Your privacy is critically important to us. At Sessionize.com, 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 don’t share your personal information with anyone except events you submit your sessions to, to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
- 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 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. 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. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:
- Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a Sessionize.com account to provide a name and email address. You may provide us with more information – like your bio and photo – but we don’t require that information to create a Sessionize.com account.
- Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, your profile's URL is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into 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.
- Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us, you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
- Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content. For example, if you write a session description that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish it to an event. This might be obvious to you... but it’s not to everyone!
- Communications With Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Support, or post a question about Sessionize.com or events in public forums.
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, 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 – for example, when you create or make changes to your profile on Sessionize.com.
- Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that event administrators and users perform on a site using our site - in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a site. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, events opened, features enabled for your event and profile and other parts of 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, 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.
- Interactions with events: We collect some information about your interactions with events while you are logged in to your account with us, so that we can, for example, recommend events we think may interest you.
- 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. Sessionize 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 email deliverability.
Information We Collect from Other Sources
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log into your Sessionize.com account through another service (like Google, Microsoft or Twitter), we will receive information from that service (such as your email, name and basic profile information) via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available.
How And Why We Use Information
Purposes for Using Information
We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:
- To provide our Services – for example, to set up and maintain your account, create your event, backup and restore your data, or charge you for any of our paid Services;
- To further develop and improve our Services – for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their websites more efficiently;
- To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
- To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals purchased a plan after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
- To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Sessionize and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
- To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by Sessionize and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on Sessionize and our products; and
- To personalize your experience using our Services, provide event recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have a particular plan with us or have been our user for a certain length of time).
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 our 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 better understand 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.
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.
For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to our websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Sessionize’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.
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, such as monitoring 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 – for example, paid, premium themes – may not be accessible.
- Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
- Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, Sessionize 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 Sessionize website, with the drawback that certain features may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
- Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services you can close your Sessionize.com account. If you have active submissions to current and recent events, you may need to contact the organizers of those events to retract the submissions and cancel your speaking engagements. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account 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 countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you 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 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 do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, please contact our support team.
EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority. However, we encourage you to contact us first, and we will do our very best to resolve your concern.
Controllers and Responsible Companies
Web-ideja Ltd. is the "data controller" of personal data collected on Sessionize.com, and Web-ideja is responsible for deciding how personal data is collected, used, and disclosed.
Event organizers may also be data controllers of certain data you provide to them when you make a session submission or through any other services.
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.
Other Things You Should Know
Transferring Information
Because Sessionize’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.
Analytics Services Provided by Others
Other parties may provide analytics services via our Services. These 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. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Sessionize and does not cover the collection of information by any third party advertisers or analytics providers.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Web-ideja may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We will post any Privacy Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). We will also keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.
That’s it! Thanks for reading.
Change log
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25 May 2018
New version, changes required by GDPR.
- 15 Jan 2017 Initial version view
Note: This Privacy Policy document is available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. This document is derived from the original work by Automattic Inc., San Francisco, California, authors of the world famous Wordpress.com.