Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy outlines what kinds of personal and sensitive information we collect, why we collect this information, and how we handle it. We’ll update this policy when our information handling practices change.

Personal information is information or an opinion about an identified individual or an individual who is reasonably identifiable.

Sensitive information is a subset of personal information and includes information or an opinion about your:

What we collect

The kinds of personal information we may collect includes all the following.

Information about you:

Information about your interactions with us, such as:

How we collect information

We collect your personal information directly through the mobile app Med Herb Lens, or through your emails and Facebook messages sent to us via the contact feature of the app.

Social networking services

We use social networking services such as Facebook, and Gmail to talk with the public. When you talk with us using these services, we may collect your personal information to communicate with you and the public.

The social networking service will also handle your personal information for its own purposes. These services have their own privacy policies. You can access the privacy policies for these services on their websites.

Data exchanges

We never share your personal information (such as email address…) to any third party or agency, unless the disclosure is required or authorised by Vietnamese law or requested by an overseas authority of a certain country the mobile app is made available.

For the herb images uploaded to our server from you, they are automatically available publicly on IM.GE, a free image hosting service we use as part of our backend. We do not affiliate with them. However, we display their credit as per advised by their support staff. Please visit https://im.ge/page/privacy-policy for their own privacy policy, and https://im.ge/page/terms-of-service for their own Terms of Service. Please note that your email adress and any other personal details are not recorded by or shared with IM.GE. Moreover, we may periodically compress all the images as a dataset and publish it on Kaggle - a subsidiary of Google LLC, an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners, only for study and/or other non-profit purposes.

Why we collect information

We collect your email address so that we can give you the permission to read and write to our database.

We collect your herb browsing history and favourite list so that we can display these lists to you on the mobile app.

We collect images uploaded by you so that we can use them to retrain our Deep Learning model, to provide you with better Medicinal Herb Recognition experience, all for non-profit purposes.

How we store personal information

Your email address is not directly stored or accessible from our server-side database. This means nobody, through the mobile app, can see your email address. It is only accessible by admin in Authentication, a service by Google’s Firebase.

Your browsing history and favourite list are stored in our database but only visible to you through the mobile app.

Your images are uploaded to IM.GE, a free image hosting service.

How to access and correct information about you

You have the right to both ask:

If you ask, we must give you access to your personal information, and take reasonable steps to correct it if we consider it is incorrect, unless there is a law that allows or requires us not to.

We will notify you in writing and explain our reasons if we refuse to give you access to, or correct, your personal information.

How to make a complaint about privacy

If you wish to complain about how we’ve handled your personal information, you can ask to speak to our staff via the Contact Us feature of the mobile app.

How we deal with your complaint

We will always respond to your feedback.

We will use the information from your feedback to investigate and resolve individual issues. We will also use the information to provide feedback to staff. Your information will be stored and used to assist us to improve the delivery of our services.