Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Proseful, 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 blog 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.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we'll refer to our website, and other products and services collectively as "Services."

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 information in two ways: if and when you provide information to us, and automatically through operating our Services. 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. 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 Proseful.com account to provide a name and email address—and that's it.

• Public Blog Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public blog. For example, your name is part of that public blog, along with any other information you provide, such as a title or description. Your public blog information is just that—public—so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.

• Content Information: You may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content. For example, if you write a blog post 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.

• Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy a subscription to a Proseful.com plan, you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.

• Communications with Us: You may also provide us information when you communicate with our team about a support question.

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, 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 blog on Proseful.com.

• Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform on a site using our Proseful.com service—in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a site. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g. page views, features enabled for your blog 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, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.

• 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: 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. Proseful uses cookies to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

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 blog, backup and restore your blog, 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 blogs more efficiently;

• 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 paid 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 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 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 Proseful 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 Proseful we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on Proseful and our products; and

• To personalize your experience using our Services, and 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).

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 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.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not 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 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 card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, and 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 those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), 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.

• 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 Proseful, 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 Proseful 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 account.

• 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.

• 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.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is—you guessed it—disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, and other content that you make public on your blog, are all available to others—and we hope you get a lot of views!

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.

How Long We Keep Information

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 Proseful's 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 Proseful's websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

As another example, when you delete a post from your Proseful.com site, it stays in our backups for 30 days 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, such as monitoring 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, profile information, and transaction and billing 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 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, Proseful 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 Proseful's websites, with the drawback that certain features of Proseful's websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

• Close Your Account: While we'd be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services 😭, you can close your account. 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 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; and

• Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings 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.

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 at support@proseful.com.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Proseful may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Proseful encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the Proseful blog, or sending you a notification through email or your Proseful.com dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That's it! Thanks for reading.

Change Log

• March 22, 2019: Initial version.

❤️ Thanks to Automattic for making their Privacy Policy available for repurposing.