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Privacy Policy

Last updated: March 27, 2024

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 Substandart e.U. including CRESQA.

This policy applies to our handling of information about site visitors, prospective customers, and customers and authorized users (in relation to their procurement of the services and management of their relationship with Substandart). We refer collectively to these categories of individuals as "you" throughout this policy.

However, this policy does not cover information about a customer’s end users that Substandart receives from a customer, or otherwise processes on a customer’s behalf, in connection with the services provided by Substandart to the customer pursuant to an applicable services agreement (including the content of messages of customer end users ("End User Communications")). Substandart processes End User Communications under the instructions of the relevant customer, which is the "data controller" or "business" (or occupies a similar role as defined in applicable privacy laws), as described in the applicable services agreement between such customer and Substandart. Substandart’s obligations as a "data processor" or "service provider" with respect to such information are defined in such services agreement and applicable data protection addendum and are not made part of this policy.

If you are a customer’s end user and you have questions about how your information is collected and processed through the services, please contact the organization who has provided your information to us for more information.

What we collect and why

Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:

Identity and access

When you sign up for a Substandart product, we 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 sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products.

Billing information

If you sign up for a paid Substandart 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 Substandart servers. 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.

Product interactions

We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your Substandart product accounts. This is so you can use our products as intended, for example, to create posts in CRESQA. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 60 days.

General Geolocation data

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.

Website interactions

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.

Voluntary correspondence

When you email Substandart 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.

When we access or disclose your information

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. You can view the third-party subprocessors we use for each of our products: CRESQA.

To exclude you from seeing our ads. Where permissible by law and if you have a CRESQA account, we may disclose a one-way hash of your email address with ad companies to exclude you from seeing our ads.

To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug. If at any point we need to access your content to help you with a support case, we will access the minimum amount of data necessary to resolve the issue.

We get automated alerts when software errors occur. When we can fix the issue and restart automated processing without looking at any personal data, we do. In rare cases, we have to look at a minimum amount of personal data to fix the issue. In these rare cases, we aim to fix the root cause to prevent the errors from recurring.

Aggregated and de-identified data. We may aggregate and/or de-identify information collected through the services. We may use de-identified or aggregated data for any purpose, including marketing or analytics.

To safeguard Substandart. We’ll look at logs and metadata as part of our work to ensure the security of your data and the Services as a whole.

Your rights with respect to your information

At Substandart, we strive to apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Some of these rights include:

  • Right to Know. You have the right to know what personal information is collected, used, shared or sold. We outline both the categories and specific bits of data we collect, as well as how they are used, in this privacy policy.
  • Right of Access. This includes your right to access the personal information we gather about you, and your right to obtain information about the sharing, storage, security and processing of that information.
  • Right to Correction. You have the right to request correction of your personal information.
  • Right to Erasure / “To Be Forgotten”. This is your right to request, subject to certain limitations under applicable law, that your personal information be erased from our possession and, by extension, from all of our service providers. Fulfillment of some data deletion requests may prevent you from using Substandart services because our applications may then no longer work. In such cases, a data deletion request may result in closing your account.
  • Right to Complain. You have the right to make a complaint regarding our handling of your personal information with the appropriate supervisory authority.
  • Right to Restrict Processing. This is your right to request restriction of how and why your personal information is used or processed, including opting out of sale of your personal information. (Again: we never have and never will sell your personal data.)
  • Right to Object. You have the right, in certain situations, to object to how or why your personal information is processed.
  • Right to Portability. You have the right to receive the personal information we have about you and the right to transmit it to another party. Contact us if you want to export data from your accounts.
  • Right to not Be Subject to Automated Decision-Making. You have the right to object to and prevent any decision that could have a legal or similarly significant effect on you from being made solely based on automated processes. This right is limited if the decision is necessary for performance of any contract between you and us, is allowed by applicable law, or is based on your explicit consent.
  • Right to Non-Discrimination. We do not and will not charge you a different amount to use our products, offer you different discounts, or give you a lower level of customer service because you have exercised your data privacy rights. However, the exercise of certain rights may, by virtue of your exercising those rights, prevent you from using our Services.

Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and updating your account information. Please note that certain information may be exempt from such requests under applicable law. For example, we need to retain certain information in order to provide our services to you.

In some cases, we also need to take reasonable steps to verify your identity before responding to a request, which may include, at a minimum, depending on the sensitivity of the information you are requesting and the type of request you are making, verifying your name and email address. If we are unable to verify you, we may be unable to respond to your requests. If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at hello@cresqa.com.

Depending on applicable law, you may have the right to appeal our decision to deny your request, if applicable. We will provide information about how to exercise that right in our response denying the request. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. 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.

How we secure your data

All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. In addition, we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest.

What happens when you delete content in your product accounts

In many of our applications, we give you the option to trash content. Anything you trash in your product accounts while they are active will be kept in an accessible trash can for about 25 days (it varies a little by product). After that time, the trashed content cannot be accessed via the application and we are not able to retrieve it for you. The trashed content may remain on our active servers for another 30 days, and copies of the content may be held in backups of our application databases for up to another 30 days after that. Altogether, any content trashed in your product accounts should be purged from all of our systems and logs within 90 days.

If you choose to cancel your account, your content will become immediately inaccessible and should be purged from our systems in full within 60 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-canceled accounts.

Data retention

We keep your information for the time necessary for the purposes for which it is processed. The length of time for which we retain information depends on the purposes for which we collected and use it and your choices, after which time we may delete and/or aggregate it. We may also retain and use this information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Through this policy, we have provided specific retention periods for certain types of information.

Location of site and data

Our products and other web properties are operated in the EU. All data is stored in the EU.

Changes and questions

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 hello@cresqa.com and we’ll be happy to try to answer them!

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0