Read below to learn how we process and protect your data.
Effective Date: 25th May, 2018
Your privacy is critically important to us. At HelpCenter.io (check out “who are we ” section), 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 help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
We never sell any personal data.
All processing operations are carried out in strict compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) (specifically but not limited to Article 6(1)(b) to (f) and Article 28) as well as the Laws of Bulgaria (together the “Applicable Law”), where “HelpCenter Solutions Ltd.” is incorporated.
Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies the abovementioned principles.
For the purpose of this Privacy Policy, personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person; an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person (the “Personal Data”).
This Privacy Policy applies to personal and anonymous data that we collect about you when you use:
Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, web application and other products and services provided by “HelpCenter Solutions Ltd.” collectively as “Services.”.
Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.
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 information in three ways: 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.
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. 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 HelpCenter.io account to provide name and email address–and that’s it. You may provide us with more information–like your company name, role in your company, city and country–but we don’t require that information to create a HelpCenter.io account and try our services.
Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy a HelpCenter.io subscription you will need to provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as credit card information, address and contact information.
Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content (such as for your help center website). For example, if you write a help center article that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish the post publicly. This might be obvious to you&helli;but it’s not to everyone! You are solely responsible for any information that you disclose and disseminate on publicly accessible areas.
Communications With Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys or communicate with our Customer Success team about a support questions.
If you have a concern about any personally identifiable information that you have posted on any publicly accessible areas and are unable to delete or edit it, please contact us.
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, such as 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 when you use our Services–for example, when you create or make changes to your website on HelpCenter.io.
Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that site administrators and users perform on a site using our HelpCenter.io services–in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a site (e.g., [HelpCenter.io user id] deleted “[title of article]” at [time/date]). We also track information about your HelpCenter.io sites such as but not limited to number of visitors, search queries made, articles ratings, total number of articles and categories. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, support document searches at our own help center site (self.helpcenter.io), customizations made and features enabled for your website) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can improve our Services.
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.
Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. HelpCenter.io uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log into your HelpCenter.io account through another service (like Google) or if you connect your website or account to another service (like Intercom or Slack) for the purposes of provided integration, we will receive information from that service (such as your email and other basic profile information) via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available. You will get further information about what data we will receive from a particular service before you decide whether to approve the authorization or not.
We may also get information, such as a mailing address, from third party services about individuals who are not yet our users (…but we hope will be!), which we may use, for example, for marketing and advertising purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our services.
We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:
To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your website, backup and restore your website, or charge you for any of our paid Services;
To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their websites more efficiently;
To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals purchased a plan after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of HelpCenter.io and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by HelpCenter.io and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on HelpCenter.io and our products; and
To personalize your experience using our Services, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have a particular plan with us or have been our user for a certain length of time), and serve relevant advertisements.
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 our 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 better understand 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–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.
We never sell our users’ private personal information.
We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:
Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
Third-Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors (data processors) who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, 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), those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), and companies that make products available on our websites (such as HelpCenter.io add-ons), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them. Other vendors are listed below in the "Service Providers" section as well as in our more specific policies (e.g. our Cookie Policy).
Legal Requests: 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 HelpCenter.io, 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, we
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 HelpCenter.io 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 with which you authorize us to do so, such as when authorizing access to your account by third-party services.
Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
Other Site Owners: If you visit a help center site hosted by HelpCenter.io, make a search query or rate an article, your IP address may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site you’ve visited.
Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our support forms and feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.
Here's more information about the service providers that we may employ to provide the Service on our behalf, to perform Service-related services or to assist us in analyzing how our Service is used.
Matomo is a fully GDPR-compliant analytics service that respects users' privacy.
You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Matomo by enabling DoNotTrack in your browser.
For more information on the privacy practices of Matomo, please visit their Privacy Policy: https://matomo.org/matomo-cloud-privacy-policy/
We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback.
You can opt-out to the creation of a user profile, Hotjar’s storing of data about your usage of our site and Hotjar’s use of tracking cookies on other websites by following this opt-out link.
For more information about the privacy practices employed by Hotjar, refer to their "Privacy Policy" at https://www.hotjar.com/legal/policies/privacy.
HelpCenter uses remarketing services to advertise on third party websites to you after you visited our Service. We and our third-party vendors use cookies to inform, optimize and serve ads based on your past visits to our Service.
Google AdWords remarketing service is provided by Google Inc.
You can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customize the Google Display Network ads by visiting the Google Ads Settings page: http://www.google.com/settings/ads
Google also recommends installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on - https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout - for your web browser. Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on provides visitors with the ability to prevent their data from being collected and used by Google Analytics.
For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
Twitter remarketing service is provided by Twitter Inc.
You can opt-out from Twitter's interest-based ads by following their instructions: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170405
You can learn more about the privacy practices and policies of Twitter by visiting their Privacy Policy page: https://twitter.com/privacy
Facebook remarketing service is provided by Facebook Inc.
You can learn more about interest-based advertising from Facebook by visiting this page: https://www.facebook.com/help/164968693837950
To opt-out from Facebook's interest-based ads follow these instructions from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/568137493302217
Facebook adheres to the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising established by the Digital Advertising Alliance. You can also opt-out from Facebook and other participating companies through the Digital Advertising Alliance in the USA http://www.aboutads.info/choices/, the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada in Canada http://youradchoices.ca/ or the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/, or opt-out using your mobile device settings.
For more information on the privacy practices of Facebook, please visit Facebook's Data Policy: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation
We may provide paid products and/or services within the Service. In that case, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).
We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information is governed by their Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information.
The payment processors we work with are:
You can review their Privacy Policy at https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full
Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.
That means, of course, that information like your public profile, articles and other content that you make public on your website are all available to others–and we hope it proves helpful to your customers!
For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one as well as your name might be displayed on a help center site as author of articles if this options has been enabled for the particular HelpCenter.io user site you are authoring content in.
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.
We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on “How and Why We Use Information”–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.
For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of HelpCenter.io websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to HelpCenter.io’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.
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, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.
Our Service may contain links to other sites that are not operated by us. If you click on a third party link, you will be directed to that third party's site. We strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy of every site you visit.
We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.
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 you may not be able to use our Services to their full extent (for example if you choose not to provide billing information, your usage of our Services will be limited to the trial period specified).
Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, HelpCenter.io does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using HelpCenter.io websites, with the drawback that certain features of HelpCenter.io websites and services may not function properly without the aid of cookies. You can learn more about cookies in our Cookie Policy
Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services :( :( :( :(, you can delete your HelpCenter.io account by contacting us at hello [at] helpcenter.io. Please keep in mind that we may 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.
If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you 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.
Request portability of your personal data.
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 do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.
EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.
The controller of personal information collected by HelpCenter.io’s products and services is HelpCenter Solutions Ltd., a limited liability company registered under the laws of Bulgaria.
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 above, please contact us by sending us an email at hello [at] helpcenter.io.
Because HelpCenter.io’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, other members of our group of companies, or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. 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:
You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.
Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests.
Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by HelpCenter.io and does not cover the collection of information by any third party advertisers or analytics providers. You can refer to our Cookie Policy to learn more about the cookies that other services may set.
We also process information about visitors to our users’ websites, on behalf of our users and in accordance with our user agreements. What information we collect about visitors to our user’s website is covered under the “Information We Collect Automatically” section of this Privacy Policy.
Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 13 ("Children"). We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Children has provided us with Personal Information, please contact us. If we discover that a Children under 13 has provided us with Personal Information, we will delete such information from our servers immediately.
Although most changes are likely to be minor, HelpCenter.io may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. HelpCenter.io encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by adding a statement to our homepage or by 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. You have the right to disagree to the changes by closing your account with us.
That’s it! Thanks for reading.
This Privacy Policy was adapted from Automattic's version, which is available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license.
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