Privacy

Your organization owns the records it enters. Authorized team members can use the downloads and exports available in each section. Formats and coverage vary; photos and uploaded documents may need to be downloaded separately. If an export does not cover the records you need, email anna@sweetfarm.org for help getting a copy.

You can move to another service whenever you choose. Contact us for help closing an organization's account or requesting deletion. We may need to confirm your authority before providing or removing records.

Booking a tour or event, donating, applying to volunteer, signing a waiver, or filling in a surrender form sends what you type on that form to the sanctuary you are dealing with. We store it so they can act on it. We do not sell it, and we do not share it with other sanctuaries.

Some sanctuaries add their own Facebook or Google advertising tags to those pages, so they can see which adverts brought people to them. When that is switched on:

• In the EU, the EEA, the UK, Brazil, Japan, South Korea and Canada you are asked first, and nothing loads unless you agree. Everywhere else the tags load when the page opens. We go by your browser's time zone, and if we cannot tell where you are, we ask. If you would rather not be counted anywhere, the three ways to say so are below.
• Three ways to say no, anywhere in the world. Wherever a sanctuary is using these tags, there is a Cookies link at the foot of the page: one press brings the question back, wherever you are and whether or not you were ever asked. (Pages that load no tags carry no link, because there is nothing there to turn off.) Turning on Global Privacy Control in your browser works too — no setting to find on our side, and it holds on every sanctuary's page. And where you were asked and said no, that answer holds: it is remembered on your device and we do not ask again.
• We tell Facebook and Google that a page was opened, which tour was chosen, and that a booking or an application happened — with the amount, for a paid booking. Our advertising event payloads never send your name, email address, phone number or postal address. The advertising services can still receive device and browser identifiers, IP addresses, and information through their own cookies when their tags load.

We record which pages get opened and how people get on with them: page views, clicks, how far through a form somebody got, and the sequence of actions leading into an error. It is used to find the parts of the software that are confusing or broken.

Our behavior analytics does not record the text on your screen. Controls are identified by the labels the developers wrote into the code, not by their contents — so an animal's medical notes, an employee's name or a donor's details are not collected as control text. There is no session recording and no screen capture.

Behaviour records are deleted after 30 days. Page views are kept for 180 days, because they answer “is anyone still using this page”, and after 90 days they stop being linked to a person. These analytics are stored within the toolkit rather than sent to an external analytics service. Summaries of problems and related support tickets may remain after the underlying events expire.

Animal, volunteer, visitor, employee and donor records belong to the sanctuary that entered them. Access is limited by organization and team permissions. Information can also be shared deliberately through features such as Knowledge Base sharing, shared libraries, and Sanctuary Connect. Information your organization publishes on public pages — such as events, animal sponsorships, or a plant sale — is visible to visitors.

Sweet Farm staff who run the service can see the data in order to support it and fix problems. We use information to operate, maintain, secure, and support the service. We do not sell it.

Card numbers and security codes are handled by Stripe and never reach the toolkit. We store the amount and Stripe's own reference for the payment, so a booking or an invoice can be matched up and refunded. Contact, billing, and transaction information may also be shared with Stripe to process payments. Money for a sanctuary's tours, produce or donations goes to that sanctuary's own Stripe account.

Emails the toolkit sends — confirmations, reminders, invitations, notifications — are sent through Google Workspace. We keep a record that they were sent, and for volunteer messages a copy of what was sent, so a sanctuary has the history of its own correspondence.

Features such as Ask Gizmo, grant research and drafting, import assistance, and document or receipt extraction use Anthropic's Claude API. Relevant prompts, conversation context, documents, or sample import values may be sent to that service to produce the requested result. Some enabled features, such as grant research, can also run in the background. Only use these tools with information your organization is authorized to provide.

Payments, email delivery, and AI processing use external providers. Their handling of information is described in Stripe's privacy policy, Google's privacy policy, and Anthropic's privacy information. Location-based features may send a location query to a mapping or weather provider to return relevant results.

We use cookies and browser storage for sign-in, preferences, consent choices, and paired kiosk sessions. These are separate from a sanctuary's optional advertising tags. Server logs and error reports help us maintain reliability and investigate problems.

Records and uploaded files are stored on systems used to operate the toolkit, with backups for recovery. Operational records remain until removed or an account is closed, subject to any retention needed to operate the service or meet legal obligations. Deleted information may remain in backups until those backups rotate out. The analytics windows above apply to analytics, not to your organization's records.

If a sanctuary holds records about you, ask the sanctuary — they control them and can correct or remove them. If you would rather come to us, or you are asking about the analytics above, write to anna@sweetfarm.org and we will help.