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GreenMaps privacy

Last updated 5 November 2026 · GreenMaps is run by the Daru Lab, Department of Biology, Stanford University.

Browsing

You can use GreenMaps without an account. We don't use advertising or tracking cookies. Your validation votes and saved offline checklists stay in your own browser unless you choose to share them.

If you sign in

Signing in with Google gives us your name, email address and a Google account identifier. We use these only to link observations to you, to contact you about them if needed, and to prevent abuse. We never receive your Google password.

Observations you share

When you share an observation we store the species, whether it was present, absent or rare/introduced, the location, the date, how it was identified, and any photo you attach. Photos are re-encoded in your browser before upload, which removes embedded camera and location metadata.

Shared observations are reviewed before they are used. Once accepted, an observation may be shown on GreenMaps and shared with biodiversity databases such as GBIF, with its location rounded to about 1 km and without your name or email. Observations that are pending or rejected are visible only to you and GreenMaps reviewers.

Photo identification

If you use "identify from a photo", the photo is sent to an identification service (Pl@ntNet or Anthropic's Claude) to suggest species. Unless you choose to share it as an observation, the photo is not stored by GreenMaps.

Where data is kept

GreenMaps runs on Cloudflare. Account and observation data are stored in Cloudflare's database and storage services.

Your choices

You can ask us to delete your account and the observations you shared at any time by emailing [email protected]. Accepted observations already published to external databases may persist there in anonymised form.

Contact

Questions: [email protected].