.

Voice Notes

Voice recordings are uploaded from your device directly to our Supabase Storage bucket in the EU (Frankfurt) using a short-lived pre-signed upload URL. Our backend then downloads the file and sends it to OpenAI (Whisper) for transcription. OpenAI does not retain the audio after processing. As soon as transcription succeeds, we immediately delete the raw audio file from our Storage bucket — we only ever hold the raw voiceprint for the seconds it takes to transcribe. Only the resulting transcribed text is retained, as part of your chat message. See OpenAI's Privacy Policy.

Photo Storage

When you attach a photo to a chat message, the file is uploaded directly from your device to a private Supabase Storage bucket hosted in the EU (Frankfurt), using a short-lived pre-signed upload URL generated by our backend. The raw file does not pass through our application server during upload — your device sends the bytes straight to Supabase.

Retention

Privacy Protections

Notifiable Animal Disease Warnings

FarmAsk's AI is instructed to identify symptoms in conversations that could indicate a notifiable animal disease (such as foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza, bluetongue, bovine tuberculosis, or African swine fever). When this happens, the AI places a prominent warning at the top of the response directing you to your country's statutory veterinary authority:

This is a safety feature, not legal advice. In most jurisdictions you have a legal duty to report suspected notifiable disease to the statutory authority on suspicion alone, without waiting for a confirmed diagnosis. FarmAsk is not a substitute for statutory notification, and a vet referral alone is not a substitute either. You or your vet must make the statutory notification yourself.

Content Reporting and Moderation

If you believe an AI response is harmful, inaccurate, offensive, dangerous, or violates your or someone else's privacy, you can report it directly from the chat screen using the "Report this response" menu on any AI message. We aim to review all reports within 24 hours. Depending on severity, we may adjust the underlying system prompt, contact you for more information, remove or hide the offending response, update our moderation rules, or escalate to the relevant authority. Repeated bad-faith reporting may result in account suspension.

How We Share Your Information

We NEVER Sell Your Data

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to anyone. Period.

Sub-Processors

We share information only as necessary to provide our service. We have Data Processing Agreements in place with all of the sub-processors below.

Sub-processorPurposeData sharedLocation
Anthropic (Claude)Farming advice, photo analysis, Farm Notebook extraction, Anonymous Intelligence extraction (opt-in)Messages, images, farm profile, recent conversation historyUSA
OpenAI (Whisper)Voice note transcriptionVoice audio (not retained by OpenAI after processing)USA
SupabaseDatabase and authentication hostingAll account dataEU (Frankfurt)
RevenueCatSubscription state and billing reconciliationAccount identifier, purchase eventsUSA
BrevoPassword reset emailsEmail address, reset codeEU
SentryError and performance trackingAccount UUID, request path, error stack traces (passwords, tokens, and uploaded media are scrubbed before transmission)EU / USA
PostHog (EU)Product analytics — funnel events such as account registered, onboarding completed, daily limit hit, subscription state changesAccount UUID, country, subscription tier, event metadata. We never send your name, email, phone number, message text, or photos. Captured server-side from our backend, so PostHog does not see your device IP.EU (Frankfurt)
AppleSign in with Apple, App Store paymentsApple ID identity token, purchase identifiersUSA
Farming Trends (anonymous, opt-in)Not linked to any userAnalytics, app improvementEU (Frankfurt)

International transfers to US-based processors rely on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum. A copy of the relevant clauses is available on request from privacy@farmask.ai.

Legal Requirements

We may disclose information if required by law or to protect our rights, users' safety, or comply with legal processes.

Error Tracking and Product Analytics — Two Separate Systems

FarmAsk uses two operational data flows that are easy to confuse but legally distinct. We want to be explicit about both.

1. Error tracking (Sentry). When something goes wrong on our servers (an unhandled exception, a 5xx response, a webhook failure), we capture a structured error event and send it to Sentry. Each event includes your account UUID, the request method and path, the error stack trace, and a sample of recent server-side events leading up to the error. Passwords, reset codes, Apple identity tokens, push tokens, and any uploaded media are stripped before the event is transmitted. We also sample approximately 10% of all requests for performance tracing (timing data, no message content). This processing is necessary to keep the service running and secure, so we rely on legitimate interest (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) as our legal basis. You have the right to object under Article 21, but because error tracking is a security-of-network-and-information-systems function (GDPR Recital 49), we may continue this processing if our overriding legitimate interest in service integrity outweighs your specific objection. If you object, please contact us at privacy@farmask.ai and we will assess and respond within one month.

Mobile app error tracking. Our iOS app uses Sentry's React Native SDK to detect crashes and errors on your device. By default this records short "breadcrumbs" describing the actions immediately preceding an error — which screen you were on, which button you tapped, which network request was in flight. These breadcrumbs are attached to error reports only and are sent to Sentry alongside the crash. We have configured the SDK to scrub form-field values from the breadcrumbs. The same legitimate-interest basis (Article 6(1)(f)) applies as for server-side error tracking.

2. Product analytics (PostHog). Separately, we capture a small set of funnel and usage events — for example, "user registered", "onboarding completed", "daily limit hit", "subscription activated". These help us understand which parts of the app work for new farmers and which need improvement. Each event includes your account UUID, your country, and event-specific metadata (such as which subscription tier was activated); it never includes your name, email, message text, or photo content. We process these events under legitimate interest (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)), balanced against your right to object under Article 21. You can object at any time using the "Send anonymous usage data" toggle in Settings → Privacy. When this toggle is off, we stop generating product analytics events for your account immediately.

What the toggle does and does not cover. The "Send anonymous usage data" toggle controls product analytics (PostHog) only. It does not turn off error tracking (Sentry) — error tracking is required to keep the service running and is processed under separate legitimate interest. It also does not turn off subscription lifecycle records (RevenueCat tier changes, billing issue notifications) or account deletion records, which we keep regardless because they are required to perform the subscription contract you have with us (Article 6(1)(b)) and to demonstrate compliance with your right to erasure (Article 17).

Payments

Subscriptions are managed through Apple's App Store. We do not access your payment details. Subscription status is synced via RevenueCat. See RevenueCat's Privacy Policy.

Data Storage and Retention

How Long We Keep Your Data

Where We Store Your Data

Data is stored in a Supabase database hosted in the EU (Frankfurt). Encrypted in transit and at rest.

Your Rights and Control

Access Your Data

Edit Your Data

Delete Your Data

What happens at third parties when you delete your account: We immediately remove your data from our own database and make a best-effort request to RevenueCat to delete your subscriber record. However, our error-tracking provider Sentry retains error logs that may contain your internal account identifier (a UUID, never your email or name) for up to 90 days after deletion, subject to their retention policy — we cannot individually purge Sentry entries. Transactional email logs at Brevo are similarly subject to their retention policy (up to 30 days). Data sent to Anthropic and OpenAI during AI processing is retained by those providers for a short abuse-monitoring window (typically 30 days) and then purged. All such third-party retention is time-limited and automatic.

Opt-Out Options

Data Portability

Download a complete copy of your data at any time from Settings → Privacy → Download my data. The download is a JSON file containing your account record, conversations, messages, Farm Notebook facts, and any content reports you have filed. Exports are rate-limited to one per hour.

Location Data

Auto-Detection

During onboarding, we auto-detect your country using your device's region settings. You can confirm or change this before continuing.

How We Use Location Data

Your Control

We do not collect: GPS location, contacts, browsing history, or advertising identifiers.

Children's Privacy

FarmAsk is intended for users aged 18 and over. At onboarding, every user must affirmatively confirm they are 18 or older before they can complete the farm profile and start using the chat. We record only the timestamp of that confirmation — we do not collect a date of birth. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe we have collected data from a person under 18, contact us immediately at support@farmask.ai and we will delete it.

California Privacy Rights (CCPA)

If you are a California resident, you have additional rights:

We do not sell your personal information to anyone. This is built into our service, not an option you need to enable.

To exercise your CCPA rights, contact us at support@farmask.ai.

European Privacy Rights (GDPR)

If you are located in the European Economic Area or United Kingdom, you have additional rights under GDPR:

Legal Basis for Processing

Your GDPR Rights

Data Controller

Sinden Digital (trading as FarmAsk)
Oxford, United Kingdom
Email: support@farmask.ai

Supervisory Authority

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the ICO if you believe we have violated your privacy rights.

Tracking

We do not use cookies on our website, third-party advertising identifiers, or cross-site tracking. We do not sell or share your data with advertising networks.

We do use a small amount of operational telemetry to keep the service running and improve it, all of which is described in the Error Tracking and Product Analytics section above. The product-analytics portion is opt-out via the in-app toggle.

Security

We use industry-standard security measures to protect your information:

Server Access Logs

When you use the FarmAsk app or website, our web server (nginx) automatically records the following for each request, for security and abuse-prevention purposes: your IP address, the timestamp, the HTTP method and path, the response status code, and your device's user agent string. These server access logs are retained for 14 days and are then automatically deleted by the system’s log rotation. Access logs are kept in flat files on our server, are not indexed against your user account, and are used only for security monitoring and debugging. Our legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interest in protecting the service from abuse (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)).

Temporary Caching and Rate Limiting

To improve performance and prevent abuse, we temporarily hold some personal data in an in-memory cache (Redis) on our own server:

Our legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interest in providing a responsive service and preventing account compromise (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)).

However, no method of transmission over the Internet is 100% secure. While we strive to protect your data, we cannot guarantee absolute security. In the event of a personal data breach that presents a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware, as required by GDPR Article 34.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make significant changes, we will:

Contact

Email: support@farmask.ai
Privacy: privacy@farmask.ai
Website: farmask.ai

We aim to respond to all privacy inquiries within 48 hours. For account deletion or data access requests, we will respond within 30 days as required by law.


Summary (TL;DR)