Last updated: October 7, 2026
EarthWise Permaculture ("EarthWise," "we," "us," or "our") operates the EarthWise Permaculture Design web application (the "App"). This policy explains what personal information we collect through the App, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. We're a small company registered in Ontario, Canada, and we've tried to write this in plain language rather than dense legal boilerplate. See also our Terms of Use, which governs your use of the App.
EarthWise Permaculture is registered in Ontario, Canada, and is the entity responsible for the App and for the personal information described in this policy. As a Canadian business, our primary obligations are under the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Because the App is available to visitors outside Canada, we've also written the rights and practices below to be broadly consistent with other major privacy frameworks (such as the EU's GDPR), even where they don't formally apply to us.
When you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, display name, and profile picture from Google. We also offer email-and-password sign-in as an alternative — if you use that instead, we collect the email address and password you provide; your password is handled entirely by our authentication provider and we never see or store it in plain text.
The App is a design tool, so most of what it stores is the content of your own designs: zones, sectors, plants, animals, structures, water systems, paths, uploaded site images, and project details like a project or client name. If you fill in the Site Brief section, that can include household-level details you choose to enter — household size, calorie and water needs, available labor, and similar figures — which the App uses to power its own calculations (like water budgets and food self-sufficiency estimates) back to you.
If you set a site location (for example, via the Site Brief location fields or by allowing browser geolocation), we use those coordinates to look up climate data for your site. Rainfall, sun hours, and wind come from NASA's public POWER climate API, which receives the coordinates. Frost dates and the hardiness zone are read from a climate dataset that ships with the App, so no coordinates are sent anywhere for those. Your site's elevation is looked up from public terrain map tiles hosted on Amazon Web Services: only the address of the map tile your site falls in (about 10 km across) is requested, not your exact coordinates. We also use the coordinates to generate accurate GeoJSON/KML exports if you use that feature.
Purchases and subscriptions are handled by our payment processor, Lemon Squeezy. When you buy access or subscribe, your payment details (card number, etc.) go directly to Lemon Squeezy — we never receive or store them. We do receive limited information back from Lemon Squeezy needed to manage your access: your order/subscription status, a customer reference ID, and the email address you checked out with.
We use Firebase Analytics (Google Analytics for Firebase) to understand how the App is used — which screens people visit, and basic funnel events like starting a checkout or completing one. This can include device and browser information, approximate location (derived from IP address, not GPS), and app interaction events. We use this to understand usage and improve the App, not for advertising, and we don't use it to build advertising profiles or share it with ad networks. Our web hosting (Vercel) and backend infrastructure (Google Firebase) may also log basic technical information for security and reliability purposes (such as request timestamps and IP addresses) as a normal part of how that infrastructure operates. If we add error monitoring or other tools in the future, we'll update this policy to describe them before turning them on.
We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell your personal information to anyone.
We're based in Canada, but the service providers listed above may store or process data outside Canada — Google's infrastructure, Vercel, and Lemon Squeezy all operate internationally, including in the United States. When your information is processed outside Canada, it becomes subject to the laws of that jurisdiction, which may differ from Canadian privacy law. We select providers that maintain strong security and privacy practices regardless of where they process data.
We keep your account and design data for as long as your account is active, so the App can keep working the way you'd expect. If you ask us to delete your account (see "Your rights and choices" below), we'll delete your personal information and design data within a reasonable time, except where we're required to retain certain records (for example, transaction records for tax or accounting purposes).
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:
You can delete your account at any time from Settings → Delete Account in the App. This permanently removes your account and all your design data, and cancels any active Pro subscription in the same step — there's no separate cancellation needed first. If you'd rather keep your account but just cancel a Pro subscription, use Settings → Manage Subscription instead, which opens Lemon Squeezy's own self-serve billing portal. You can also update or remove design content directly within the App at any time. If you'd prefer we handle a deletion or other request for you directly, email us (see "Contact us" below).
We rely on Google Firebase's security infrastructure (encryption in transit, access-controlled databases, and authenticated access) to protect your information, and we scope our own backend code to only the access it needs. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we take reasonable, industry-standard steps to protect your information.
The App is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we'll delete it.
The App stores some data — such as your preferences and drafts of your current work — directly in your browser's local storage, on your own device. This lets the App work quickly and, in some cases, offline. It isn't sent to us unless the App saves it to your account. We don't use third-party advertising or tracking cookies.
We may update this policy as the App evolves — for example, if we add new features, change service providers, or introduce analytics or error-monitoring tools. We'll update the "Last updated" date above when we do, and for material changes we'll make a reasonable effort to let you know within the App.
Questions, concerns, or requests about your personal information (including access
or deletion requests) can be sent to:
EarthWise Permaculture
Ontario, Canada
joel@earthwisepermaculture.ca