Privacy Policy

What we don't do

• ● No user accounts. There is nothing to sign up for.
• ● No tracking cookies, pixels, fingerprinting, or cross-site identifiers.
• ● No advertising, affiliate links, or remarketing.
• ● No selling, sharing, or trading any data about you.

What is collected

The site runs on Cloudflare. Cloudflare keeps standard edge-server logs (IP address, timestamp, request URL, user-agent, response status) for operational purposes — abuse mitigation, debugging, and DDoS protection. Cloudflare's own privacy notice governs how those logs are handled and for how long.

Rootfast itself does not write any user-identifying data to its database. The API ingests USDA + GBIF + iNaturalist data and returns it; it does not record who asked.

Cloudflare Analytics

Rootfast uses Cloudflare Analytics to understand aggregate traffic — total page views, referrers, country-level geography, and broad browser / device categories. This data is collected without cookies, without any persistent identifier across visits, and without cross-site tracking. Individual visits are not profiled and cannot be linked to you on return. Cloudflare processes the data on our behalf and does not sell it.

If you'd rather not be counted at all, any standard ad- or tracking-blocker that blocks Cloudflare's insights endpoints will exclude you with no effect on the rest of the site.

Third-party content

Some pages embed images served directly from iNaturalist's open-data CDN (inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com). Loading those images causes your browser to connect to AWS infrastructure. We attach no identifiers; the request is whatever your browser sends by default.

Links out to plants.usda.gov, gbif.org, itis.gov, and similar are standard hyperlinks — clicking them takes you to those sites under their own policies.

Contact form

If you reach out via the contact form, your name, email, and message are forwarded by a Cloudflare Worker (operated by Gold Dust Web) through SendGrid to a mailbox we monitor. The submitting IP is briefly retained for rate-limiting (one hour) and then discarded. Messages themselves live in the recipient mailbox until manually deleted; they are used only to reply to your inquiry.

Children

Rootfast does not knowingly collect any data about anyone, and therefore does not knowingly collect data about children. The content is general botanical reference material suitable for all ages.

Changes

If this policy materially changes, the updated text replaces this page and the date at the top of the page changes. There is no mailing list to notify.