Privacy Policy

1Who this policy covers

This Privacy Policy explains how Leaf Farm LLC ("Leaf Farm", "we", "us") handles personal information in connection with the leaf application for iPhone, iPad and Mac ("the App") and the website at leaffarm.org ("the Site").

It applies to Leaf Farm and to nobody else. It does not govern how an automotive repair shop that uses the App handles its own customer or employee records, and it does not govern how a franchisor or brand owner handles information about its franchisees. Those organizations act on their own behalf and answer for their own practices. Sections 5, 6 and 7 explain the boundary.

2The short version

Leaf Farm does not operate a server that holds your shop's data. The App stores your records in your own Apple account's private iCloud database and on your own devices. We have no copy, no access, and no technical means of reading them.

The App contains no analytics software, no advertising identifier, no crash-reporting service and no third-party tracking of any kind. The only information about App usage that reaches Leaf Farm is what Apple chooses to make available to any developer in App Store Connect, in the form Apple provides it. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we have no interest in building a profile of anyone.

3What we do not collect

To be specific, Leaf Farm does not collect, receive or store any of the following:

• Names, phone numbers, email addresses or postal addresses of a shop's customers
• Vehicle records, license plates, VINs, odometer readings or service history
• Estimates, repair orders, invoices, payment records or amounts a shop takes in
• Employee records, wage or commission figures, time cards, or Social Security numbers
• Photographs, signatures, inspection sheets or scanned documents
• Precise or coarse location data
• Contacts, calendars, photo libraries or health data from a device
• Advertising identifiers, device fingerprints, or any cross-app or cross-site tracking identifier

The App requests only the device permissions it needs for a feature you use, such as the camera for scanning a VIN, plate, barcode or receipt. Material captured that way stays in your own store and is never transmitted to Leaf Farm.

4What we receive from Apple

Because leaf is distributed through the App Store, Apple Inc. provides Leaf Farm with the standard reporting it gives every developer through App Store Connect. This is the only routine source of information we receive about use of the App. Depending on what Apple makes available and on the choices you have made in your own device settings, it can include:

• Sales and download reports. Counts of downloads, updates, installations, purchases, subscriptions, refunds and cancellations, broken out by territory, device type and operating system version. These reports identify units and regions, not people, and Apple does not give us the names or Apple Account details of individual purchasers.
• App analytics. Aggregated and anonymized measures such as sessions, active devices, retention, crashes and engagement, provided by Apple only for users who have consented to share analytics with developers, and only at a level of aggregation Apple considers non-identifying. Apple suppresses figures below its own thresholds, so small numbers frequently reach us as nothing at all.
• Crash and diagnostic reports. Anonymized crash logs and performance metrics from users who have opted in with Apple to share them, showing where the App failed. These describe code, not customers.
• Ratings and reviews. Public App Store reviews, with whatever nickname the reviewer chose to publish.
• Support and payout records. Aggregate financial and tax reporting Apple provides to us as the seller of the App.

Apple collects this information under Apple's Privacy Policy, which governs Apple's own handling of it. We use what Apple gives us for one purpose: to understand whether the App is working and being used, so we can fix it and improve it. We do not attempt to re-identify anyone from it, and we do not combine it with any other source to do so.

5Your shop's data, and who owns it

If you operate a shop, your data is yours. Every record you create in the App belongs to you: customers, vehicles, tickets, inspections, invoices, inventory, employees and reports. Leaf Farm claims no ownership of it and no licence to use it.

Those records are stored on your device and synchronized between your own registers through the private database of your own Apple account, using Apple's iCloud and CloudKit services. The path runs from your device to your Apple account and back to your devices. Leaf Farm is not a stop on that path. We hold no keys, run no mirror, and could not produce your records if we were asked for them.

For data protection purposes, a shop using the App is the controller of the personal information it holds about its own customers and employees, and it decides what to collect, how long to keep it, and how to answer a request about it. Leaf Farm supplies software; we do not process that information on your behalf, because we never receive it. If your business is subject to a law that requires a data processing agreement with a vendor who handles personal data, that requirement does not arise here, and we will say so in writing if it helps you document it.

Certain highly sensitive fields, such as an employee Social Security number, are encrypted by the App with AES-256-GCM before they are stored, under a key held only in your device Keychain. Employee PINs and passwords are never stored at all, only a salted PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 verifier that cannot be reversed into the original secret.

6If a shop that uses leaf served your vehicle

You may have reached this page because a repair shop mentioned leaf on an invoice or a service reminder. If so, please note that Leaf Farm has no record of you. We do not receive your name, your contact details, your vehicle or your invoice, and we cannot look you up.

The shop that served you holds that information and is the right party to contact about correcting it, obtaining a copy of it, or asking for it to be deleted, along with any request to stop receiving service reminders. Reminder emails are sent by the shop from the shop's own email account, never by us. If you contact us instead, the only thing we can honestly do is tell you this and, where we can, point you back to the shop.

7Franchise networks and franchise fees

leaf can be used by franchised brands. In that arrangement, the franchisor or brand owner maintains its own network records and receives business information from its franchisees, typically to calculate and collect franchise fees, to track shop performance, and to administer the brand. That may include shop identifiers, revenue rollups by service, daily shop-level figures, and the contact details of the franchisee's business.

The franchisor collects that information for its own purposes, and Leaf Farm does not receive it. The franchisor is the controller of it and is responsible for how it is collected, used, stored, retained and disclosed, including any fee processing or payment handling. Leaf Farm is not a party to the franchise agreement between a franchisor and a franchisee, does not process franchise fee payments, and takes no role in the commercial relationship between them. A franchisee with a question about what its brand collects should raise it with the brand.

What the software does is keep that flow narrow. A franchisee publishes revenue figures and shop-level totals upward. Customer names, vehicles and individual invoices remain in the franchisee's own account and are not bulk-shared with the brand.

Where a brand network uses a hosted repository to record membership and revenue rollups, that repository is operated on the brand's own account with a third-party provider, and access tokens are held in the device Keychain of the accounts entitled to them. Each brand's repository is separate, so credentials for one brand grant nothing on another.

8Vehicle specification contributions

The App includes a database of vehicle specifications such as torque values, fluid capacities and service intervals. A shop can submit a correction when it finds a value that is wrong, and a value is promoted only when several independent shops agree on it.

A submitted correction contains vehicle specification data only: make, model, year, engine configuration, and the value being corrected. It carries no customer, no vehicle owner, no plate, no VIN and no employee information. The shop is identified by a random value generated on the device, which exists solely so that repeated submissions from the same shop are counted once. It is not derived from your business licence, your account, your device or anything else about you, and it cannot be traced back to your shop by us or by anyone reading the database.

9When you contact us

If you email [email protected], we receive your message, your email address, and whatever you choose to put in it. We use that solely to answer you and to keep a record of the exchange. Please do not send customer records, employee records, payroll data or any other sensitive material by email. If you send us a diagnostic report from the App, review it first and remove anything you do not wish us to see.

Correspondence is kept only as long as needed for support history and for our own legal and accounting obligations, and is not used for marketing. We will not add you to a mailing list because you asked us a question.

10Third parties

The complete list of outside parties involved in delivering leaf is short:

• Apple Inc. Distributes the App, provides iCloud and CloudKit storage and sync for your own account, provides App Store Connect reporting to us, and handles all purchases and subscriptions. Apple's handling of your information is governed by Apple's own privacy policy and terms.
• A repository host, for brand networks only. Where franchise features are used, brand membership records and revenue rollups are stored in a repository on the brand's own account with its provider. Shops not using brand features never contact it.
• Your own email client and printer. Documents and reminders leave through software you already control, addressed by you.
• Your payment provider, if you accept cards. Card payments, including Tap to Pay on iPhone, are authorized and settled by Apple and by your own merchant processor under their agreements with you. Leaf Farm never receives, stores or transmits cardholder data, and full card numbers are not stored in the App.
• Our hosting provider for this website. Serves these static pages, as described in section 11.

There is no advertising network, no data broker, no analytics vendor and no marketing platform in this list, because there are none in the product. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information with third parties for cross-context behavioural advertising. We never have, and we are not building toward it.

11This website

leaffarm.org is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, embeds no third-party scripts, loads no external fonts or advertising, and has no forms or accounts. The only scripts on the Site stamp the current year into the footer and enable a small entrance animation. Neither observes you, and the pages read correctly with JavaScript switched off.

Our hosting provider records ordinary technical server logs when a page is requested, including IP address, timestamp, requested page and user agent. That happens at the infrastructure level for security and reliability, is retained briefly by the provider, and is not used by us to identify or profile visitors.

12Children

leaf is business software for automotive repair shops. It is not directed to children, it is not designed for or marketed to anyone under 18, and it is not offered in the Kids Category. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child's information has somehow reached us, write to [email protected] and we will delete whatever we hold.

13How data is protected

The strongest protection here is structural: we hold almost nothing, so there is almost nothing to lose. Beyond that, the App is built so that data at rest and in transit stays encrypted.

• Your local store sits inside the device's hardware-backed, passcode-protected file encryption, and in iCloud your records are encrypted at rest by Apple.
• All network connections the App makes are TLS-encrypted. The App has no plaintext endpoint.
• Highly sensitive fields are additionally sealed with AES-256-GCM under a Keychain-held key that never enters the database.
• Credentials, tokens and encryption keys live only in the Keychain, never in the database, in preferences, in a log, or in the source code.
• Nothing sensitive is written to a log file, and no secret or personal record is ever logged.
• Access inside a shop is limited by role-based permissions, a register lock screen, and an audit log of significant actions.
• The App ships with no third-party software development kits, which removes an entire class of supply chain and data leakage risk.

No system can be guaranteed absolutely secure, and we do not claim otherwise. Protecting your device passcodes, your Apple account credentials and your employee PINs is your responsibility, and it matters more here than it would with a vendor-hosted product, because you hold the data.

14Retention and deletion

Your shop records are kept for as long as you keep them, and are deleted when you delete them. Because they live in your own account, you do not need our permission or our cooperation to remove them: delete the records, or delete the App and its iCloud data from your Apple account, and they are gone. leaf creates no account with Leaf Farm, so there is no account with us to close.

What we hold ourselves is limited to the Apple reporting described in section 4, which is retained in aggregate form, and any correspondence you send us. Apple determines its own retention periods for App Store data.

15Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to know what personal information an organization holds about you, to obtain a copy of it, to correct or delete it, to limit its use, to opt out of its sale or of targeted advertising, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. This includes residents of California under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA, residents of other US states with comprehensive privacy laws, and individuals in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom under the GDPR.

You can exercise those rights against Leaf Farm by writing to [email protected]. We will verify the request as required by law and respond within the applicable statutory period. Because of how leaf is built, the honest answer to most requests is that we hold no personal information about you at all, and we will tell you so directly. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of.

If your information is held by a repair shop or by a franchisor rather than by us, your rights run against that organization, and we cannot answer for it or act on its behalf. See sections 6 and 7. Individuals in the EEA or UK also have the right to lodge a complaint with their supervisory authority.

16International users

Leaf Farm operates from the United States. If you use the App or the Site from outside the United States, any information covered by this policy is handled in the United States, where data protection law differs from the law of your country. Where information is transferred internationally by Apple as part of iCloud or the App Store, Apple carries out that transfer under its own terms and safeguards.

17Tracking signals

We do not track users across apps or websites, so there is nothing for a Do Not Track header or a Global Privacy Control signal to switch off. The App does not request App Tracking Transparency permission, because it does not track.

18Changes to this policy

If our practices change, we will post the revised policy on this page with a new effective date, and where the change is material we will make it clear in the App or on the Site before it takes effect. Continued use after a change takes effect means you accept the revised policy. Prior versions are available on request.

19How to reach us

Questions about privacy, or a request under any of the rights above, go to a person and get a real answer.

Leaf Farm LLC
An Illinois limited liability company
[email protected]