Privacy Policy

• We collect what you give us at signup and the questions you ask, so we can run your account and answer you.
• We don’t sell or rent your information, we don’t show ads, we don’t track you across other websites, and we don’t send marketing email.
• Your question and the matching handbook passages go to our AI service provider to write the answer. Neither we nor our AI provider train AI models on your conversations.
• CropCoach staff can see the questions people ask, how each answer was rated and which handbooks it drew on, so they can spot gaps in the handbooks and answers that need work. Staff do not see the answers.
• A few service providers (hosting, database, AI and email) handle your data for us, in the United States, to keep CropCoach running.
• If you just browse the site without signing in, we set no cookies at all.
• You can delete your conversations whenever you like, and ask us to delete your account.

This policy applies to the CropCoach website at mycropcoach.com and the CropCoach app on it. It covers everyone who uses it: visitors who have not signed up, people with a CropCoach account, and our own staff, whose accounts are handled the same way as everyone else’s.

It does not cover other websites. If you follow a link from CropCoach to another site, that site’s own privacy policy applies, not this one.

You can look around mycropcoach.com without an account. While you are not signed in, we don’t set any cookies, and we don’t ask you for anything unless you choose to sign up.

The only information collected about your visit is the standard request logs kept by the companies that host CropCoach, such as your IP address, your browser type, the page you asked for and the time of the request. These are used for security and to troubleshoot problems, and are kept for a limited time.

When you sign up, we ask for your first and last name, your email address, a password, where you farm (for example, a county and state) and, if you choose to tell us, what brings you to CropCoach.

We never store your password itself. We keep only a one-way scrambled version of it (a hash), which can check a password you type but cannot be turned back into it. Nobody at CropCoach can read your password.

About your account, we keep whether your email address has been verified, whether the account is active, and the answer preferences you choose in Settings (such as shorter answers, or showing the exact handbook wording).

When you ask a question, we keep:

• your question and the answer CropCoach gave;
• the handbook passages the answer cited, and how closely each one matched your question;
• the conversation’s title, which is set automatically and which you can rename;
• when each question was asked, and whether it was answered or declined;
• for a follow-up question, the reworded, standalone version of it that we searched the handbooks with.

If you rate an answer with a thumbs up or down, we keep that rating with the answer. After a thumbs down you can also pick what was wrong from a short list (such as “Wrong” or “Out of date”), and we keep that too. There is no box to type in, so a rating never carries anything else you write.

When you use the site, the companies that host CropCoach keep the same standard request logs described above for visitors.

We don’t buy information about you from anyone else, and we don’t combine what you give us with information from other sources.

We use your information to:

• create and run your account, and sign you in;
• answer your questions. For a follow-up question, the last few turns of the conversation (up to four) are sent along with it, so it is understood in context;
• remember your answer preferences;
• send you emails about your account (see “Emails” below);
• see which answers people found helpful and which need work, from the ratings they give;
• keep CropCoach secure and working properly, and prevent misuse;
• find gaps in the handbooks we have loaded, so we know what to add (see “Who can see your questions” below);
• meet our legal obligations.

We do not use your information for advertising. We do not sell or rent your personal information to anyone, and we do not send marketing email.

When you ask a question, CropCoach searches the handbooks for the passages that match it. Your question and those passages (and, for a follow-up, the earlier turns of the conversation) are sent to our AI service provider, whose model writes the answer from them. Your name, email address and where you farm are not sent to it.

Neither we nor our AI provider train AI models on your conversations. We use the AI as a paid service, and under the provider’s terms for paid use it does not use this content to train or improve its models. It may keep it for a limited time to detect misuse.

The AI writes informational answers only. It does not make decisions about you, and CropCoach does not use automated processing to make any decision that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you, such as about insurance, credit or employment.

CropCoach staff (our administrators) have an admin panel that lists every question asked on CropCoach, who asked it, when, and whether it was answered or declined. Alongside each question it shows things about the answer, never the answer itself: the rating you gave it and the reason you picked, if any; the names of the handbooks it drew on; and whether the closest handbook passage was only a loose match for the question. They do not see the answers.

The reason is simple: when several people ask about the same topic and CropCoach has to decline, it usually means a handbook is missing, and when answers drawn from one handbook keep being rated down, that handbook may be out of date. The question log is how we find out.

Administrators can also see the list of accounts (name, email address, when you joined and when you were last active), and can disable an account.

Nobody else using CropCoach can see your conversations.

We use a small number of service providers to run CropCoach. They handle your information on our behalf, in the United States, and only to provide their service to us:

• Hosting and infrastructure providers run the website, our servers, the database that holds accounts and conversations, and the search index of the handbooks.
• An AI service provider writes the answers from your question and the matching handbook passages (see “How AI is used” above).
• An email delivery provider sends our account emails. It receives your email address and the content of each email.
• The contractors who build and maintain CropCoach for us, who are bound by confidentiality.

We may also disclose information if the law requires us to, for example in response to a valid court order, or where it is needed to protect the safety, rights or property of our users, the public or CropCoach. Apart from that, and the business transfers described below, we do not share your information with anyone.

We may turn information into counts and totals that cannot identify you, such as how many questions were asked about a topic, or which topics CropCoach most often had to decline. We use these to decide which handbooks to add and to improve CropCoach.

We keep this information in a form that cannot be linked back to you, and we do not try to re-identify anyone from it.

If CropCoach is involved in a merger, an acquisition, or a sale of all or part of its assets, your information may be transferred as part of that deal. If it is, this policy will continue to protect it, and we will tell you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

We only send emails about your account, from update@notifications.mycropcoach.com:

• a 6-digit code to verify your email address;
• a link to reset your password, if you ask for one. It works once and expires after an hour;
• a notice whenever your password is changed, so you know if it wasn’t you.

There is no mailing list, and we do not send newsletters or offers. Because these emails are needed to run and protect your account, you can’t opt out of them while you have an account.

We use cookies only when you sign in, and only the ones that signing in needs. Visitors who are not signed in get no cookies at all.

• a session cookie that keeps you signed in for up to 7 days. The pages’ scripts cannot read it;
• a cookie holding your name and email address, so pages can show who is signed in;
• a security cookie that protects your account from forged requests from other websites.

We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not load any third-party analytics or advertising scripts. Our fonts are served from our own site, so your browser does not contact a font service when you visit.

Some browsers can send a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal. CropCoach does not track you across other websites, and does not sell or share your information for advertising, so there is nothing for these signals to switch off.

Even so, if your browser sends a GPC signal, we treat it as a request to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information.

• Your account (your details, preferences and password hash) is kept until you ask us to delete it.
• Your conversations (questions, answers, cited passages, titles and times) are kept until you delete them or your account is deleted.
• Your ratings are kept with the answer they rate, and go when that conversation is deleted.
• A disabled account, and its conversations, are kept until the account is deleted. You can ask us to delete it at any time.
• Email verification codes and password reset links expire, and are then deleted automatically.
• Request logs are kept by our hosting providers for a limited time.

When information is deleted, copies may remain in our providers’ systems, such as backups, for a short time before they are overwritten.

• Your conversations. You can rename or delete any conversation, or clear your whole question history in Settings. Clearing your history deletes all your conversations, and also removes your questions from the staff question log.
• Your details. You can change your name, your password and your answer preferences in Settings.
• Deleting your account. Email us at support@mycropcoach.com from the email address on your account, and we will delete your account and its conversations within 30 days.
• Seeing or correcting what we hold. You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, or ask us to correct it, at support@mycropcoach.com.

Depending on where you live, including California and the other states with consumer privacy laws, you may have the rights described below. We extend the same choices to everyone who uses CropCoach, wherever in the United States they live, and will honour them as the law that applies to you requires.

What we have collected in the last 12 months. These are the categories of personal information we collect, and have collected in the last 12 months:

• Identifiers: your name, email address and IP address.
• Account and customer records: your password hash, whether your email is verified and your account is active, your answer preferences, and what brings you to CropCoach if you told us.
• General location: where you farm, such as a county and state, as you entered it. We do not collect your precise location.
• Internet or other electronic activity: request logs, and when you joined, were last active and asked each question.
• The content of your questions: your questions and conversations, the answers, and your ratings.

Where it comes from: from you, when you sign up and use CropCoach, and from your device, when your browser makes requests to the site.

Why we collect it: for the purposes listed in “How we use it” above.

Who receives it: the service providers and contractors listed in “Who we share it with” above, who receive it to provide their services to us. We have disclosed each category above to them for those business purposes in the last 12 months.

Sale, sharing and sensitive information. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not “share” it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the last 12 months, and we have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the information of anyone under 16. The only sensitive personal information we collect, as some state laws define it, is your account login (your email address and password), which we use only to sign you in. We do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you, so there is nothing for a request to limit its use to switch off.

Your rights. Subject to your state’s law, you may have the right to:

• know what personal information we have collected about you, and get a copy of it;
• have us delete the personal information we hold about you;
• have us correct personal information about you that is inaccurate;
• opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, and of its use for targeted advertising or profiling (we do none of these);
• limit our use of your sensitive personal information (we use it only to sign you in);
• not be treated differently for using any of these rights. We will not deny you the service, or give you a different level of service, because you made a request.

How to make a request. Email support@mycropcoach.com and tell us what you would like. To protect your account, we verify a request by checking that it comes from, or is confirmed from, the email address on the account. We may ask for more information if we can’t verify it that way.

Authorised agents. You can have someone else make a request for you. We will ask the agent for your signed permission, and may ask you to confirm the request from the email address on your account.

Our response. We will respond within 45 days. If we need more time, as the law allows, we will tell you why and how much longer we need.

Appeals. If we decline your request, in whole or in part, you can appeal by replying to our decision and asking us to reconsider. We will tell you the outcome of your appeal, and our reasons, within the time your state’s law requires. If you are not satisfied, you can contact your state’s attorney general.

Everything between your browser and CropCoach travels over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection. Passwords are stored only as a hash. Setting a new password signs you out everywhere else you were signed in. Only staff with the administrator role can reach the admin panel.

No system is perfectly secure, so please don’t type sensitive personal details, such as Social Security numbers or policy or bank account numbers, into your questions. CropCoach doesn’t need them to answer you.

If there is a security breach that affects your personal information, we will notify you, and the authorities, as the law requires.

CropCoach is intended for people in the United States. Your information is processed and stored in the United States. If you use CropCoach from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be handled there, under US law.

CropCoach is not meant for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect any information from children under 13. If we learn that we have, we will delete it. If you believe a child has signed up, contact us at support@mycropcoach.com and we will delete the account.

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top of this page. If the change is significant, we will also email everyone who has an account.

Your use of CropCoach is also covered by our Terms of Use.

Questions about this policy or your information, or a request about your rights? Email CropCoach at support@mycropcoach.com.