Privacy Policy - Permalink

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Permalink, Inc.., 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 Website 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.

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 marketers to bloggers, photographers, small business owners, and enterprises — to take full advantage of WordPress, currently the world’s most popular content management solution for having performance-optimized, highly secure and SEO friendly websites.

Our mission is to provide craft customer-focused support service so that we’ll make sure your site enjoys top-notch performance and security every day. We’ll handle all details such as updates, backups, uptime, safety, and support so you can focus on what you do best.

We believe the right way to support applications is with an ongoing and consistent level of care from an expert team, closely connected to your project’s particulars. Our support services have an essential role in helping our customers focus on their companies, grow their business while they delegate the tech work to us.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

Our Website permalink.co;
Our blog permalink.co/blog;
Our other Permalink products, services, and features that are available on or through our websites (for example, new templates or plugins we could launch on our Website); and
Other users’ websites that use our Services, while you logged in to your account with us.

This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you fill an application form for a job at Permalink. Throughout this Privacy Policy, we’ll refer to our websites, mobile applications, and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Creative Commons Sharealike License

We’ve decided to make this Privacy Policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You can grab a copy of this Privacy Policy and other legal documents on GitHub. You’re more than welcome to copy it, adapt it, and repurpose it for your own use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your policy reflects your actual practices. If you do use it, we’d appreciate a credit and link to Permalink somewhere on your site.

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:

Necessary account information: We ask for basic information from you to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a permalink.co account to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name — and that’s it. 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 a permalink.co account.
Payments and contact information: If you buy something from us (like a theme or plugin), we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. To treat recurring subscription payments, we store the customer’s name, billing address, email address, phone number, and credit card/payment details. Also, we accept payments through PayPal or Stripe. When processing payments, some of your data will pass to one of these payment gateways, including information required to handle or support the amount, such as the purchase total and billing information. Please see the PayPal Privacy Policy and the Stripe Privacy Policy for more details.
Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide us with credentials for your self-hosted Website (like SSH, FTP, and SFTP username and password). Also, you may give us access credentials to the account where you have registered your domain name (like Godaddy, Namecheap, Network Solutions, etc.).
Communications with us (hi there!): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our engineers about a support question, or sign up for a newsletter. When you interact with us via form, email, phone, a post comment, 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 — excellent! 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

As you navigate through and interact with our Website, we may use automatic data collection technologies to collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns, including:

Details of your visits to our Website, including traffic data, location data, logs, and other communication data and the resources that you access and use on the Website.
We collect information about your computer and internet connection—for instance, your IP address, operating system, and browser type.

We also may use these technologies to collect information about your online activities over time and across third-party websites or other online services (behavioral tracking).

Please note that our Website does not support “do not track” requests.

The information we collect automatically is statistical data and does not include personal information. However, we may maintain it or associate it with personal information we collect in other ways or receive from third parties. It helps us to improve our Website and to deliver a better and more personalized service, including by enabling us to:

Estimate our audience size and usage patterns.
Store information about your preferences, allowing us to customize our Website according to your interests.
Speed up your searches.
Recognize you when you return to our Website.

The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include cookies and similar technologies. A cookie is a small file placed on the hard drive of your computer. To learn more about our use of cookies, 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 permalink.co account through another service (like Google or LinkedIn), we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, necessary profile information, friends list) via the authorization procedures for that specific 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. An example would be, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services or by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services. This way, 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 more comfortable to use.
To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. An example would be, 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. Further, 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 Permalink 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 blog posts.
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 Permalink; 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 “Permalink.” 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 legitimate grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your data is based on the grounds that: (1) 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) is required 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. We spell them out below:

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 to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. These includes vendors that help us deliver our Services to you (like Stripe or PayPal which powers processing recurring subscription payments), 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, and your hosting provider if Permalink does not host your site); 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 (like Let’s Encrypt for providing free SSL certificates ), who may need information about you to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments to share information with them. Other vendors appear in our more specific policies (e.g., our Cookie Policy).
Legal and regulatory requirements: For instance, We may disclose information about you to comply with any court order, law, or legal process, including to respond to any government or regulatory 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 Permalink, 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 Permalink 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 when you authorize us to do so, like when you connected your site to a social media service like Twitter or Facebook.
Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information aggregated or de-identified so that it can no longer reasonably use it 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.
Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request to clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s not necessary for the purposes for which we collect and use is — 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 Permalink’s websites, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period to analyze traffic to Permalink’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our sites, among other things.

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 options 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 — for example, premium themes or plugins that carry an additional charge — 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, Permalink 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 Permalink’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Permalink’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Close your account: While we’d be 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 retaining your data after closing your account. 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 required for our legitimate business interests. Review the section How Long We Keep Information.

Your Rights

If you are in certain parts of the world, including Delaware 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 in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights concerning to your data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

Request access to your data;
Request correction or deletion of your data;
Object to our use and processing of your data;
Request that we limit our use and handling of your data; and
Request the portability of your data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your 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 require you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

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 through our web form or via email to support@permalinkgroup.com. These are the fastest ways to get a response to your inquiry.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Third-party links

Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third products or services on our Website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We, therefore, have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.

Third-Party Services

We utilize third parties and their platforms or services to power and support the site, including the following (collectively, “Third-Party Services”):

For hosting, Digital Ocean.
For analytics, to monitor how our users are using the site and to identify potential issues, Google Analytics and Jetpack ( by wordpress.com).
For Off-site Backups, Amazon Web Service S3 Storage

Third-Party Services and your provision of information to and storage of your data with such services are subject to their applicable terms and policies.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Permalink may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Permalink 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 (like adding a statement to our homepage or the Permalink Blog 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.

Change Log

March 2, 2020: Included information about the Creative Commons ShareAlike License.