Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective 17 September 2026 · Applies to the BonsaiGlobe app for iPhone and iPad and to bonsaiglobe.com

1. Who is responsible

BonsaiGlobe is developed and published by Kasper Madvig, Denmark (“we”, “the developer”). Questions about this policy can be sent through the contact form.

2. What the app stores

The app stores the information you choose to enter about your collection:

• Details of your bonsai and pots, such as names, identifiers, origin, acquisition, measurements, tags and notes.
• Care entries (repotting, pruning, wiring, woodwork, fertilizing, defoliation) with their dates, details and notes.
• Photos you add to the photo journal or to a care entry, with dates and captions.
• Reminders and their schedule.
• Settings such as appearance, notification time and growing season.
• Your profile name and photo, if you add them. They are stored with the rest of your collection and follow it to your other devices through iCloud when sync is on.

All of this is kept in the app’s own storage on your device. It is never sent to the developer or to any third party.

3. iCloud sync

When you are signed in to iCloud on your device and iCloud is enabled for BonsaiGlobe, the app uses Apple’s CloudKit service to keep the same data available on your other devices. The data is stored in the private database of your own iCloud account. Only you and your devices can access it; the developer has no access and no way to read it.

Apple processes this data as part of iCloud under Apple’s own terms and privacy policy. You can turn iCloud off for BonsaiGlobe at any time in your device’s Settings under your Apple Account → iCloud. The app keeps working with the data already on the device.

To let iCloud tell the app that something changed on another device, the app registers for silent push notifications. These carry no personal information and are not shown to you.

4. Camera and photo library

The app asks for camera access only when you choose to take a photo. Picking existing photos goes through the system photo picker, which needs no permission. The app asks to read your photo library only when a photo you picked arrives as a small preview because its original is kept in iCloud; with that permission it downloads the originals of the photos you pick, and nothing else. It never browses your library on its own. Photos you add are copied into the app’s storage; the originals in your library are not modified. If you use “Save to Photos”, the app writes a copy of that photo to your photo library and needs the corresponding permission. You can change these permissions at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security.

5. Notifications

Reminders are delivered as local notifications scheduled on your device. Nothing about your reminders leaves the device. You can turn notifications off in the app’s settings or in the system Settings.

6. Exports, backups and hand-overs

Backups (zip), CSV exports, PDF reports and hand-over files are created only when you ask for them, and they go exactly where you send them: iCloud Drive, another app, AirDrop, e-mail and so on. What happens to a file after that is governed by the service you choose.

A hand-over file holds the tree or pot you picked, with its photos and care entries, and your profile name if you have set one, so the receiver can see who it came from. Opening a hand-over file adds its contents to your own collection; nothing is sent back to the sender, and the developer is not involved in the exchange.

7. What we do not do

• No accounts, sign-ups or passwords.
• No analytics, crash-reporting or tracking libraries.
• No advertising and no advertising identifiers.
• No third-party services other than Apple’s iCloud, and only if you enable it.
• No sale, sharing or transfer of your data to anyone. The only files that leave the app are the ones you send yourself.

8. Deleting your data

Items you delete in the app go to the Trash, where they can be restored or deleted permanently. Deleting the app removes all its data from that device. Data synced to iCloud can be removed from your iCloud account in Settings → your Apple Account → iCloud → Manage Account Storage, or by turning iCloud off for BonsaiGlobe on each device and deleting the app.

9. The website

bonsaiglobe.com is a static website with one contact form. Apart from the visitor statistics described below, it loads nothing from third-party servers. On iPhone and iPad, Safari may show a banner at the top of the page that opens BonsaiGlobe on the App Store; Safari draws that banner itself with information it fetches from Apple. When you use the contact form, the name, e-mail address and message you enter are sent to the developer by e-mail, together with your IP address, and are used only to reply. A session cookie is set the moment you start filling in the form to protect it against forged submissions; it holds no personal data and expires when you close the browser. To limit abuse, the site keeps a hashed record of your IP address for one hour after a message is sent. Your hosting provider may keep ordinary server logs (such as IP address and requested page) for a limited time for security and operation.

Visitor statistics (Google Analytics)

The website asks whether it may count your visit. Only if you choose Accept does it load Google Analytics, a service from Google Ireland Limited; if you decline, or never answer, nothing is loaded from Google and no analytics cookie is set. Your answer is remembered in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie, and a browser that sends the Global Privacy Control signal is treated as a “no” without being asked.

With your consent, Google Analytics sets the cookies _ga and _ga_… (kept for up to two years) and records which pages you view, the page that referred you, your browser, device type and language, and an approximate location derived from your IP address, which Google does not store. The developer sees these only as aggregated statistics and uses them to understand how the site is found and read. Advertising features and Google signals are switched off, and visitor-level data is deleted after two months. Google may process the data on servers in the United States, under the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework.

The legal basis is your consent (GDPR article 6(1)(a)). You can withdraw it at any time with the Cookie settings link at the bottom of every page; choosing Decline there stops the measurement and deletes the Analytics cookies. None of this applies to the app, which contains no analytics at all.

10. Children

BonsaiGlobe collects no personal data and is suitable for all ages. It is not directed at children and contains no content of concern.

11. Changes

If this policy changes, the new version is published on this page with a new effective date. Since the app collects no data, changes will normally be clarifications rather than changes in practice.

12. Contact