Privacy Policy

Updated June 3rd 2020

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Collected Notes, we have a few fundamental principles:

We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services. We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it. We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted. We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information. Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

Our website collectednotes.com

Our mobile applications (including the Collected Notes mobile app for Android and iOS); Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our websites, mobile applications, and other products and services collectively as “Services.”.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a Collected Notes account to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name — and that’s it. We use Apple & Google sign in to handle signup's on our website and this means Google Inc. & Apple Inc. knows when you sign-up or sign-in to Collected Notes.

Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a Collected Notes account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.

Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).

Communications with us (hi there!): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Engineers about a support question. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, Collected Notes comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).

We also collect some information automatically:

Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information that our services generate but we don't associate it with your user so we have no way of knowing which user viewed what content.

Usage information: We collect only information that you provide to us. For example when you write a note, we log this action with your user id in our database. We do not log page views with your user id so your browsing of the site cannot be tied back to your user id.

Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.

Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of the sunrise to your website.

Information from cookies & other technologies: At this time, Collected Notes only sets a single cookie for authenticated (signed-in) users. If you configure your browser to block cookies then you will not be able to authenticate but you can still continue to use the service as as a non-authenticated user. The authentication cookie (auth. cookie) is only used to identify an authenticated user to our backend. Other than the previous mentioned auth. cookie we do not set any other cookie. For Non-authenticated (users that have not signed-in) users we do not set any tracking or analytics cookies.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log in to your Collected Notes account through another service (like Apple, Google), we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information) via the authorization procedures for that service. The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Services. While our website is public and can be accessed without a sign-up or sign-in certain interactions with the content such as following, cloning, and posting does require an sign'd in user. To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage websites more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.

To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Collected Notes and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services. To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues. To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, recommending content.

To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on Collected Notes; texting you to verify your payment; or calling you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that: (1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy.

Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Stripe, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, data escrow services that allow us to provide domain registration services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.

Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.

To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Collected Notes, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.

Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Collected Notes goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.

With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so, like when you connected your account to a social media service. Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.

Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users. We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users' data. We aren't a data broker, we don't sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don't sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly. That means information like your public profile, posts, other content that you generate are all available to others — and we hope they get a lot of views! Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it. For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Collected Notes’s websites, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 90 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Collected Notes’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible.

Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, Collected Notes only sets a single cookie for authenticated (sign-in) users. If you configure your browser to block cookies then you will not be able to authenticate you can still continue to use the service as as a non-authenticated user.

Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. Your posted content will be deleted permanently. Keep in mind that we may also continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.
• You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers); Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example); Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services); Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address); Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one); You can find more information about what we collect in the "Information We Collect section" above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the "How and Why We Use Information section" of our privacy policy. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the "Sharing Information section" of the privacy policy. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you; Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain; Opt out of any sale of personal information; and Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us" in the privacy policy to, well, find out how to reach us. When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the "Your Rights section" of this privacy policy, please contact us by email [email protected].

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because Collected Notes’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the "How and Why We Use Information section" of this privacy policy. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

In the case of US based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the EU-US Privacy Shield; or In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them. You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads may appear on any of our services. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Collected Notes.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Collected Notes may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Collected Notes encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our website or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy

That’s it! Thanks for reading.