In June 2020 Apple announced that it would soon require all developers to disclose their app’s privacy practices to customers via a new ‘privacy summary’ that will appear on all apps’ product pages. As of January 2021, the Agworld apps will have this privacy summary available for all users to reference. As some of the symbols and language might be a bit confusing, and with a lot of rumours doing the rounds online about privacy of apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and others, I thought it useful to explain a bit more about the privacy summary of the Agworld apps through this article.

In the images below you’ll see what our apps’ privacy summary looks like and you’ll notice seven data ‘headers’ - I’ll explain each of these 7 categories below.

Contact Info

For contact information we only use your email address for authentication. This is the same email address that you’ve already provided us previously to set up your Agworld account.

Contacts

Contacts are only accessed if you send a job from Agworld, AND on the mail message you tap "Contacts on this iPhone / iPad". We only use the contacts you’ve selected to add them as recipients for the purposes of sending the message, and never for anything else. We never access the rest of the contacts list, store it, or transmit it anywhere.

Identifiers

Identifiers are used once you are authenticated via your email address, and this allows us to enable features in the app based on your roles, relationships to other companies and your subscription. It is used by our sync server to keep track of the data we need to sync to your iPhone or iPad so that it stays in sync with data that is changed on our website. It is also used in analytics so we can see which parts of the apps are widely used, and to assist in solving errors or solving problems. We also use it to send you information about new features.

Diagnostics

Diagnostic data such as app crashes, and performance are all collected and only used for Agworld to improve the app, or assist in customer support requests. This data is transmitted to the following third parties: Intercom and Firebase. In Firebase the data is anonymised and these parties can only see user IDs as identifiers. Through Intercom, the Agworld customer support team can use this user ID to tie the information back to a particular user so we can assist our customers with whatever the issue they are experiencing.

Location

• Coarse location is used in some of our customer support systems to give us a very rough idea of where our users are located. It shows our customer support team your city/town/region when you are using the app and helps us guide our customer support procedures.
• Precise location is only ever used when drawing a field boundary and using the GPS tracking feature by pressing "start". It's only ever used for the purposes of drawing a field boundary, and is turned off when you press "stop". Only the field boundary is transmitted to our servers. When using the location feature on the map (blue user dot), this is only ever used for the purposes of showing the user location on the map, and the location is never transmitted from the device to other parties.

User Content

Photos or videos - these are only ever used when attaching photos to a job, or to a support team request to send a screenshot via the in-app messaging functionality. We never access the device photos except for the individual photos selected to use with either of those features. "Other user content" consists of app specific data that the user creates in the app - farms, fields, boundaries, jobs, rainfall readings, pins etc.

Usage Data

Usage data is gathered to show us how the app is being used, so we can see how often certain features are used. This helps us to discover customer pain points, find out how well new features are adopted, and target messages to customers on how to use new or existing features to get the most from the Agworld product.

I hope this answers all your questions about data collected in the Agworld apps but, if you have any questions about this or anything else, our customer support team will be more than happy to have a chat with you about this.