Privacy Policy

Last updated: 3 August 2026

FernsBook is published by KeenShift in Sydney, Australia. This policy describes the iPhone app and the fernsbook.keenshift.ai website, and it is written to match what the software actually does rather than to reserve rights we do not use.

There is no account

The app has no sign-up, no sign-in, no Sign in with Apple, no email field and no profile. You install it and it works. Because there is no identifier for a person, nothing in FernsBook can be linked to you, and there is no login for us to lose.

What stays on your iPhone

• Your notes. Everything you write against a species — your own note, the question you asked, and any coach answer you chose to save with it — is stored locally in the app's own on-device database (SwiftData). It is not uploaded to us, not synced to iCloud by the app, and not readable by us.
• Your care log. Each dated entry you record against a fern — watered, misted, fed, repotted, pruned, moved, and any detail you type with it — goes into that same on-device database. The app's data store is configured with no cloud backing at all: there is no CloudKit container, no sync and no upload path, so a care entry is written to your iPhone and stops there.
• Your coach question count for today. A number and a date are stored in the app's local settings so the three-per-day free allowance can reset at midnight in your time zone. Neither is sent anywhere.
• The species library itself. All thirty-seven entries ship inside the app. Reading, searching and filtering them makes no network request at all.

Deleting the app deletes all of it. Because none of it is uploaded, there is no copy for us to restore, export or hand over — including to ourselves.

What leaves your iPhone, and only then

One feature makes a network request: the fern coach. When you type a question and tap Ask coach, the app sends the following to its own service at fernsbook-api.mitsi-8b0.workers.dev, over HTTPS:

• the text of the question you typed;
• the identifier, common name, botanical name and collection of the species you were reading, so the answer is about that fern;
• the app's version number, so a bad answer can be traced to a build.

That service runs on Cloudflare Workers. It passes your question and the species context to Cloudflare's AI platform, which generates the reply, and it returns the reply to your phone. The request is not written to any database. We operate no user database, and questions are not stored, profiled, used to build a history, or used to train anything of ours.

No account identifier, device identifier, advertising identifier, name or email address is attached, because the app holds none. As with any request to any website, the network connection itself exposes your IP address and a user-agent string to Cloudflare, which processes them as our infrastructure provider to route the request and protect the service from abuse. We do not use them to identify you and we do not receive a log of them tied to your question.

If the request fails — no signal, aeroplane mode, or the service is down — the app writes an answer locally out of that species' own light, water, humidity, soil and watch-out text, and tells you on screen that it did so. In that case nothing left your phone at all.

Exporting your records

FernsBook Pro can turn your notes and your whole care log into a plain-text file. That file is built on your device and handed straight to the standard iOS share sheet. It is not sent to us and it does not pass through any server of ours. Nothing moves until you pick a destination yourself — Files, Notes, Mail, or wherever else you choose — and from that point the file is an ordinary document governed by whatever you sent it to. If you close the share sheet without choosing anything, the file simply goes away.

What FernsBook never asks for

• No camera or photo library access. There is no plant photo identification in FernsBook, so there is no reason to ask.
• No location. Not for native ranges, not for anything.
• No contacts, calendar, microphone or health data.
• No push notifications. The app sends no watering reminders and asks for no notification permission.
• No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDK, and no advertising SDK. There is no advertising identifier, no attribution framework and no cross-app or cross-site tracking in the build. We do not sell or share personal information, and there is none to sell.

Payments and the subscription

FernsBook Pro is bought through Apple's In-App Purchase system. Apple processes the payment; we never see your card details, billing address or Apple Account email. The app asks Apple's own on-device framework whether a valid subscription exists and gets back yes or no. That check does not touch our servers, and we cannot tell which subscriber is which.

This website

fernsbook.keenshift.ai is four static pages. There is no JavaScript on them, no cookie is set, no analytics or tag manager runs, and no font, script or image is loaded from anywhere else — the content security policy on the site blocks all of that outright. Our hosting provider processes ordinary web-server request logs (IP address, time, page, user agent) to serve and protect the site.

Children

FernsBook is a horticultural reference and is not directed at children. It collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

Your rights

Privacy law in Australia, the EEA, the UK and California gives you rights to access, correct, export and delete the personal information a company holds about you. We hold none, so in practice there is nothing for us to return or erase — a request would be answered with exactly that. The data the app does hold is on your device and entirely under your control: swipe away a note in My notes or an entry in a fern's care log, or delete the app to remove everything at once. If you believe we are wrong about any of this, write to us and we will investigate and correct it.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of the app collects something new, this page will be updated before that version ships and the date at the top will change. We will not quietly start collecting under the current wording.