Privacy Policy

We collect or access the following categories of data when you use AgriSmart Ghana:

• Account & profile information: Your name, email address, and role (e.g., farmer, extension officer, admin), obtained via email registration or Google Sign-In (OpenID Connect). Used to identify your account and personalize your experience.
• Ghana Card verification data: To unlock marketplace posting and other verified-user features, you must complete identity verification by submitting images of your Ghana National ID card (Ghana Card front side) and a live selfie captured through your device camera. The card image is processed by AI-based optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically extract your full name, Ghana Card number, date of birth, and other printed details. The selfie and the portrait on your Ghana Card are then analyzed by an open-source face-recognition engine that runs locally in your browser to generate biometric face embeddings (mathematical representations of facial features). These embeddings are compared on our server to determine whether the selfie matches the card portrait. A randomized liveness challenge (e.g., smile, look left) may be issued to confirm the selfie is live. The extracted data, card images, selfie, face-match score, and liveness results are stored on your verification record and reviewed by our administrators when automatic confidence is low. One Ghana Card may be linked to only one account.
• Biometric data (face embeddings & liveness): When you complete identity verification, face embeddings derived from your selfie and Ghana Card portrait, along with liveness challenge results and a face-match score, are stored on your VerificationAttempt record. This data is used solely to evaluate whether you are the legitimate holder of the submitted identity document. Biometric embeddings and document images are access-controlled and visible only to you and authorized administrators — they are never shared publicly or sold to third parties.
• Google Calendar data: If you connect Google Calendar, we access your calendar event titles, dates, and descriptions to sync them with your AgriSmart farm calendar.
• Google Drive files: If you connect Google Drive, we access file names and metadata of files you choose to upload or attach to farm records and posts.
• Farm records & financial data: Income and expense entries you create, including amounts, categories (feed, fertilizer, seeds, labour, fuel, machinery, harvest, sales), dates, and notes.
• Livestock records: Animal type, breed, count, weight, acquisition date, health status, vaccination schedules, and notes for your livestock entries (poultry, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, rabbits, fish).
• Crop & disease detection data: Photos of crops and leaves you upload for AI-powered disease identification, along with the diagnostic results returned.
• Weather & location data: Location identifiers used to fetch localized weather forecasts and climate data relevant to your farming activities.
• Marketplace listings: Product titles, descriptions, prices, locations, images, and contact phone numbers you publish when listing crops, livestock, farm inputs, seedlings, machinery rentals, labour, or transport services. Listings are automatically reviewed by AI agents for validation, pricing insights, fraud detection, and content moderation.
• Marketplace reviews & disputes: Star ratings and written reviews you submit on marketplace listings, and dispute reports you file against listings. These are processed by AI moderation and fraud-detection agents and may be reviewed by administrators.
• Seller profile data: Trust scores, verification status, response times, delivery performance, dispute rates, and ratings aggregated from your marketplace activity to compute a seller performance profile.
• Marketplace support chat: Messages you exchange with the AI customer support assistant, including listing-specific questions and any conversations escalated to human administrators.
• Community forum content: Posts, replies, images, and likes you contribute to the community forum, including your display name as author.
• Learning progress: Your progress through training resources and learning paths, including completed steps, completion status, and earned certificates.
• Theme & display preferences: Your selected theme mode (light, dark, or system) stored in local storage to persist your display preference across sessions.
• Calendar events: Farming activities you schedule (planting, irrigation, fertilizer application, vaccination, harvesting, market days) with titles, dates, and notes.
• AI chat interactions: Questions and prompts you submit to the AI Chat Assistant, and the responses generated.
• Subscription & payment data: Your subscription plan, trial status, payment status, and transaction identifiers processed through Base44 Payments. We do not store full card numbers — payment details are handled securely by our payment processor.
• Usage & analytics data: Interactions with the platform (e.g., feature usage, events tracked) to improve the Service and provide a better user experience.
• Contact form submissions: Your name, email address, subject, and message when you use the Contact Us form. Submissions are stored in our database and a confirmation email is sent to your email address. Rate limiting prevents duplicate submissions from the same email within 60 seconds.

We request only the minimum scopes necessary for each feature. If you signed in with Google, you may review and revoke Google API permissions at any time from your Google Account security settings.

We process your data strictly to provide, maintain, and improve the Service. Specifically, we use your data to:

• Authenticate your identity, manage your account session, and enforce access controls.
• Verify your identity through Ghana Card OCR extraction to unlock marketplace posting and other verified-user features, and to enforce one-card-per-account uniqueness.
• Provide AI-powered crop recommendations tailored to your inputs and crop management data.
• Analyze uploaded leaf and crop images to detect diseases and suggest treatments.
• Track livestock health records, vaccination schedules, and growth data, and send vaccination reminders.
• Fetch and display localized weather forecasts and climate information for your location.
• Sync Google Calendar events with your AgriSmart farm calendar and send activity reminders.
• Store and display files you attach from Google Drive within your farm records and posts.
• Record and summarize your farm income and expenses, and generate financial summaries.
• Display your marketplace listings and facilitate contact between buyers and sellers.
• Generate AI-driven market price predictions based on submitted and publicly available data.
• Power the AI Chat Assistant to answer your farming questions using the context you provide.
• Display your name on community posts, marketplace listings, and forum replies you create.
• Provide access to training resources (videos, articles, PDFs, webinars) based on your subscription plan.
• Process subscription payments, manage your plan and trial status, and send trial expiration reminders.
• Send you service-related emails such as payment confirmations, trial reminders, and account notifications.
• Track usage analytics to understand feature adoption and improve the platform.
• Detect, prevent, and address fraud, abuse, and technical issues.
• Automatically synchronize your data across devices — your user profile, subscription status, marketplace listings, and farm records are refreshed from the server when the app resumes from the background, when network connectivity is restored, and periodically while the app is open. This ensures you always see current data without needing to log out and log back in.

We do not use Google user data for advertising, selling to third parties, or any purpose unrelated to the Service. We comply with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

AgriSmart Ghana uses AI models to power several features. When you use these features, the following data is processed:

• Crop Assistant: Your crop type, location, and farming inputs are sent to an AI model to generate personalized recommendations.
• Disease Detection: Images you upload of leaves or crops are processed by an AI vision model to identify diseases and suggest treatments.
• Price Predictor: Market data and your inputs are analyzed by AI to forecast price trends.
• AI Chat Assistant: Your questions and any context you provide are sent to an AI model to generate responses. The model may use web search to provide up-to-date information.
• Marketplace AI Agents: When you create or update a marketplace listing, AI agents automatically validate listing content, generate smart pricing insights, assess fraud risk, moderate content, produce recommendations, and evaluate seller performance. Listing text, images, price, and category are sent to AI models for these analyses.
• Marketplace Support & Disputes: Questions you ask the AI support assistant and dispute descriptions you submit are processed by AI models to generate responses and fraud analyses.
• Ghana Card OCR Verification: When you submit your Ghana Card for verification, the front-side image is sent to an AI vision model that performs optical character recognition to extract your name, card number, date of birth, and other printed fields. The extracted data is compared against your registered account name and checked for duplicate registrations before being stored for administrative review.
• Biometric Face Matching & Liveness (Phase 1 MVP): When you complete identity verification, an open-source face-recognition engine runs locally in your browser to detect faces in your selfie and Ghana Card portrait and to generate face embeddings. The embeddings are sent to our server, where a decision engine compares them to compute a face-match score and determines whether the selfie matches the document portrait. A randomized liveness challenge may be analyzed to confirm the selfie is live. The decision engine then assigns a status (auto-verified, pending admin review, retry required, rejected, or error). If automatic confidence is low or the engine is unavailable, the attempt is routed to an administrator for manual review. This is a Phase 1 MVP biometric system — it is not a professional KYC solution and does not guarantee identity.
• Ghanaian Language Voice Output: When you enable voice output in the AI Chat Assistant and select a local Ghanaian language (Twi, Ewe, Ga, or Dagbani), your chat response text is sent to a server-side text-to-speech service to generate audio in the selected language. English voice output uses your device's built-in speech synthesis and does not send data to the server.

AI-generated outputs are informational only and may not always be accurate. Data you submit for AI processing may be sent to third-party AI model providers solely to generate the responses you request. We do not use your data to train third-party AI models.

We do not sell or rent your personal data. We share data only in the following limited circumstances:

• Service providers & infrastructure: We use trusted third-party providers for hosting, database management, payment processing (Paystack), and email delivery. These providers process data on our behalf under contractual obligations and do not use it for their own purposes.
• AI model providers: Data you submit (e.g., crop images, chat questions, farm inputs) may be sent to AI model providers solely to generate the responses you request.
• Google APIs: When you connect Google Calendar or Google Drive, data is exchanged with Google's APIs to provide the features you requested. Google's own Privacy Policy applies to data processed by Google.
• Public content: Information you post to the community forum or marketplace (including your display name, listing details, and contact phone number) is visible to other users and visitors of the Service. AI-generated validation badges, pricing insights, and moderation statuses are also displayed on your listings.
• Admin oversight: AI agent decisions (validation, pricing, fraud, moderation) are logged and may be reviewed by authorized administrators who can override or approve automated actions.
• Legal compliance: We may disclose data if required by law, court order, or to protect our rights, property, and the safety of our users and others.
• Business transfers: In the event of a merger, acquisition, or asset sale, user data may be transferred as part of the transaction, subject to this policy.

We do not share Google user data with any third party except as necessary to provide the features you have explicitly requested.

Your data is stored on secure cloud infrastructure. Access to your data is protected by the following measures:

• Row-Level Security (RLS): Your farm records, livestock entries, calendar events, financial data, and subscription records are isolated so that only you (and authorized platform administrators) can access them. Other users cannot see your private data.
• Authentication & sessions: Account access is protected by authenticated sessions. Passwords are never stored in plain text. OAuth tokens from Google are stored securely on the server and never exposed to the client browser.
• Encryption in transit: All data is transmitted over HTTPS/TLS encrypted connections.
• Role-based access control: Administrative actions (e.g., managing subscriptions, publishing training resources) are restricted to authorized admin roles only.
• Minimal token retention: Google OAuth tokens are used only to perform the actions you authorize and are stored in a secure, access-controlled environment.
• Payment security: Payment processing is handled by Paystack, which complies with industry security standards (PCI DSS). We do not store full card numbers or sensitive payment credentials. Webhook events are verified via HMAC-SHA512 signature validation.
• Ghana Card & biometric data protection: Submitted Ghana Card images, extracted identity data, selfie images, face embeddings, face-match scores, and liveness results are access-controlled and visible only to you and authorized administrators. Biometric embeddings and document images are never exposed publicly or to other users. A uniqueness constraint ensures that one Ghana Card number cannot be linked to multiple accounts.
• Biometric consent: Before biometric verification begins, you must explicitly consent to the collection and processing of your facial biometric data (selfie, face embeddings, and liveness analysis). You may decline consent, in which case identity verification cannot be completed and verified-user features will remain unavailable. Consent can be withdrawn by deleting your account or contacting us.
• Regular review: We regularly review our security practices to maintain the protection of your data.

When you create a marketplace listing or post in the community forum, certain information you provide becomes publicly visible to other users and visitors:

• Marketplace listings: Your listing title, description, price, location, images, seller name, and the contact phone number you provide are visible to anyone browsing the marketplace.
• Community forum: Your post title, content, images, display name, and replies are visible to all forum participants.
• Contact information: Any phone number you include in a marketplace listing is displayed so that interested buyers can contact you directly. Please only share phone numbers you are comfortable making public.

You can edit or delete your marketplace listings and community posts at any time. Deleting a listing or post removes it from public view.

7. Cookies & Local Storage

AgriSmart Ghana uses essential cookies and browser local storage to maintain your authentication session and remember your preferences (e.g., trial reminder dismissal state). We do not use advertising or tracking cookies. Analytics data is collected to understand how the platform is used and to improve features.

We retain your data for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. Specifically:

• Account data: Retained while your account is active. You may delete your account and all associated data at any time using the in-app "Delete Account" feature in the sidebar, or by contacting us (see Section 10). Account deletion permanently removes your farm records, livestock entries, calendar events, forum posts and replies, marketplace listings, reviews, disputes, support messages, learning progress, and subscription records.
• Google API data: If you revoke Google access or disconnect a Google service, we stop accessing that data. Cached data from Google services is removed within 30 days of disconnection.
• Ghana Card & biometric verification data: Card images, extracted identity data, selfie images, face embeddings, face-match scores, and liveness results are retained for the lifetime of your account to maintain your verification status and prevent duplicate registrations. You may request deletion of this data by deleting your account or by contacting us (see Section 10). Deleting your account permanently removes all biometric data associated with your verification attempts.
• Farm & livestock records: Retained for the lifetime of your account. You may delete individual records at any time within the app.
• Uploaded images: Photos you upload (disease detection, marketplace, forum) are retained while the associated record or listing exists. Deleting the record or listing removes the image.
• AI chat history: Chat interactions are retained to provide continuity in your conversations and may be deleted upon request.
• Subscription & payment records: Retained for the duration of your subscription and for a reasonable period thereafter for record-keeping, tax compliance, and dispute resolution.
• Public content: Community posts and marketplace listings remain visible until you delete them or your account is deleted.

Request deletion: You may request deletion of your personal data at any time by contacting us. We will process verified requests within 30 days, except where retention is required by law. You can also revoke Google API access independently from your Google Account security settings.

9. Your Rights

You have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Deletion: Delete your account and all associated data at any time via the in-app "Delete Account" feature, or by contacting us.
• Portability: Export your farm data by copying it before account deletion.
• Revocation: Disconnect any connected Google service at any time.
• Objection: Object to or restrict certain processing of your data.
• Withdrawal: Withdraw consent for data processing at any time (note: this may limit your ability to use certain features).

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, wish to exercise your data rights (including requesting data access, correction, or deletion), or want to disconnect a connected service, please contact the AgriSmart Ghana team through our Contact page, the in-app support channel, by email at techsolutionsghapp@gmail.com, or by phone at +233 53 554 4183.

Changes to this policy will be posted on this page with an updated revision date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.