Last updated: July 10, 2026
Supplant is a game about the real plants around you: you photograph them, identify them, and collect them as cards whose role is relational to place. That means the app is built around two kinds of sensitive information — where you are and photos you take— so we've tried to be specific and honest about how each is handled. This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have.
“Supplant,” “we,” and “us” refer to the team that operates the Supplant game and the supplant.app service.
You sign in with Google. Signing in shares only your basic profile — your name, email address, and profile photo — which we store to create your account, identify you across sessions, and show who you are in the game. That is the full extent of the access: we never receive your Google password, and the sign-in gives us no ability to read, post, or change anything in your Google account or any other Google service.
Because the game is available to a general audience that may include minors, we ask for your birth year once, on a neutral age screen. We use it only to determine whether age-based restrictions apply to your account (see Children's privacy below). We store the year you entered and the date you answered.
Supplant is a location-based game, so location is essential to how it works — a plant read as a native in one place is invasive in another, and that difference drives the mechanics. When you scan a plant, leave a plant at a spot, or pin your greenhouse, your device shares its precise GPS coordinateswith us. From those coordinates we also derive coarse grid cells (roughly a 1.2 km area and a ~38 m square) used for gameplay such as daily catches and the greenhouse location lock.
Two things worth being clear about. Your collected plants do not store where you caught them — a card's role is recalculated from your currentlocation each time it's shown, so what matters is where a plant is now, not a trail of where it has been. Your “Seen” life-list is the exception: each sighting is recorded with the coordinates of that scan, which we use for the life-list itself and to keep the game fair (for example, detecting physically impossible jumps between scans). We don't hold onto those coordinates — they are erased every night, so we never keep them beyond the current day. The life-list entry keeps only the species and the date. We delete the coordinates outright rather than blurring them to an approximate area.
To identify a plant, the photo you take is sent to a third-party plant-identification service (currently Pl@ntNet). Before any photo leaves our server we strip its metadata — including any embedded GPS/EXIF location— and if that cleanup can't be completed we reject the photo rather than forward it. We do not store your photos.What we do keep from a scan is a small mathematical “fingerprint” of the image (a perceptual hash) plus an advisory camera-authenticity score, used only to detect duplicate or replayed images and keep the game fair — neither is the image itself and neither can reconstruct it.
As you play, we store the data that makes up your game: your “Seen” life-list of identified plants, your kept collection and each card's stats and nicknames, coins, experience, battles, decks, inventory, and settings such as your display name and time zone.
We record a small set of product-analytics events (for example, “a scan happened” or “a battle was won”) to understand how the game is used in aggregate. These events are fully anonymous by design: they are not linked to your account or any per-person identifier, and they never include personal information or raw coordinates. We can see totals and trends, but not what any individual did.
To keep you signed in we set one essential, secure session cookie. Our servers also keep standard operational logs (such as request and error logs) as part of running and securing the service.
We do not sell your personal information, and we don't share it for advertising. We share information only with the service providers that make the game work, and only as needed:
To describe a species we also look up openly available reference facts (for example native range and conservation status) from public botanical databases such as GBIF, POWO, and the IUCN. These lookups are keyed by a plant's scientific name only — no personal data about you is sent.
We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our terms, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users and the service.
We use a single essential cookie to keep you signed in. It is HTTP-only and, in production, sent only over HTTPS. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking cookies.
Supplant is not directed to children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your country). The age screen determines whether an account is age-restricted; restricted accounts are blocked from features that collect personal information, such as scanning. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under this threshold. If you believe a child under this age has provided us personal information, let us know and we will delete it.
We keep your account and gameplay data for as long as your account is active. Two things are minimized sooner: photos are not retained at all (see above), and the precise coordinates of a sighting are erased every night, so they are never kept beyond the current day — the life-list entry keeps only the species and date. If your account is deleted, we delete your personal information, except where we are required to keep it to comply with the law. Anonymous analytics events cannot be traced back to you and are retained in aggregate.
We protect your information with measures including encryption in transit (HTTPS) and secure, signed session cookies. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information and limit access to it.
We operate the service from, and store data in, the United States. If you access Supplant from another country, you understand your information will be processed in the United States, which may have different data-protection laws than your own.
We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we'll revise the “Last updated” date at the top. Significant changes will be communicated in the app where appropriate. Continuing to use Supplant after a change means you accept the updated policy.
Supplant is early, and we don't yet publish a dedicated privacy contact. We'll add one here — and update this policy — before relying on this document for formal requests. Significant changes to how we handle your data will also be surfaced in the app.