Project policies
Privacy Notice
Last updated August 20, 2026
The Heritage Apple Project is operated by Plantaera Biotech LLC. This notice explains how information submitted through heritageapple.com is collected, used, protected, and considered for publication.
- Applies to
- heritageapple.com submissions
- Project operator
- Plantaera Biotech LLC
- Questions
- Contact the project
Information we collect
When you report a tree, we may collect your name, email address, relationship to the tree, county and municipality, a location description, an optional device-provided GPS location, the tree's story, photographs, publication choices, your agreement to the Participation Terms and Privacy Notice, and your tree-specific and general communication preferences. We use your email to send a submission receipt and HAP reference. We also receive limited technical information needed to operate and protect the site, including information processed by Cloudflare's human-verification service.
How we use it
We use submitted information to review and research tree leads, contact reporters about their submission or tree, plan possible documentation visits, maintain private project records, prevent abuse, and develop the Heritage Apple Project catalog. If you choose tree-specific updates, we may send significant findings about that tree. If you choose general communications, we may send occasional project news and announcements. A report is a lead for review and does not guarantee a visit, testing, preservation, or publication.
Private records and public stories
Reports are reviewed privately. Contact details, private notes, and unapproved coordinates are never published. A contributor may allow no public location, a town-level or coarser location, or the exact tree location. That choice sets the maximum permitted precision; publication remains a separate project decision, and exact coordinates appear only when exact sharing was authorized and deliberately approved. Story content, photographs, and location details are considered separately. Uploaded photograph originals are retained privately without re-encoding. If a photograph is approved for public display, the project publishes a separate derivative with embedded metadata, including EXIF location data, removed; the protected original remains unchanged. Plantaera Biotech may decline, edit, or remove public material when needed for privacy, safety, accuracy, property protection, or appropriate moderation.
Service providers and legal disclosures
We use service providers, including Cloudflare, to host the site, protect the form, store submitted material, and operate the private review system, and Resend to deliver transactional email such as submission receipts and tree-specific updates. When we send email through Resend, it processes the recipient's email address, message content, and delivery metadata for that purpose. During private review, we may send a reported tree's coordinates to an official government parcel or assessment service, such as New York State ITS Geospatial Services, to identify the intersecting tax parcel and assessor-listed ownership. Parcel results are retained as unconfirmed private research and may be incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate. These providers and public agencies process or return information for those purposes. We do not sell or rent personal information. We may disclose information when required by law, to protect rights or safety, or to professional advisers assisting the project.
Retention and security
We retain project records for as long as reasonably useful to research, documentation, preservation, administration, or legal obligations. We use reasonable safeguards and keep public and private project information separate, but no online system can promise absolute security.
Your choices
You may ask to review, correct, or delete personal information you submitted, change a publication preference, or stop tree-specific or general communications at any time by replying to a project email or contacting us. Some information may be retained when reasonably necessary for legal, security, record-integrity, or already-published archival purposes. We do not knowingly request reports from children under 13 without a parent or guardian.
Contact
For a privacy question or request, email Sage.Monast@plantaerabiotech.com. This project notice supplements the broader Plantaera Biotech privacy information.