Last updated: September 26, 2022
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.
Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
When you sign up, we ask for your email address. 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 may send you our newsletter and other updates. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products.
We’ll never sell your personal information to third parties, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.
If you sign up for a paid 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 our servers. We occasionally use aggregate billing information to guide our marketing efforts.
We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your product accounts. This is so you can use our products as intended, for example, to link an email address to a private phone number. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 60 days.
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.
We do not collect any information about your browsing activity for analytics and statistical purposes.
When you contact us 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.
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 here.
No human looks at your content except for limited purposes with your express permission, for example, if 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 recurring. We may also access your data if required in order to respond to legal process (see “When required under applicable law” below).
To exclude you from seeing our ads. Where permissible by law and if you have a Basecamp account, we may share 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, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your content to help you with a support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.
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 want to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us, and we do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will take action as necessary, including notifying appropriate authorities where warranted.
When required under applicable law.
We strive to apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Some of these rights include:
Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and updating your account information.
If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us.
All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser.
Most data are not encrypted while they live in our database (since they need to be ready to send to you when you need them).
In many of our applications, we give you the option to trash content. 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-cancelled accounts. Please refer to our Cancellation policy for more details.
Phoneless policies are open source, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0.