Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 1, 2022

Summary: your privacy is important to CASTANET. We abide by these fundamental principles: We don't ask you for personal information unless we truly need it to run our service.

We don't share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.

We don't store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.

We strive for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information. CASTANET, LLC (CASTANET) operates gocastanet.com. It is CASTANET policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our website.

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.

Information You Provide to Us: 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 CASTANET account to provide an email address–and that's it

Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us–a subscription to a CASTANET plan, for example–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. We use a company called Stripe to process our payments and another called SimpleInvoices.io to invoice certain customers.

Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide us with credentials for your website or browser extensions. For example, we may know your website address and associated content if you choose to install our WordPress plugin.

Communications With Us: You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our team about a support question, or post a question about your account in our public forums.Information We Collect AutomaticallyWe 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.

Comment Information: If you leave a comment on our site, your IP address and the email address associated that comment will be shared with us.

Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform on our site–in other words, who did what. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services, interactions with 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. We use Google Analytics and MixPanel to collect this information.

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. Stored Information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile app. We access this stored information through your device operating system's permissions.

Interactions with Other Users' Sites: We collect some information about your interactions with other users' sites while you are logged in to your account with us, such as your “Likes” and the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that we can, for example, recommend additional content 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. CASTANET 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 campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. CASTANET visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using CASTANET' website, or visit CASTANET using an incognito or private browsing window, with the drawback that certain features of CASTANET' website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

The cookies we use are:

Cookie provider - Purpose

Our own service - capturing and storing CASTANET account information about your settings and preferences

Google Analytics - understanding how visitors browse and use gocastanet.com

MixPanel - understanding how CASTANET users interact with our product

FreshDesk - assisting customers with the CASTANET product via helpdesk support

Facebook - serving targeted Facebook ads to gocastanet.com visitors

Doubleclick - serving targeted Google ads to gocastanet.com visitors

LinkedIn - serving targeted LinkedIn ads to gocastanet.com visitors To find out more on how to manage and delete cookies, visit aboutcookies.org. For more details on your choices regarding use of your web browsing activity for interest-based advertising visit youronlinechoices.eu (EU based) or optout.aboutads.info (US based). On a mobile device, you may also be to adjust your settings to limit ad tracking.

You can opt out of Google Analytics by installing Google's opt-out browser add-on.

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 CASTANET account through another service (like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram) or if you connect your CASTANET account to a social media service (like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram), we will receive information from that service (such as your username, basic profile information, and friends list) via the authorization procedures used by that service. The same is true for information from any Email Service Provider to which you choose to connect your CASTANET account. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available.We may also get information, such as a mailing address, from third party services about individuals who are not yet our users (…but we hope will be!), which we may use, for example, for marketing and advertising purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our services.

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, backup and restore your website, 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 CASTANET 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 CASTANET and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on CASTANET and our products; and

To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content 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), and serve relevant advertisements.Legal Bases for Collecting and Using InformationA 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–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on.

Sharing Information

How We Share InformationWe do not sell our users' private personal information.We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy: Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.

Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, 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), 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), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), and companies that extend our product (such as Email Service Providers), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We only select vendors with robust privacy commitments as a prerequisite for sharing information with them.

Legal Requests: 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 CASTANET, third parties, or the public at large.

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 CASTANET 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 with which you authorize us to do so, such as the social media services that you connect to your account.

Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.

Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.Information Shared PubliclyInformation that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

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 one of gocastanet.com, 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 our website and investigate issues if something goes wrong on our website.

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, usage of your paid accounts–may not be accessible.

Limit Access to Information On Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you do so, you may not be able to use certain features (like adding a location to a photograph, for example).

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, CASTANET 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 the CASTANET website, with the drawback that certain features of CASTANET website 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 CASTANET 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 RightsIf 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.In most cases, you can access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings or preferences center, but if you aren't able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, email us using this form or via physical mail at the address below.

CASTANET

805 Aerovista Pl, Suite 205

San Luis Obispo, CA 93401

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Other Things You Should Know

Transferring Information Because CASTANETs' 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.Third Party SoftwareIf you'd like to use third party plugins or other third party software such as that of your Email Service Provider, please keep in mind that when you interact with them you may provide information about yourself (or your site visitors, or your customers, or your subscribers) to those third parties. We don't own or control these third parties and they have their own rules about collection, use and sharing of information, which you should review.

California Residents' Additional Privacy Rights

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (the "CCPA"), and subject to exceptions, California residents have certain rights regarding their data, including: The right to know the categories of Personal Information (as later defined) we've collected and the categories of sources from which we got the information (see Collection and Use of Personal Information and below); The right to know the business purposes for sharing Personal Information (see Collection and Use of Personal Information and below); The right to know the categories of third parties with whom we've shared Personal Information (see Collection and Use of Personal Information); The right to access the specific pieces of Personal Information we've collected and the right to delete your information; and The right to opt out of having your personal information sold. Castanet does not sell or rent Personal Information to third parties, as we understand that term to be defined by the CCPA and its implementing regulations. We collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or device ("Personal Information"). In particular, we have collected the following categories of Personal Information from or about consumers within the last twelve (12) months:

IDENTIFIER:

A real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, IP address, email address, phone number, account name, or other similar identifiers.

We will not collect additional categories of Personal Information or use the Personal Information we collected for materially different, unrelated, or incompatible purposes without providing you with notice and obtaining your explicit consent. As a California resident, you may exercise your right to know or your right to deletion by emailing us or calling us at (844) 787-2278. We may require you to verify your identity prior to accessing or deleting your information. You may also designate an authorized agent to make a request to know or a request to delete. We may deny a request from an authorized agent that does not submit proof of authorization. California residents have the right to not be discriminated against if they choose to exercise their privacy rights. California Law permits California residents to request certain information once per year regarding our disclosure of "personal information" (as that term is defined under applicable California law) to third parties for such third parties' direct marketing purposes. To make such a request, please send written notice, by certified mail or Federal Express (signature required), noting that you are making a "California Privacy Request" to the following address:

CASTANET

805 Aerovista Pl, Suite 205

San Luis Obispo, CA 93401

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, CASTANET may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in CASTANET's sole discretion. CASTANET encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a gocastanet.com account, you should also check your account's dashboard for alerts to these changes. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

This Privacy Policy is adapted from that of Automattic, published under Creative Commons Sharealike License.en choose how often you want to send.