Privacy Policy

Our 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 for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

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 three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our services, and from outside sources.

Information You Provide to Us

• We receive and store any information you enter on our website or provide to us in any other way.
• Registration: In order for you to use Mailtimer services you must complete a registration form. As part of registration, we require a minimum set of information from you. Our lawful basis for collecting this personal information is to provide our services and to communicate with you through your consent when you register with us. The information we collect at registration is limited to a minimum set of information that is technically required for us to provide our services to you.
• User profile: You may enter more information about yourself in order to augment the information we collect from you during registration, such as your phone number and a photo of yourself.
• Billing and Contact Information: If you buy something from us–a subscription to an Hey Texting plan, you will provide additional personal and payment information, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
• Communications with Us: You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with us about a support question, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications.
• You have the right to edit, update, access, transfer, or delete your personal information if you are terminating your account with Mailtimer. In some special circumstances you may not be able to terminate your account.

Information We Collect 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.
• Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform– in other words, who did what, when and to what thing. We also collect information about what happens when you use our services (e.g., page views) 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. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (when, for example, 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. We use 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.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

• Third Party Login: If you create or log in to your WordPress.com account through another service (like Google) we’ll receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your username, your email address)
• Financial Account Info: If you use Stripe Payments, we’ll receive information relating to your Stripe account, such as your email address and phone number.

The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.

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, backup and restore your timers, 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 create and manage websites more efficiently 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 Mailtimer 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 content through our Reader post suggestions, and providing new essays and stories through Longreads for your reading pleasure.
• 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 Mailtimer; 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.)

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.

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 and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
• 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 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, 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 and Regulatory Requirements: 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 Mailtimer, third parties, or the public at large.
• 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 Mailtimer 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.
• 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 and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
• 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 an anonymized version of that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

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.