Your privacy is critically important to us. At Ashpool, 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 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.
Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.
Who We Are and What This Policy Covers
Howdy! We are the folks behind a variety of products and services designed to allow anyone —
from bloggers, to photographers, small business owners, and enterprises — to take full
advantage of the power and promise of the open web. Our mission is to democratize publishing
and commerce so that anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone can turn their great idea
into a livelihood. We believe in powering the open internet with code that is open source
and are proud to say that the vast majority of our work is available under the General
Public License (“GPL”). Unlike most other services, because our GPL code is public, you can
actually download and take a look at that code to see how it works. This Privacy Policy
applies to information that we collect about you when you use:
- Our websites (including ashpool.io, ashpool.ai, directory.ashpool.io, directory.ashpool.ai, app.ashpool.io, and app.ashpool.ai);
- Our other Ashpool products, services, and features that are available on or through our
websites (for example, Ashpool Cloud, Ashpool Directory, and Tofu); and
- Other users’ websites that use our Services, while you are logged in to your account
with us.
This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at
Ashpool. Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our websites, applications, and other
products and services 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.
Creative Commons Sharealike License
We believe in participating in the open source ecosystem and as such have opted to utilize a
privacy policy that is itself open source. This privacy policy is available under the Creative Commons Sharealike
license and was stemmed from the policy developed by Automattic, which is available on GitHub.
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 an Ashpool.io account to provide an email address and
password, along with details such as a name, company name, and company size. You may
provide us with more information — like your address and other information you want to
share — but we don’t require that information to create an Ashpool.io account.
- Payment and contact information: If you buy something from us — a
subscription to an Ashpool.io plan or Ashpool Preflight
Credits — you’ll provide additional personal and payment information like your name,
credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases
you’ve made. You may also provide us with financial details to set up a payments
integration, like the email address for your Stripe or PayPal account or your bank
account information.
- Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when
you respond to surveys, communicate with our representatives about a support question,
or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via email, phone, Ashpool.io support request, or otherwise, we store a
copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable
law).
- Job applicant information: If you apply for a job with us — awesome!
You may provide us with information like your name, contact information, resume or CV,
and work authorization verification as part of the application process.
Information We Collect Automatically
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 when you use our Services — for example, when
you use Ashpool.io.
- Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our
Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform on Ashpool.io — in other words, who did what and when
(e.g., [Ashpool.io username] deleted “[Prospect ID]” at
[time/date]). We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services
(e.g., page views, searches on directory.ashpool.io, Prospects uploaded,
and other parts of our Services) 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, get insights on how people use our
Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about
user retention.
- 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. We may
also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (like when you
post a photograph with location information) if you allow us to do so through your
mobile device operating system’s permissions.
- 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. Ashpool 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.
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 Ashpool.io account through another service (like
Google) or if you connect your account to one of our integrations (like Salesforce), 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. Third-party services may also
give us information, like mailing addresses for individuals who are not yet our users (but
we hope will be!). We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other
mailers advertising our Services.
How and Why We Use Information
Purposes for Using Information
We use information about you 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, provide customer service,
process payments and orders, and verify user information.
- 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 maintain
a healthier lead pipeline or make our Services easier to use.
- To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our
marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of
our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a
certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our
marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a
marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
- 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 Ashpool 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 related companies in our Directory, and providing tailored insights on how
to perfect your lead pipeline.
- 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
Ashpool; 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.)
- To recruit and hire new employees. For example, by evaluating job
applicants and communicating with them.
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 —
for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later
on, as described in our Cookie Policy.
Sharing Information
How We Share Information
We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on
your privacy. These are spelled out below, as well as in the section called Ads and
Analytics Services Provided by Others:
- 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, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent
payment transactions, 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); 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, and by placing ads to market our 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);
other third-party tools that help us manage operations; and companies that make products
available on our websites , 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 in
our more specific policies (e.g., our Cookie
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.
- 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, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad
campaigns on other platforms.
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 Ashpool’s websites, like 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
Ashpool’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites. As
another example, when you delete a prospect, company, or list from your Ashpool account, it
stays in our database for thirty days in case you change your mind and would like to restore
that content, because starting from scratch is no fun. After the thirty days are up, the
deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.
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. Please keep in mind that
if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be
accessible.
- Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving
promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications
or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you
other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
- Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, Ashpool 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 Ashpool’s websites, with
the drawback that certain features of Ashpool’s websites may not function properly
without the aid of cookies.
- Opt out of our internal analytics program: You can do this through your
user settings. By opting out, you will stop sharing information with our analytics tool
about events or actions that happen after the opt-out, while you’re logged in to your ashpool.io account. For more information, please see
our Cookie Policy.
- 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. 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.
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);
- Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of
a research survey for us);
- Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our
Services, like the actions you take as an user of Ashpool.io);
- 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);
- Professional or employment-related information (for example, your company and team
information, or information you provide in a job application); and
- Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).
You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information 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. And we share this information with the categories of third
parties described in the Sharing
Information section. 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.
The CCPA & Personalized Advertising in Our Ads Program
Some of our sites advertise, and do use cookies to share certain device identifiers and
information about your browsing activities with our advertising partners, and those
advertising partners may use that information to show you personalized ads some of our
sites. The personal information we share includes online identifiers; internet or other
network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP
address); and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address).
These disclosures may be considered a “sale” of information under the CCPA. We do not sell
(or share) information through our ads program that identifies you personally, like your
name or contact information. We don't knowingly sell personal information of those under 16.
Learn how you can opt out by going to California: Do
Not Sell My Personal Information.
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” 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.
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 above, please contact us via email.
These are the fastest ways to get a response to your inquiry, but you can also contact us by
telephone at 1-877-273-3049.
Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)
Transferring Information
Because Ashpool’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:
- 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 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 ads that
may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the
collection of information by Ashpool and does not cover the collection of information by any
third-party advertisers or analytics providers.
Third-Party Software and Services
If you’d like to use third-party plugins or embeds, WooCommerce Payments (powered by Stripe),
WooCommerce extensions that enable services provided by third parties, or other third-party
software or services, please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing
information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. For example, some
third-party services may request or require access to your (yours, your visitors’, or
customers’) data via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third-party service
or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy
policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own
rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using
the software or services.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Ashpool may change its Privacy Policy from time
to time. Ashpool encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its
Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we may provide notice (like adding a statement to our
homepage 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