Privacy Policy

This policy covers the Sankofa Botanical Hub website and application (the "Archive"), operated by The Diasporadical Initiative in partnership with ESOLV DIGITAL Inc.

Account information. If you create an account, we collect your email address and password (handled by our authentication provider, Supabase — we never see or store your raw password). You may optionally add a full name and a display name shown next to your contributions.

Content you contribute. If you document a plant, we collect the photo you submit, any notes you write, and — only if you grant your browser's location permission — the GPS coordinates of where you found the plant. If you submit a community tip, we collect the tip text and which plant it's about. All of this is stored linked to your account.

Usage data. Search terms are logged in aggregate (term + count) to understand what people look for — this is not linked to your account or identity. If curator/admin features are enabled for your account, actions you take there (approving a submission, editing a plant, changing a role) are recorded in an audit log for accountability.

Local device storage. If you document a plant while offline, the submission (including the photo) is queued in your browser's local storage on your own device until you're back online, at which point it syncs to our servers and the local copy is cleared.

To operate your account and let you sign in; to display your contributions and, where you've opted in, your standing on the community leaderboard; to let curators review and verify submissions before they're published; and to run the AI-assisted drafting and safety-check features described in our FAQ.

We rely on a small number of service providers to run the Archive. Each only receives the data it needs to do its job:

• Supabase — our database, authentication, file storage, and backend hosting.
• Google Gemini API — processes submitted photos and text for AI-assisted plant identification, content drafting, the archive search assistant, and community-tip safety checks.
• Upstash — rate-limiting infrastructure that helps prevent abuse of our submission endpoints.
• Vercel — hosts and serves the application.
• A small set of image sources (iNaturalist, Wikimedia Commons, a resizing proxy) are used only to fetch fallback reference photos for plants that don't yet have a community-submitted image — no personal data is sent to them.

We do not use third-party advertising or marketing-analytics trackers.

We use one type of cookie: a session cookie set by our authentication provider so you stay signed in. It's required for account features to work and isn't used for advertising or cross-site tracking.

You can permanently delete your account at any time from Profile Settings. Deleting your account removes your profile, saved plants, community tips, and votes. Plant records and submissions you contributed to the shared archive are kept (traditional knowledge, once verified, is part of a public preservation effort), but are no longer linked to your identity — your authorship is cleared, not the botanical record itself.

You can edit your profile, opt in or out of the public leaderboard, and delete your account at any time from Profile Settings. Location sharing when documenting a plant is always your browser's own permission prompt — you can decline it and still submit a record without GPS coordinates.

The Archive is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them.

If this policy changes materially, we'll update the date at the top of this page.

Questions about this policy or your data can be sent to hello@esolv.digital.