Last updated: October 1, 2020
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.
This policy applies to all products built and maintained by Altocode.
Altocode's policies are open source, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Lightly adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0 - thank you Basecamp!
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
When you sign up for an Altocode product, 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 an Altocode product, 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 VAT in the European Union, 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. We keep this record forever because they are used to mitigate spammy signups.
We do not use any third party web analytics software.
In Services like ac;pic users can import their images and videos from Google Drive.
We do use persistent first-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and support some in-house analytics. A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser to help it remember your login information, site preferences, and more. This cookie, however, only exists if you're logged in. If you're not logged in, we do not store cookies in your browser.
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 Altocode 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. For products like ac;pic, where you store and organize photos and videos, we do not extract any information from the images, nor we run any Artificial Intelligence algorithm or methodologies. We do collect metadata from the files to make the Service more useful to you, such as the year the image or video was taken or the geolocalization in order to provide shortcuts to access such images. Geolocalization is strictly opt-in, and you can turn it off at any point. For Altocode services 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:
To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your account to help you with a Support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.
To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding restricted uses. Accessing a customer’s account when investigating potential abuse is a measure of last resort. We have an obligation to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us. We do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we do discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will report the incident to the appropriate authorities.
When required under applicable law.
Altocode is a Dutch company and all data infrastructure are located in the EU.
Altocode is built to never be sold, so there should be no changes to our privacy policy stemming from a merger or acquisition.
At Altocode, 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. Altocode 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 info@altocode.nl. 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.
If you are in the EU, you can identify your specific authority to file a complaint or find out more about GDPR, at https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en.
All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted.
Most data are not encrypted while they live in our database (since it needs to be ready to send to you when you need it), but we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest.
We have some backups of our application databases, which are kept for up 30 days. We also have application logs of errors where there might be user information present - these logs will be purged every 30 days as well.
Our products and other web properties are operated in the European Union. If you are located elsewhere outside of the EU, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to and stored in the EU. By using our Site, participating in any of our services and/or providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.
We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. You can view a history of the changes to our policies on GitHub. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will also announce them on our blog.
Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch by emailing us at info@altocode.nl and we’ll be happy to answer them!