Privacy policy

The privacy of your data — and it is your data, not ours! — is a big deal to us. In this policy, we lay out: what data we collect and why; how your data is handled; and your rights to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will.

What we collect and why

Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:

Identity & access

When you sign up for a our product, we typically ask for identifying information such as your name, email address. That’s just so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you invoices, updates, or other essential information. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products, but we do not normally look at or access that picture. We’ll never sell your personal info to third parties.

Billing information

When you pay for a our product, we ask for your credit card and billing address. That's so we can charge you for service, calculate taxes due, and send you invoices. Your credit card is passed directly to our payment processor and doesn't ever go through our servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number and as-of billing address, for account history, invoicing, and billing support.

Geolocation data

We log all access to all accounts by full IP address so that we can always verify no unauthorized access has happened. We keep this login data for as long as your product account is active.

We also log full IP addresses used to sign up a product account. We keep this record forever because they are used to mitigate spammy signups.

Web analytics data — described further below — are also tied temporarily to IP addresses to assist with troubleshooting cases. We blind all web analytics data after 30 days.

Website interactions

When you browse our marketing pages or applications, your browser automatically shares certain information such as which operating system and browser version you are using. We track that information, along with the pages you are visiting, page load timing, and which website referred you for statistical purposes like conversion rates and to test new designs. We sometimes track specific link clicks to help inform some design decisions. These web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account if applicable and you are signed into our Services. We blind all of these individual identifiers after 30 days.

Cookies and Do Not Track

We do use persistent first-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and support some in-house analytics. A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser to help it remember your login information, site preferences, and more. You can adjust cookie retention settings in your own browser. To learn more about cookies, including how to see which cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, please visit: www.allaboutcookies.org.

At this time, our sites and applications do not respond to Do Not Track beacons sent by browser plugins.

Voluntary correspondence

When you write to support, we keep that correspondence, including the email address, so that we have a history of past correspondences to reference if you reach out in the future.

Information we do not collect

We don’t collect any characteristics of protected classifications including age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. You may provide these data voluntarily, such as if you include a pronoun preference in your email signature when writing into our Support team.

We also do not collect any biometric data. You are given the option to add a picture to your user profile, which could be a real picture of you or a picture of something else that represents you best. We do not extract any information from profile pictures: they are for your use alone.

When we access or share your information

Our default practice is to not access your information. The only times we’ll ever access or share your info are:

• To provide products or services you've requested. We do use some third-party services to run our applications and only to the extent necessary process some or all of your personal information via these third parties. You can see the list of third-party services we use at the end of this page.
• Having subprocessors means we are using technology to access your data.
• When required under applicable law. If the appropriate law enforcement authorities have the necessary warrant, criminal subpoena, or court order requiring we share data, we have to comply. Otherwise, we flat-out reject requests from local and federal law enforcement when they seek data. And unless we’re legally prevented from it, we’ll always inform you when such requests are made.

How we secure your data

All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. Most data are not encrypted while they live in our database (since it needs to be ready to send to you when you need it), but we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest.

When you delete data in your product accounts

In many of our applications, we give you the option to trash data. Anything you trash on your product accounts while they are active will be kept in an accessible trash can for up to 30 days (it varies a little by product). After that, the trashed data are no longer accessible via the application and are deleted from our active servers within the next 30 days. We also have some backups of our application databases, which are kept for up to another 30 days. In total, when you trash things in our applications, they are purged within 90 days from all of our systems and logs. Retrieving data for a single account from a backup is cost-prohibitive and unduly burdensome so if you change your mind you’ll need to do so before your data are deleted from our active servers.

We also delete your data after an account is cancelled. In this case, there is no period of data being kept in an accessible trash can so your data are purged within 60 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-cancelled accounts.

EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield policy

The GDPR requires that data transfer out of the EU must only happen to countries deemed as having adequate data protection laws. The United States generally doesn’t meet that requirement. Privacy Shield is an agreement between certain European jurisdictions and the United States that allows for the transfer of personal data from the EU to the US. Participation in the Privacy Shield program is voluntary.

Location of Site and Data

Our products and other web properties are operated in the United States. If you are located in the European Union or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to the United States. By using our Site, participating in any of our services and/or providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.

Subprocessors

Below is a list of personal data subprocessors we use

• Amazon Web Services: Cloud services provider.
• Google Firebase: Cloud services provider.
• Crisp: Customer Support provider.
• Mixpanel: Analytics.
• Paddle: Payment and subscriptions

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0