Sward is a lawn diagnosis app. This policy says what leaves your phone, what does not, and who touches the parts that do.
The short version
Sward has no accounts. You never make one, and there is nothing to sign in to. Your patches, photos, scan history, journal and chat are stored on your device and are not uploaded anywhere except in the two cases described below.
There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no third-party SDK in the app. The only server Sward talks to is its own.
What stays on your device
Everything, unless it is named in the next section. Specifically:
- The patches you create, their names and their sizes
- Every photo you take or choose, and every diagnosis
- Watering, mowing, feeding and seeding you log, and the health trend built from it
- Your conversations with Rye
- Your reminder settings and unit preference
This lives in the app's own storage on the device and is included in your device backup if you have one turned on. Deleting the app deletes all of it. Sward has no copy, and no way to reach it.
Notifications are scheduled and delivered by your phone. No reminder is sent from a server, so no server needs to know your patches or your schedule.
What leaves your device, and why
Sward sends data to its own service, run on Cloudflare Workers, in exactly three cases.
1. A photo you ask to have diagnosed
When you take or choose a photo for a diagnosis, the app resizes it and re-encodes it as a JPEG before sending. That re-encode discards the photo's metadata, including any GPS coordinate the camera attached to it. What is sent is the picture and nothing else — no location, no device identifier, no name you gave the patch.
The photo is passed to Anthropic's API, which reports what is visible in it: a likely grass species, a few factual observations, and a weight for each cause the photo speaks to. It does not write advice — every sentence of care advice in Sward is written into the app itself, and the diagnosis is assembled on your device.
Sward's own service does not store the photo. It is held in memory for the length of the request and then gone. Anthropic processes it under their API terms as a data processor and does not use it to train models.
2. A message you send to Rye
Chat messages are sent the same way, with the context of the patch they are about, and are answered by Anthropic's API under the same terms. The conversation itself is kept on your device.
3. A weather forecast
If you allow location access, Sward asks your phone for your position, rounds it to two decimal places — roughly a kilometre — before it leaves the device, and sends that rounded point to fetch a forecast. It is enough to know what weather your lawn is getting and not enough to identify an address.
Forecasts come from MET Norway and are cached by Sward's service against the rounded coordinate. No coordinate is tied to you, because there is nothing to tie it to.
If you refuse location access, the app still works: the diagnosis, the calculators, the journal and the log are unaffected, and the weather-driven reminders simply do not run.
What Sward's service stores
- A cached forecast per rounded coordinate, expiring on its own, so the same square kilometre is not fetched repeatedly.
- An App Attest key. To keep the service from being used by anything other than the app, each install registers a cryptographic key issued by Apple. The public half and a counter are stored; the private half never leaves your device's secure hardware, and the key identifies an installation, not a person.
- Short-lived request logs, including the IP address the request came from, used to apply rate limits and to find faults. These are not linked to anything else and are not used to build a profile.
Nothing here contains your photos, your patches, your journal or your conversations.
Payments
Subscriptions are sold and charged by Apple, through the App Store. Sward is told only whether a subscription is active. It never sees your name, your card, your address or your Apple Account.
Apple's own privacy policy covers what happens on their side.
Children
Sward is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from them.
Your rights
Because there are no accounts, there is no profile to request, correct or export — the data is already on your device and under your control. To erase everything Sward holds about you, delete the app.
If you are in the UK or EU, the lawful basis for the processing described above is performance of the contract you enter into by using the app (Art. 6(1)(b) UK/EU GDPR), and for the security and rate-limiting logs, legitimate interests in keeping the service running (Art. 6(1)(f)).
Processors
- Cloudflare, Inc. — hosts Sward's service.
- Anthropic PBC — analyses photos and answers chat messages.
- MET Norway — supplies forecast data (CC BY 4.0).
- Apple Inc. — handles purchases and delivers notifications.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Email info@getsward.app.