Last updated: October 17, 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 to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will.
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
When you sign up for the OurSails product, we typically ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a company name. That’s just so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you invoices, updates, or other essential information. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products, but we do not normally look at or access that picture. We’ll never sell your personal info to third parties, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.
When you pay for the OurSails product, we ask for your credit card and billing address. That’s so we can charge you for service, calculate taxes due, and send you invoices. Your credit card is passed directly to our payment processor and doesn’t ever go through our servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number and as-of billing address, for account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address to calculate any sales tax due in the United States or VAT in the EU, to detect fraudulent credit card transactions, and to print on your invoices.
We log all access to all accounts by full IP address so that we can always verify no unauthorized access has happened. We keep this login data for as long as your product account is active.
Web analytics data — described further in the Website Interactions section — are also tied temporarily to IP addresses to assist with troubleshooting cases.
When you browse our marketing pages or applications, your browser automatically shares certain information such as which operating system and browser version you are using. We track that information, along with the pages you are visiting, page load timing, and which website referred you for statistical purposes like conversion rates and to test new designs. We sometimes track specific link clicks to help inform some design decisions. These web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account if applicable and you are signed into our Services. We blind all of these individual identifiers after 30 days. Other web analytics we utilize are described further in the Cookies and Do Not Track section.
We do use persistent first-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and support some in-house analytics.
We partner with Google for some marketing activities. If you are coming to OurSails from a Google ad, and are in the United States, Google will send a cookie to your browser to determine whether you visited OurSails.com because of a particular advertisement you viewed. This enables us to evaluate the effectiveness of these ads.
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 in your own browser. To learn more about cookies, including how to view which cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, please visit: www.allaboutcookies.org.
At this time, our sites and applications do not respond to Do Not Track beacons sent by browser plugins.
When you write OurSails with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including the email address, so that we have a history of past correspondences to reference if you reach out in the future.
We also store any information you volunteer like surveys. Sometimes when we do customer interviews, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We only do so if you give your express consent.
We don’t collect any characteristics of protected classifications including age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or physical and mental abilities or disabilities. You may provide these data voluntarily, such as if you include a pronoun preference in your email signature when writing into our Support team.
We also do not collect any biometric data. You are given the option to add a picture to your user profile, which could be a real picture of you or a picture of something else that represents you best. We do not extract any information from profile pictures: they are for your use alone.
Our default practice is to not access your information. The only times we’ll ever access or share your info are:
To provide products or services you’ve requested. We do use some third-party services to run our applications and only to the extent necessary process some or all of your personal information via these third parties. Here is a list of third parties that we use:
Having subprocessors means we are using technology to access your data. No OurSails human looks at your data for these purposes unless 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 from reoccurring.
To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. We will rely on infrastructure and application monitoring capabilities along with anything you provide willingly in support ticket submissions. We will never ask for access to your account, nor will we ever grant ourselves access to your account to troubleshoot. Our commitment to this constraint of non-access will ensure we invest appropriately in debugging capabilities that do not require any of our staff to ever access or have the capability to access your data.
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 have an obligation to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us. We do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we do discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will report the incident to the appropriate authorities.
When required under applicable law.
OurSails hosts data and infrastructure in Singapore and the US.
Finally, if OurSails is acquired by or merged with another company — we don’t plan on that, but if it happens — we’ll notify you well before any info about you is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
At OurSails, we apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Currently some of the most privacy-forward regulations in place are the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) in the US. OurSails recognizes all of the rights granted in these regulations, except as limited by applicable law. These rights include:
Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and directly updating your account information.
If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at [email protected]. For requests to delete personal information or know what personal information has been collected, we will first verify your identity using a combination of at least two pieces of information already collected including your user email address.
If you are in the EU, you can identify your specific authority to file a complaint or find out more about GDPR, at https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en.
First, all data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted.
Second, your private notes, shared notes, comments and other long-form content is always encrypted while living in our database, and it remains encrypted in RAM and throughout its use in the application. This is encryption in use / at work, and it is an additional layer of security that we're proud to offer. We made a conscious choice to increase security of your data at the expense of some search functionality which we cannot easily offer with these stronger security features. But this choice means that if an attacker ever gained access to your data regardless of location (from the database, our server's RAM, or a backup or data dump etc), they would not be able to read it. Our encryption scheme follows a non-deterministic approach which guarantees each time it is encrypted the results will differ - making crypto-analysis of the encrypted data basically impossible.
Encryption at rest is the third approach to how we secure your data. Some of your data is not encrypted while living in our database such as the titles of topics (titles only) or the names of meetings or people you are connected to (since it needs to be queryable), but we go to great lengths to secure ALL of your data at rest.
We give you the ability to delete data. Anything you delete in your accounts while they are active will be kept in a restorable format for up to 30 days. After that, the deleted data are no longer accessible via the application and are deleted from our active servers. We also have some backups of our application databases, which are kept for up to another 30 days. In total, when you delete things in our applications, they are purged within 60 days from all of our systems and logs. Retrieving data for a single account from a backup is cost-prohibitive and unduly burdensome so if you change your mind you’ll need to do so before your data are deleted from our active servers.
We also delete your data after an account is cancelled. In this case, there is no period of data being kept on active servers so your data are purged within 30 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-cancelled accounts.
Our application and other web properties are operated in the United States and Singapore. If you are located in the European Union or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us may be transferred to and stored in the United States or Singapore. By using our Site, participating in any of our services and/or providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.
The GDPR requires that any data transferred out of the EU must be treated with the same level of protection that the EU privacy laws grant. The privacy laws of the United States and Singapore generally do not meet that requirement. Regardless of whether you are in the EU or not, we protect and secure your data to the high standards set out in this policy but realize it may not meet the evolving privacy laws in the EU (and we welcome stronger privacy laws!). The EU has stronger privacy laws than the US and a core tenet of the GDPR is that if you transfer any personal data of EU residents out of the EU, you must protect it to the same level as guaranteed under EU law. There are two factors to this:
We are serious about treating our customers fairly and our practices in handling personal data reflect our commitment to your control of your data, your right to privacy, and to the security of your data. Some highlights:
We do work with sub-processors. We've listed our current sub-processors earlier in this page. With each vendor, we assess their commitment to privacy.
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 also announce them to our users upon logging in to the application. This privacy policy was adapted from the open-source policies by Basecamp / CC BY 4.0.
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 [email protected] and we’ll be happy to answer them!