Last updated: April 27, 2023
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 with respect to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will.
This policy applies to all products built and maintained by AppStance (formerly Search Ads Optimization - SAO) and our apps.
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
When you sign up for our product, we may ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a company name. That’s so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you product updates and other essential information. We may also send you optional surveys from time to time to help us understand how you use our products and to make improvements. With your consent, we will send you our newsletter and other updates.
We’ll never sell your personal information to third parties, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.
If you sign up for our paid product, you will be asked to provide your payment information and billing address. Credit card information is submitted directly to our payment processor and doesn’t hit our servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number, for purposes of account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address so we can charge you for service, calculate any sales tax due, send you invoices, and detect fraudulent credit card transactions. We occasionally use aggregate billing information to guide our marketing efforts.
We store on our servers the content that you integrate or receive or maintain in your accounts. This is so you can use our products as intended, for example, to create integrations in AppStance Optimize. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we'll delete the content within 90 days.
For most of our products, we log the full IP address used to sign up a product account and retain that for use in mitigating future spammy signups. We also log all account access by full IP address for security and fraud prevention purposes, and we keep this login data for as long as your product account is active.
We collect information about your browsing activity for analytics and statistical purposes such as conversion rate testing and experimenting with new product designs. This includes, for example, your browser and operating system versions, your IP address, which web pages you visited and how long they took to load, and which website referred you to us. If you have an account and are signed in, these web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account until your account is no longer active.
We may use CAPTCHA across our applications to mitigate brute force logins and as a means of spam protection. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our apps and the broader Internet community from credential stuffing attacks and spam. When you log into your our accounts and when you fill in certain forms in our products, the CAPTCHA service evaluates various information (e.g., IP address, how long the visitor has been on the app, mouse movements) to try to detect if the activity is from an automated program instead of a human. The CAPTCHA service then provides our with the spam score results; we do not have access to the evaluated information.
We may run contextual ads on various third-party platforms such as Google, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Users who click on one of our ads will be sent to the AppStance marketing site. Where permissible under law, we may load an ad-company script on their browsers that sets a third-party cookie and sends information to the ad network to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of our ads, e.g., which ad they clicked and which keyword triggered the ad, and whether they performed certain actions such as clicking a button or submitting a form.
We also use persistent local storage or sometime cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and perform A/B testing as well as support some analytics.
A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings and accept or block individual cookies in your browser settings, although our apps won’t work and other aspects of our service may not function properly if you turn cookies off.
When you email our with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including your email address, so that we have a history of past correspondence to reference if you reach out in the future.
We also store information you may volunteer, for example, written responses to surveys. If you agree to a customer interview, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We will only do so with your express consent.
To provide products or services you’ve requested. We use some third-party subprocessors to help run our applications and provide the Services to you. Some of third party processors include Firebase, Stripe etc., We will be updating this document as we add or remove subprocessors.
We do not manually access your content except for rare cases to identify or debug errors or performance issues, for example, if an error occurs that stops an automated process from working and requires manual intervention to fix. These are rare cases, and when they happen, we look for root cause solutions as much as possible to avoid them recurring. We may also access your data if required in order to respond to legal process (see “When required under applicable law” below).
To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your content to help you with a support case.
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 want to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us, and we do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will take action as necessary, including notifying appropriate authorities where warranted.
When required under applicable law.
AppStance is a U.S. company based in California and all data infrastructure are located in the U.S.
Finally, if AppStance is acquired by or merges with another company — we don't plan on that, but if it happens — we'll notify you well before any of your personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
At our, we strive to apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Some of these rights include:
Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and updating your account information.
If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at support@appstance.com . If an authorized agent is corresponding on your behalf, we will need written consent with a signature from the account holder before proceeding.
If you are in the EU or UK, you can contact your data protection authority to file a complaint or learn more about local privacy laws.
All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. In addition, we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest. Most of non personal data are not encrypted while they live in our database (since they need to be ready to send to you when you need them).
If you choose to cancel your account, your content will become immediately inaccessible and should be purged from our systems in full within 90 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-canceled accounts.
Our products and other web properties are operated in the United States. If you are located in the European Union, UK, or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to and stored in the United States. By using our websites or Services and/or providing us with your personal information, you consent to this transfer.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has issued guidance that personal data transferred out of the EU must be treated with the same level of protection that is granted under EU privacy law. UK law provides similar safeguards for UK user data that is transferred out of the UK.
There are also a few ad hoc cases where EU personal data may be transferred to the U.S. in connection with AppStance operations, for instance, if an EU user signs up for our newsletter or participates in one of our surveys or buys swag from our company online store. Such transfers are only occasional and data is transferred under the Article 49(1)(b) derogation under GDPR and the UK version of GDPR.
We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify users.
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 support@appstance.com and we’ll be happy to try to answer them!
AppStance (formerly Search Ads Optimization (SAO))