We value your privacy!

As part of our commitment to privacy and transparency, we want to give you more information about how we collect and use personal information — in a more organized and readable format.

“We value your privacy!” These are the first words of our Privacy Policy, and words we live by when designing and building our products.

This privacy policy applies to all visitors and customers using or accessing any of the websites that we produced and maintain the services that we provide, including allcot.com and  allcot.net.

Our mailing address for the head office is:

ALLCOT AG

Bahnhofstrasse 10
6300 Zug

Switzerland

For any privacy-related questions, you can reach us at privacy@allcot.com

Our fundamental principals

• 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.

Who We Share Your Data With

We use third-party services (data processors) across our sites. The extent to which your data is shared with these providers depends on your use of our services, and we list the specific third-parties in use (with links to their privacy policies) in the sections below.

Each third-party provider has been vetted by our security team to ensure that privacy policies and practices meet or exceed the same levels of compliance and standards that we follow. Where appropriate and available, we hold additional signed Data Privacy Agreements with these companies as an additional layer of accountability in order to help ensure your data is safe and secure.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelt 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 the 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 who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information) and those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers). We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
• As Required by Law: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.
• To Protect Rights and Property: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of ALLCOT, 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 may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• 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 ALLCOT 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 the social media services that you connect to your site through our Publicize feature.
• Aggregated and 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.
• Other Site Owners: If you have a WordPress.com account and leave a comment on a site that uses our Services (like a site created on WordPress.com or a site running Jetpack), your IP address and the email address associated with your WordPress.com account may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site where you left the comment.
• Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our 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.

Cookies

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. We use cookies across our sites to help identify and track visitors, their usage of our services, and their website access preferences. We describe the specific cookies used in the sections below. Visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using our websites, with the drawback that certain features may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

What Personal Data We Collect And Why We Collect It 

Registered Users

• If you create an account on one of our sites, you will be prompted to select a Username and provide your Email Address.
• When choosing a Username, we strongly advise you not use or include your real name. Usernames cannot be changed.
• Your Username and Email Address are stored in the website’s database. Your Email Address is used to send you an email with a link to set your password or to send you an email with a link to reset your password in the event you forget your password.
• Once an account is created, you must contact us to have it deleted.
• You may optionally complete your Profile by providing your First Name, Last Name, Website (URL) and/or Biographical info. These additional details are also saved in the website’s database. You may edit these details, and your Email Address, in your Profile at any time.
• You may also choose how your name is displayed (your Display Name) to visitors to the site (e.g. in comments you create) in your Profile.
• Your Username, First Name, Last Name and Email Address are accessible by employees on the site.
• If you attempt to log in to our site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies at all. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
• If you have an account and you log in to a site, we will set up several cookies to save your log in information and some of your screen options. The logged-in cookies last for two days, and the screen options cookies last for a year.
• If you select “Remember Me” these cookies will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the log in cookies will be removed. It is important that you log out if you are using a public computer.
• For users that register on one of our sites, we also store the data they provide in their profile indefinitely. All registered users can see, change or delete most of that data at any time except their login name/nickname.

Email/Chat/Contact Forms

• We use Google/G Suite to process all internal email and communication with our customers. Google’s privacy policy is available here: https://policies.google.com/privacy.
• Customers that email us, or use any of the contact forms on our websites, will have their email address, IP address, and any data provided in the contact form or body of the email stored in G Suite archives
• We keep all email and chat communication indefinitely to help us provide support and improve our services. Individuals can request copies of any previous correspondence with us at any time.

Analytics

• We use Google Analytics for tracking visitors and aggregating information about the traffic to our websites. The Google Analytics privacy policy can be found here:  https://policies.google.com/privacy. You can learn more about how to opt-out of tracking in Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/.

Marketing Campaigns

• We use email marketing to communicate with customers and potential customers from time to time. All email lists and campaigns are “opt-in” meaning we will not send you these sorts of emails unless you indicated that you wish to receive them during signup or other interactions on our website.
• We may send you “system” emails, such as password reset requests or payment notifications/receipts even if you have not opted-in to email marketing lists.
• All marketing emails sent by us will include an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email. Emails sent to you may also include standard tracking, including open and click activities.
• We use MailChimp. Mailchimp’s privacy policy is found here: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/.
• We may utilize social media and web advertising campaigns. These service providers use cookies on our sites and/or pixel tracking to serve ads across the different platforms.
  • Google AdSense & DoubleClick (privacy policy | opt out)
  • Twitter (privacy policy | opt out)
  • Facebook (privacy policy | opt out)

Paying Customers

• For business analytics, CRM, and subscription records of Enterprise customers, we use Pipelinedeals. Pipelinedeals privacy policy can be found here: https://www.pipelinedeals.com/privacy.
• For payment transactions for, we use PayPal and Stripe. PayPal’s privacy policy can be found here: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full. Stripe’s privacy policy can be found here: https://stripe.com/us/privacy.
• To comply with accounting and legal requirements, we keep data on financial transactions in the systems above for up to 10 years depending on which company in the ALLCOT Group you are dealing with.

What Rights You Have Over Your Data

 If you are a registered user or have left comments on our site you can request to see or download the data we have about you.

Typically for visitors that have left comments, the data will be their email address, any IP addresses assigned to them at the time of leaving the comments and the user agent strings of the browsers they used. The rest of the data is public as published by the visitors.

For registered users or paying customers, this will also include profile information and download, payment, and support tickt histories.

You can also request “to be forgotten” and we will erase any personally identifiable data we have about you. Of course, this excludes data we need for administrative or security purposes or if we are required by law to retain some of the data.

An individual who seeks access, or who seeks to correct, amend, or delete inaccurate data, should direct his/her query to admin@allcot.com. We will respond within a reasonable timeframe, not to exceed seven business days.

Disclosure and Transfer Of Data

 We disclose potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to our employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on our behalf or to provide services, and (ii) that have agreed, in writing, not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using our websites and services, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. We will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone.

We may be required to disclose an individual’s personal information in response to a lawful request by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.

If we ever were to engage in any onward transfers of your data with third parties for a purpose other than which it was originally collected or subsequently authorized, we would provide you with an opt-out choice to limit the use and disclosure of your personal data.

How We Protect Your Data

The security and reliability of our service is our number one priority. We invest heavily in the training of our staff and our infrastructure to ensure that best practices are followed in everything that we do.

See wordpress.org/about/security for details on the security of the WordPress core itself.

• Prevention is best when it comes to security, and as a first step, we follow all WordPress Code Standards in the plugins that we build and use.
• In addition, we have an extensive internal review and Quality Assurance process in place specifically to prevent potential security vulnerabilities in our plugins and services.
• Every ALLCOT employee and contractor that has access to personal information of our users or other stakeholders goes through background checks and an onboarding process that includes a trial period where access to customer data is provided only when working directly under the supervision of another staff member.
• All staff only have access to systems that are directly required to complete the functions of their job.
• All staff (including any contractors) undergo initial training to ensure proper understanding of all security-related processes.
• We only use third-party services, such as Digital Ocean, that are fully vetted and adhere to the highest levels of privacy and security practices.

How We Use Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and as follows:

• 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 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 monitor and protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of ALLCOT and others;
• To communicate with you about offers and promotions offered by ALLCOT and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on ALLCOT and our products; and
• To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations and serve relevant advertisements.

What Data Breach Procedures We Have In Place

Should any event occur where customer data has been lost, stolen, or potentially compromised, our policy is to alert our customers via email no later than 48 hours of our team becoming aware of the event.

We will also report such incident to any required data protection authority. We will work closely with any customers affected to determine next steps such as any end-user notifications, needed patches, and how to avoid any similar event in the future.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, ALLCOT  may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in ALLCOT’s sole discretion. ALLCOT will notify clients by email when making changes.

Changelog

• May 18, 2018 – Iniated language of the policy to be more user-friendly and more openly communicated to all stakeholders,  specifically outlining requirements in preparation for meeting the GDPR.