The basics — definitions
- The "Services": providing online platforms that you may use to market to or stay in contact with others, including creating, sending and managing SMS and other information related to your Subscribers.
- "Member": a person or entity that is registered with us to use the Services as provided above. When we say "you," we are referring either to a Member or to some other person who visits any of our Websites.
- "Subscriber": a person you contact through our Services or a person who you might choose to contact at some point in the future through the use of our Services. A Subscriber is anyone on your Contact List or about whom you have provided us information.
- "Personal Information": any information that can be used to identify you or a Subscriber, including, but not limited to, first and last name, date of birth, email address, gender, company information, VAT number, or other demographic information.
- "Contact List": a list (or lists) of Subscribers and all associated information related to those Subscribers — for example, mobile numbers, names, geographical information, etc.
- The "Websites": include the Websites themselves and any web pages, interactive features, applications, widgets, blogs, social networks, social-network "tabs," or other online, mobile, or wireless offerings that post a link to this Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy applies to these specific websites (each a "Website" and together with the "Websites"). While providing the Services, and as described in more detail below, we may collect Personal Information about a Website visitor, Member, person or email address on or related to a Contact List, or Subscriber as per descriptions above.
Changes
This Privacy Policy may be amended from time to time. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is used. All updates and amendments are effective immediately upon notice, which we may give by any means, including, but not limited to, by posting a revised version of this Privacy Policy or other notice on the Website. We strongly encourage and advise you to review this Privacy Policy often to stay informed of changes that may affect you, as your continued use of the Website signifies your continuous consent to be bound by this Privacy Policy. Electronically or otherwise properly stored copies of this Privacy Policy are each deemed to be the true, complete, valid, authentic, and enforceable copy of the version of this Privacy Policy which is in effect on each respective date you visited the Website.
Scope
This Privacy Policy is effective with respect to any data that we have collected, or are due to collect, from you.
Questions & concerns
If you have any questions or comments, or if you want to update, delete, or change any Personal Information we hold, or you have a concern about the way in which we have handled any privacy matter, please use our contact form at smswarriors.com/#contact or email us at [email protected].
Your information — information we collect
Voluntarily provided information. When you sign up for and use the Services, consult with our customer service team, send us an email, use our integrated chat support system, integrate the Services with another website or service (for example, when you choose to connect your system with the SMSwarriors API), or communicate with us in any way, you are voluntarily giving us information that we collect. That information may include either yours or your Subscribers' name, physical address, email address, IP address, phone number, as well as other details which might include gender, occupation, location, purchase history, and other demographic information. The act of providing this information to us means an explicit consent by you for this information to be collected, used, and stored by us, as described in our Terms and Conditions and in this Privacy Policy.
Automatically collected information. When you use the Services or browse one of our Websites, we may collect information about your visit to our Websites, your usage of the Services, and your web browsing, for the reasons of providing, improving and developing our services. The information in question may include your IP address, your operating system, your browser ID, your browsing activity leading to our Websites, and other information about how you interacted within our Websites. We may collect this information as a part of log files as well as through the use of cookies or other tracking technologies. Our use of cookies is discussed further in our Cookie policy.
List and email information. When you add a Contact List or create a mobile number through our Services, we have and may access the data on your list and the information in your mobile number. We use, store, and process information, including personal information, about you to provide, understand, improve, and develop the quality of Services, create and maintain a trusted and safe environment and comply with our legal obligations.
Information from your use of the service. We may receive information about how and when you use the Services, store it in log files or other types of files associated with your account, and link it to other information we collect about you. This may include your IP address, time, date, browser used, and actions you have taken within the application. This type of information helps us to improve our Services for both you and for all of our users.
Cookies and tracking. We and our partners — Hotjar, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and HelpCrunch — use cookies or similar technologies to analyse trends, administer the website, track users' movements around the website, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. Users can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. We partner with third parties to either display advertising on our website or to manage our advertising on other sites. We may also allow our business partners to use these tracking technologies on the Website or engage others to track your behaviour on our own behalf. Our third-party partners may use cookies or similar technologies in order to provide you advertising or other content based upon your browsing activities and interests.
Information from other sources. We may receive more information about you or your Subscribers, such as names, email addresses, demographic information, IP addresses, locations, and use of social media websites, by searching the Internet or querying third parties (we refer to that information as "Supplemental Information"). We use Supplemental Information to develop features including Social Profiles, a tool that helps you learn about your Subscribers and allows you to send them more relevant content.
Use and disclosure of personal information
We may use and disclose Personal Information only for the following purposes:
- To promote. If you provide your Personal Information during your visit to our Website and do not sign up or choose any of the Services at that time, we may send you an email inviting you to sign up for some of our Services. Promotional emails can be stopped by following the unsubscribe instructions included in every email we send.
- To send you informational and promotional content that you may choose (or "opt-in") to receive. You can stop receiving promotional emails by following the unsubscribe instructions in every email.
- To bill and collect money owed to us by our Members. This includes sending you emails, invoices, receipts, notices of delinquency, and alerting you if we need a different credit-card number. We use trusted third parties for secure credit-card transaction processing, and we send billing information to those third parties to process your orders and credit-card payments.
- To send you System Alerts. For example, we may inform you of temporary or permanent changes to our Services, such as planned outages, new features, version updates, releases, abuse warnings, and changes to our Privacy Policy.
- To communicate with our Members about their account and provide customer support.
- To enforce compliance with our Terms and Conditions. This may include developing tools and algorithms that help us prevent violations.
- To protect the rights and safety of our Members and third parties, as well as our own.
- To meet legal requirements, including complying with court orders, valid discovery requests, valid subpoenas, and other appropriate legal matters that may arise.
- To provide information to representatives and advisors that by law they are entitled to such information, including attorneys and accountants, to help us comply with legal, accounting, or security requirements.
- To prosecute and defend a court, arbitration, or similar legal proceeding.
- To respond to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.
- To provide, support, and improve the Services we offer. This includes our use of the data that our Members provide us in order to enable our Members to use the Services to communicate with their Subscribers. This also includes, for example, aggregating information from your use of the Services or visit to our Websites and sharing this information with third parties to improve our Services. When we share Personal Information with third parties, we take steps to protect your information by requiring these third parties to enter into a contract with us that requires them to use the Personal Information we transfer to them in a manner that is consistent with this policy.
- To transfer your information in the case of a sale, merger, consolidation, liquidation, reorganization, or acquisition. In that event, any acquirer will be subject to our obligations under this Privacy Policy, including your rights to access and choice. We will notify you of the change either by email or by posting a notice on our website.
Data collected for and by our users
As you use our Services, you may import into our system Personal Information you have collected from your Subscribers or other individuals. We have no direct relationship with your Subscribers or any person other than you, and for that reason, you are responsible for making sure you have the appropriate permission for us to collect and process information about those individuals. Consistent with the uses of Personal Information covered above, we may transfer Personal Information about you or your Subscribers to companies that help us promote, provide, or support our Services or the services of our Members ("Service Providers"). All Service Providers enter into a contract with us that protects Personal Information and restricts their use of any Personal Information consistent with this policy. As part of our Services, we may use and incorporate into features information you have provided, we have collected from you, or we have collected about Subscribers. We may share this information, including Subscriber mobile number, with third parties in line with the approved uses above.
If you are a Subscriber and no longer want to be contacted by one of our Members, please contact the Member directly to update or delete your data. If you contact us, we may remove or update your information within a reasonable time and after providing notice to the Member of your request.
We will retain Personal Information we process on behalf of our Members for as long as needed to provide our Services or to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, and enforce our agreements.
Public information and third-party websites
We have public blogs on our Websites. Any information you include in a comment on our blog when this is allowed may be read, collected, and used by anyone. If your Personal Information appears on our blogs and you want it removed, contact us. If we are unable to remove your information, we will tell you why.
Links to third-party websites. Our Websites include links to other websites, whose privacy practices may be different from SMSwarriors'. If you submit Personal Information to any of those sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy policy of any website you visit.
Third parties
We may disclose Personal Information to the following types of third parties for the purposes described in this policy:
- Service providers. We use trusted external service providers to provide and support certain features of our Services. The service providers that we use are carefully selected and meet high data-protection and security standards. We only share information with them that is required for the services offered and we contractually bind them to keep any information we share with them as confidential and to process Personal Data only according to our instructions.
- Advertising partners. We may partner with third parties to display advertising on our Websites or to manage our advertising on other sites and may share Personal Information with them for this purpose. All third parties with which we share this information enter into a contract with us that requires them to use your Personal Information in a manner that is consistent with this policy. We or our third-party partners, mainly through cookies or other tracking technologies, gather information about your activities on our Web sites and other sites in order to provide you with advertising based on your browsing activities and interests.
Sweepstakes
We may, from time to time, offer surveys, contests, sweepstakes, or other promotions on our Websites or through social media (collectively "Our Promotions"). Participation in Our Promotions is completely voluntary. Information requested for entry may include personal contact information such as your name, address, date of birth, phone number, email address, username, and similar details. We use the information you provide to administer Our Promotions. We may also, unless prohibited by the Promotion's rules or law, use the information provided to communicate with you, or other people you select, about our Services. We may share this information with our affiliates and other organizations or Service Providers in line with this policy and the rules posted for the Promotion. From time to time such Promotions might have an updated privacy policy, about which you would be informed accordingly.
Content of SMS campaigns
Sometimes we review the content of our Members' SMS campaigns to make sure they comply with our Terms and Conditions. To improve that process, we have software that helps us find SMS campaigns that may violate our Terms. Our employees or independent contractors may review those particular SMS campaigns. This benefits all Members who comply with our Terms because it reduces the amount of spam being sent through our servers and helps us maintain high deliverability.
Your contact lists
A Contact List can be created in a number of ways, including by importing contacts, such as through CSV or XLSX. Your Contact Lists are stored on secure OVH Cloud servers and on Microsoft Azure Cloud. We do not, under any circumstances, sell your Contact Lists. If someone on your Contact List complains or contacts us, we might then contact that person. Only authorized employees — specifically C-level executives, Account Managers, Business Development Managers and the Head of Operations — have access to view Contact Lists. You may export (download) your Contact Lists from SMSwarriors at any time.
We will use and disclose the information in your Contact Lists only for the reasons discussed in the sections above. We will not use and disclose the information in your Contact Lists to:
- bill or collect money owed to us;
- send you system alert messages;
- communicate with you about your account; or
- send you informational and promotional material.
If we detect abusive or illegal behaviour related to your Contact List, we may share your Contact List or portions of it with affected ISPs or anti-spam organizations.
Security — notice of breach of security
If a security breach causes an unauthorized intrusion into our system that materially affects you or people on your Contact Lists, then SMSwarriors will notify you in accordance with Art. 33 of GDPR.
Safeguarding your information
We take reasonable and appropriate measures to protect Personal Information from loss, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction, taking into account the risks involved in the processing and the nature of the Personal Information.
Our credit-card processing vendor uses security measures to protect your information both during the transaction and after it is complete. Our vendor is certified as compliant with card-association security initiatives, including the Visa Cardholder Information Security and Compliance (CISP), MasterCard® (SDP), and Discovery Information Security and Compliance (DISC). All our credit-card transactions are protected using 3D Secure and will not be accepted if they are not 3D Secure enabled.
SMSwarriors accounts require a username and password to log in. You must keep your username and password secure, and never disclose it to a third party. Because the information in your Contact Lists is so sensitive, account passwords are encrypted, which means we cannot see your passwords. We cannot resend forgotten passwords either. We will only reset them.
Compliance — we operate in Malta
Our head offices are located in Malta, while our servers are located in the EU/EEA as specified by our third-party providers (see Microsoft Azure and OVH Cloud), so your information may be transferred to, stored, or processed in these countries. While the data-protection, privacy, and other laws of Malta might not be as comprehensive as those in your country, we take many steps to protect your privacy. By using our Websites, you understand and consent to the collection, storage, processing, and transfer of your information to our facilities in Malta and other countries mentioned above and those third parties with whom we share it as described in this policy in accordance with EU legislation.
Accuracy of data, transparency, and choice
We do our best to keep your data accurate and up to date, to the extent that you provide us with the information we need to do so. If your data changes (for example, if you have a new email address), then you are responsible for notifying us of those changes. Upon request, we will provide you with information about whether we hold, or process on behalf of a third party, any of your Personal Information.
We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as long as needed to provide you with our Services. We may also retain and use your information in order to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, and enforce our Agreements.
SMSwarriors shares your Personal Information and the Personal Information you may have collected from your Subscribers with Service Providers in order to provide and support our Services.
Access
We will give an individual, either you or a Subscriber, access to any Personal Information we hold about them within 30 days of any request for that information. Unless it is prohibited by law, we will remove any Personal Information about an individual, either you or a Subscriber, from our servers at your or their request. There is no charge for an individual to access or update their Personal Information.
Do not track disclosure
"Do Not Track" is a standard that is currently under development. Because it is not yet finalized, SMSwarriors adheres to the standards in this policy and does not monitor or follow any Do Not Track browser requests. That said, some of our features may have the ability to monitor or follow Do Not Track browser requests.