Privacy Policy

Account information

• Email (for login): we use your email address to send login links and account emails. We do not store your plaintext email address in the database; we store a cryptographic HMAC identifier derived from it.
• Account metadata: confirmation timestamps and basic administrative flags (for example, whether an account is confirmed or muted).

Authentication and security data

• Session tokens: stored so we can expire sessions and keep your account secure.
• Magic-link / email-change tokens: tokens are stored in hashed form when delivered by email.

Public content you create

• Pins: title, description, icon URL (if provided), type, and optional schedule/time fields.
• Location: latitude and longitude associated with pins.

Technical data

Like most websites, our servers may receive and log basic request data (such as IP address, user agent, and timestamps) for security, debugging, and reliability.

Render.com (hosting)

Map Garden is hosted on Render.com. Render processes web requests and stores application data on our behalf (for example, in the database and server storage).

Resend (email delivery)

We use Resend to send transactional emails. Resend receives the recipient email address and the email contents needed to deliver login and account-related messages.

MapTiler (map tiles)

We use MapTiler to render maps. Your browser requests map tiles directly from MapTiler, which means MapTiler may receive information such as your IP address and browser details as part of serving those requests.

Stadia Maps (place search)

The map includes a search box provided by Stadia Maps. When you search for a place, your browser sends that query to Stadia's servers to return results. Stadia may receive information such as your IP address, browser details, and the text you typed into search.

Email identifiers (HMAC)

We store a keyed hash ( HMAC ) of your normalized email instead of the plaintext address. This means that:

• Reading the database alone does not expose your email as a normal readable column the way storing plaintext would.
• The stored HMAC is not “decryptable” back to your email from those bytes alone. Recovering an email would require guessing addresses and checking for a match (impractical for arbitrary addresses).
• Someone with full access to our production systems (including the database and the secret key used to derive email identifiers) could test whether a specific candidate email belongs to a given account, by computing the same HMAC and comparing it to what we store—the same kind of check we use when you sign in. They cannot simply export a list of plaintext emails from the database without trying candidate addresses.
• Someone with a copy of the database but not the secret key cannot compute HMACs for candidate emails, so they generally cannot match a known email address to a stored account row from the backup alone.
• Using the public site does not give people a way to look up your Map Garden account from an email address they know, or to derive your email from your public profile—the email identifier is not exposed for that purpose.