Privacy Policy

TL;DR

Your privacy is critically important to us. At POPSMASH, 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 is shared publicly (or kept private).
• We aim to 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. We've also created a shorter summary here more relevant to consumers.

Who We Are & What This Policy Covers

Hey there! We are the team behind a variety of products and services designed to give you the tools to earn more online and we would love for you to use them. This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our websites (including popsmash.com);
• Our applications (including the POPSMASH mobile app for Android and iOS and the Shopify app);
• Our other POPSMASH products, services, and features that are available on or through our websites.

This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at POPSMASH. Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our websites, mobile applications, and other products and services collectively as “Services.” Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy. Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

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:

• Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account.
• Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
• Payment and contact information: If you buy something from us or earn revenue, we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. If you buy something from us — for example, a subscription to a POPSMASH plan — or if you pay fees to a person or business through their POPSMASH account, you’ll provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made. You may also provide us with financial details to set up a payments integration, like the email address for your Stripe or PayPal account or your bank account information. If you participate in a revenue sharing opportunity, you’ll provide some additional information — for example, a tax ID or other identifier so we can process payments to you.
• Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our team about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, 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 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

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, including 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 POPSMASH account.
• Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about changes made to your POPSMASH account — in other words, who did what and when (e.g., [POPSMASH user] updated “[account setting]” at [time/date]). Our Services also track information provided through 3rd party services you have connected along with information about your account and connect profiles, like the aggregate performance data. We also collect information about what happens when you use 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, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
• 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 if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
• Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions when you give us permission.
• 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. POPSMASH uses 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 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, if you create or log in to your POPSMASH account through another service, or if connect your POPSMASH account to another service, we may receive information from that service (e.g., your username and basic profile information) via the authorization procedures for that 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. We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.

POPSMASH Service Considerations

As part of our service, our customers run marketing campaigns (such as quizzes) where they gather data in order to provide personalized recommendations and personalize their marketing efforts. Information provided during these campaigns is synced to the campaign host's (who is responsible for the campaign) database where this information is used for marketing or other purposes. By participating in these campaigns and willingly providing this information you are consenting to future marketing and other activities using this information. See our POPSMASH terms of service and for more details.

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, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information. When you initially log in to and/or install our app, we will automatically create a POPSMASH account for you, which is required to use our services.
• 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 or make our Services easier to use.
• To place and manage ads in our advertising program. For example, to place ads as part of our advertising program, and understand ad performance with third parties to perform services on our behalf.
• 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 campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention, including with third parties to perform services on our behalf.‍
• 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 POPSMASH 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 and recommending content.‍
• 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 POPSMASH; 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 POPSMASH team members. For example, by evaluating job applicants and communicating with them.

Legal Bases for Collecting & 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 share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled 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 in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Stripe and other 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, ReCAPTCHA that helps us prevent spam signups, registrars, registries, and our hosting provider); 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, who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you.
• 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 POPSMASH, 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 POPSMASH 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 account to a social media service or when you opt-in to a campaign (e.g. providing information during a quiz).
• Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used 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 in order to 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 information like your public profile and actions you take during campaigns (public by default) are all available to others. 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 publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it, with the exception of opportunities to provide future value to our users.

Specific Retention Guidelines

• We remove any personal Shopify merchant data once our app is uninstalled or there is a request to delete data.
• User opt-in data (such as quiz opt-ins) is retained to to simplify the process (e.g. automatically log the user in) when they enter another quiz. This typically consists of basic data like a social media username (e.g. Instagram username) and the associated email address. However, the merchant can delete the customer profile associatd with the user.

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 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.
• Limit access to information on your mobile device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features.
• 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, POPSMASH 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 POPSMASH’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of POPSMASH’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. Contact us here if you wish to 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 parts of the world, including California 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 located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain 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 also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

You can find our GDPR page with further instructions here.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

• Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
• Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
• Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us);
• Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services);
• Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
• Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one);
• Professional or employment-related information (for example, information you provide in a job application); and
• Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect in the "Information We Collect" section above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the "How and Why We Use Information" section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the "Sharing Information" section. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

• Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
• Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
• Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Contacting Us About These Rights

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

Controllers & Responsible Companies

POPSMASH’s Services are worldwide. Different POPSMASH companies are the controller (or co-controller) of personal information, which means that they are the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and the location of the individual using our Services. Depending on the Services you use, more than one company may be the controller of your personal data. Generally, the “controller” is the POPSMASH company that entered into the contract with you under the Terms of Service for the product or service you use.

Questions?

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy please contact us.

Other Things To Know

Transferring Information

Because POPSMASH’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our group of companies, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and 'Why We Use Information' section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

• In the case of US based entities, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them, or ensuring they have signed up to the EU-US Privacy Shield; or
• In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Ads & Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver ads that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by POPSMASH and does not cover the collection of information by any third-party advertisers or analytics providers.

Third-Party Software & Services

If you’d like to use third-party software or services, please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing information about yourself and associated accounts to those third parties. For example, some third-party services may request or require access to your data via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services.

Shopify app permissions

Shopify permissions are sometimes grouped together, so here's context on what they are and how we use them:

• Customer information: The ability to read/write customer information as they opt-in to marketing (e.g. join your email list).
• Store owner information: Default information Shopify shares with every app to serve the merchant.
• Content provider information: This comes as part of read_content, which we use, but is specifically for blog posts/comments, which we don't use. It's grouped with read_content.

If you want to learn more, you can find more details on the above here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/apps/app-personal-information

Here are the limited scopes that POPSMASH requests:

1. read_content (website pages)
2. read_customers (check if customer profile already exists)
3. write_customers (create/update customer's name, email, location, accepts marketing)
4. write_draft_orders (optional, draft order to send the prize to a winner)
5. read_products (website products for selection during campaign setup)

Here is the reference for the above scopes: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/usage/access-scopes

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, POPSMASH may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. POPSMASH encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Translation

Our Privacy Policy was originally written in English (US). We may translate it into other languages. In the event of a conflict between a translated version of our Privacy Policy and the English version, the English version will control.