Last updated: August 16th, 2022
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.
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
When you sign up for Substratum, we typically ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a company name. 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, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.
When you pay for a Substratum, 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. We store your billing address to calculate any sales tax due in the United States or VAT in the EU, to detect fraudulent credit card transactions, and to print on your invoices.
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.
Web analytics data — described further in the Website Interactions section — are also tied temporarily to IP addresses to assist with troubleshooting cases.
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. Other web analytics we utilize are described further in the Cookies and Do Not Track section.
We might use CAPTCHA services across our applications to mitigate brute force logins and as a means of spam protection. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our app and the broader Internet community from credential stuffing attacks and spam. When you log into your accounts and fill specific forms, the CAPTCHA service evaluates various information (e.g IP address, how long the visitor has been on the app, mouse movements) to check whether the data is possibly filled out by an automated program instead of a human. We retain these data via our subprocessor forever because they are used for anti-spam mitigation.
We do use persistent first-party cookies to store certain preferences and make it easier for you to use our applications.
A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings in your own browser. To learn more about cookies, including how to view 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.
When you write Substratum with a question or to ask for help, 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.
We also store any information you volunteer like surveys. Sometimes when we do customer interviews, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We only do so if you give your express consent.
We don’t collect any characteristics of protected classifications including age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or physical and mental abilities or disabilities. 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.
Our default practice is to not access your information. The only times we’ll ever access or share your info are:
At Substratum, we apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Currently some of the most privacy-forward regulations in place are the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) in the US. Substratum recognizes all of the rights granted in these regulations, except as limited by applicable law. These rights include:
Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and directly updating your account information.
If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at support@substratum.app. For requests to delete personal information or know what personal information has been collected, we will first verify your identity using a combination of at least two pieces of information already collected including your user email address. If an authorized agent is corresponding on your behalf, we will first need written consent with a signature from the account holder before proceeding.
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 might vary a little). 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.
Some parts of our products (e.g. 3rd party services) and other web properties might be 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 might be transferred to and stored in 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.
In compliance with the EU-US Privacy Shield Principles and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Principles, we commit to resolve complaints about your privacy and our collection or use of your personal information. European Union, United Kingdom, or Swiss individuals with inquiries or complaints regarding this privacy policy should first contact us at support@substratum.app.
At our discretion, we may change our privacy policy to reflect updates to our business processes, current acceptable practices, or legislative or regulatory changes. If we decide to change this privacy policy, we will post the changes here at the same link by which you are accessing this privacy policy.
If required by law, we will get your permission or give you the opportunity to opt in to or opt out of, as applicable, any new uses of your personal information.
Policy adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0