Your details, treated with care.

Plant It On is a free, non-commercial service, personally operated by Stuart Hough, established in United Kingdom. It is not operated through a registered company. Contact hello@plantiton.com.

Plant It On connects adult gardeners for free local collections in England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland listings and website-arranged deliveries are not supported.

What we use, and why

• Account email, authentication, accepted terms information and a record of first-time membership confirmation, to provide and secure membership.
• Listing descriptions, country, town or area and photographs, to publish and manage your free items.
• An optional preferred name, to personalise your private welcome and Account settings. This is separate from any name you choose to send with an enquiry.
• Your chosen name, enquiries, replies and notification details, to keep private conversations together.
• Reports, blocks, complaints and proportionate security records, to protect people and investigate misuse.
• Contact enquiries and privacy requests, to respond and administer the service.

We use account, listing and conversation information as necessary to provide the member service you request. We rely on our legitimate interests in responding to enquiries and protecting members for proportionate safety and security processing, taking account of your rights. Where a specific law requires processing, we rely on that legal obligation. Any optional processing requiring consent is explained separately. Accepting the Terms is not consent to advertising.

When you register, we use the date of birth you enter to calculate whether you are 18 or over. We do not save the full date in your account or send it to Supabase. Only a signed, short-lived eligibility result is used to complete registration, and the adult/Terms declaration is recorded. This checks the date you declare; it does not verify your identity or age using documents.

Who sees your information?

Your preferred welcome name is private to your account. We do not derive it from your email or automatically add it to public listings, messages or other members’ profiles. You can change or remove it in Account settings.

Listings and photographs are public. Use a town or area, not a home address, and check photographs for private details. New photographs are prepared to remove file metadata before upload; this does not remove addresses visible in a photo or certify older uploads.

New conversations are available to their participating members; account email addresses are not displayed to the other gardener. Earlier guest enquiries remain available only to their original listing owner and may include the sender’s supplied email address. Notifications from hello@plantiton.com link back to My Messages. Replying to a notification email reaches the site’s contact inbox, not the other gardener.

The operator may access relevant information where necessary and lawful to investigate reports, safeguard users or respond to a legal request. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. Reporting does not publish private messages or the reporter’s contact details.

Simple automated text checks on public listings can suggest plant-rule, payment, spam, contact-information or behaviour reviews. These uncertain suggestions do not automatically restrict members or delete listings. Private conversations are not scanned by these checks. The operator assesses context; you can contact us to ask for a decision to be reviewed.

The services behind the garden

Supabase supports accounts, database and photographs; Vercel hosts the website; Resend sends transactional email; Cloudflare supports domain, security and email-routing services. Contact mail is forwarded through Cloudflare Email Routing to the operator’s Yahoo Mail mailbox; the personal mailbox address is not published. Our main records are stored in Frankfurt, Germany. Some services may handle information outside the UK. Our Vercel Pro hosting is covered by its Data Processing Addendum, including provisions for transfers from the UK. The location of our main records does not describe every service’s processing. Contact hello@plantiton.com for information about the applicable provider safeguards.

Approved retention arrangements

• New or renewed listings: 90 days (about three months). Existing explicit expiry dates are preserved until renewal.
• Inactive listing information: 12 months after becoming inactive.
• Unneeded photographs: delete within 30 days after the listing becomes inactive, subject to valid references and lawful holds.
• Conversations and earlier enquiries: 12 months after the last message.
• Reports and complaints: 12 months after closure.
• Contact enquiries: six months after resolution.
• Dormant accounts: review after 24 months with advance notice, rather than immediate deletion.

These are our retention limits. Earlier guest enquiries are also reviewed after 12 months, protecting related conversations and necessary safety records. Automatic deletion is switched off; the operator reviews older information against these limits. You can ask us to delete your information. Photograph access is checked and reported photographs can be withheld without deleting them. Copies someone has already downloaded cannot be recalled. A necessary, documented safety investigation or legal obligation may justify retaining specified information longer; it must have a review date.

Recovery copies are encrypted and access is restricted. A copy may retain older information until it is securely replaced or removed. We record erasure requests and necessary safety holds so that restoring a backup does not restore a closed account for ordinary use. Contact us about information in recovery copies.

If detected child sexual exploitation or abuse is reported to the National Crime Agency, the law requires us to keep the report reference for five years and the specified content and related evidence for one year from reporting. This is a specific legal exception, not a reason to keep everyone’s information longer.

Closing your account

To close your account, choose “Delete my account” in Account settings and confirm once. If the option is unavailable, you cannot sign in or you need help, email hello@plantiton.com.

Closure removes the authentication account, owned listings, unneeded photos and queued notifications. Own messages are removed or redacted; other members retain their accounts and remaining conversation history, with known account identifiers redacted. Photos genuinely referenced by others are preserved under neutral references. Specific necessary legal or safety evidence is segregated privately with a documented reason, review and expiry date; a serious unresolved report may require a short evidence review. This is not a reason to retain all account data. Read the process and exceptions.

Notifications already delivered cannot be recalled. Provider backups and external mailbox/provider records require separate erasure and expiry procedures. Contact us about residual personal information in another member’s content. A failed or interrupted closure is shown as pending until verified complete. A minimal private deletion marker is kept as necessary to prevent erased accounts being restored from backups; it is reviewed with backup expiry, rather than used as a continuing account profile.

Your choices and rights

Depending on the circumstances, you can request access, correction, erasure, restriction or portability, and object to processing based on legitimate interests. You can withdraw consent for optional processing that relies on it. Rights have conditions and exceptions.

Write to hello@plantiton.com or read account deletion and your data. We verify requests proportionately; do not send passwords or identity documents by default. Data-rights requests are normally handled within one calendar month under the applicable rules; a lawful extension or exception must be explained.

You can make a privacy complaint at hello@plantiton.com, without an account or a special form. We acknowledge privacy complaints within 30 days, investigate without undue delay, keep you informed and explain the outcome without undue delay. This is separate from the usual one-calendar-month response period for data-rights requests. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Cookies and browser storage

Read Cookies & browser storage for account/session and theme storage. Optional Vercel visitor statistics run only if you allow them there. We use them to improve public pages and count registration starts and first email confirmations, not for advertising. These counts are not linked to your account. Private member pages are excluded and we remove query details and listing identifiers from page statistics. We do not send names, email addresses, dates of birth or message content to analytics. Vercel processes request information to produce aggregate reports; its short-lived visitor identifier is discarded after 24 hours according to its analytics privacy information. Our Pro analytics has a standard reporting window of 12 months. You can withdraw your choice at any time through Cookies & storage; withdrawal stops new collection and does not remove statistics already aggregated. No advertising tools have been added.

Please contact us if you have questions about your information.