Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy​

Effective 30 Jul 2019 20:20 GMT

Your privacy is very important to us. At GrottoPress, we are careful about what data we collect, who we share this data with, and for how long we keep your data.

We have put together the following to give you a good understanding of our data collection and usage practices, and of what rights you have regarding data you have provided to us.

Who We Are

We are GrottoPress, owned and operated by I-Tech Plus Enterprise, a web services agency based in Ghana. Our website address is grottopress.com. Find out more about us.

Scope of this Policy

This privacy policy applies to data we collect about you when you:

  • Use our websites (including grottopress.com, and itechplus.org)
  • Use any website hosted on the GrottoPress platform.
  • Use our shops on third-party websites (including etsy.com/shop/grottopress)
  • Subscribe to any plan across any of the services we provide (including web hosting and web development)

Exceptions to this Policy

While this policy covers data we collect when you use any website hosted by us, this policy does not cover data our customers collect about you when you visit their website, or provide them data about you while you use their services.

We encourage our customers to post a privacy policy that accurately describes their practices on data collection, use, and sharing of personal data. You should check out the privacy policy of our customers on their own websites.

License

Parts of this privacy policy are adapted from Automattic Inc.‘s privacy policy, and made available under the Creative Commons Sharealike license.

Data We Collect

We only collect data that is necessary to provide our services to you, communicate with you, or improve our services to you.

Data we collect fall into either of 2 categories:

Data you explicitly provide us

We gain access to data you explicitly provide us. Data we collect depends on the purpose for which the data is being sought. The following are some of the use cases for collecting your data:

  • Basic account data: We ask for data about you in order to set up your account. For instance, we require individuals who sign up for any or our services to provide us with their full name and email address.
  • Transaction and billing data: If you buy something from us, such as from our shops on third-party market places, you may provide additional personal and payment data that may be required to process the transaction.
  • Content you publish on our platform: You may publish anything on any service on any of our servers. Content (including posts, comments and emails) you publish that contains any personally identifiable information will remain on our servers until you delete them.
  • Credential to your other services: You may provide us with credentials for your accounts on third-party platforms. For instance, if you need us to transfer content from an existing service provider to our platform, we may require you to provide us with your account credentials at this other service provider, in order that we may transfer your content.
  • Communications with us: You may provide us your data when you communicate with us, such as when you open a support ticket, or send us a mail, respond to a survey, or fill out a form on any of our websites.

Data we collect automatically

Due to the nature of the services we provide, we may collect data data about you automatically. Such data may include:

  • Server logs: We collect data 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 may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address.
  • Cookies: Cookies are small files that we store on your device through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables us to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information. See our Cookie Policy for more information on what cookies we store, and why.
  • Embedded content: Content we embed on this site from another website behave in the exact same way as if you have visited this other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Why We Collect Data

The following outline the purposes for which we collect your data:

  • To provide our services to you. These services include setting up and maintaining your account, host your website, back up and restore your website, charge you for any of our paid services, or provide support for such services.
  • To further improve our services, by adding new useful features, or removing existing unhelpful ones, based on feedback we gather from the data we collect.
  • 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 monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and secure the systems that enable us to provide our services.
  • To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by GrottoPress and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on GrottoPress and our products.
  • To personalize your experience while using our services, provide content recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of our users.

Who We Share Your Data With

We do not sell the data we collect. We may share data about you, with appropriate safeguards for your privacy, under the following circumstances:

  • Subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors: We may disclose data about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need the data in order to help us provide our Services or to process the data on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal data we share with them.
  • Third-party vendors: We may share data about you with third party vendors who need the data in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card data, 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, domain name registrars from which we may acquire your domain), 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). We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share data with them.
  • Legal requests: We may disclose data about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose data about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of GrottoPress, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose data related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that GrottoPress goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user data 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 data and the party receiving your data may continue to use it, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  • With your consent: We may share and disclose data with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your data with third parties with which you authorize us to do so, such as the social media services that you connect to through our services.
  • Aggregated or anonymised data: We may share data that has been aggregated or reasonably anonymised, so that the data could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.
  • Published support requests: 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.
  • Data shared publicly: Data you choose to make public is disclosed publicly. This means that data like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on your website, and your replies on other websites, are all available to others. Public data may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Where We Keep Your Data

The data about you that we process when you use our services may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating within or outside Ghana, who are members of any of our subsidiaries, or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes already outlined in this policy.

When providing data about you to these entities, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal data adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law.

How Long We Keep Your Data

We, generally, delete data about you when we no longer need it for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue keeping it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record data about a visitor to one of GrottoPress’websites, or any website hosted by GrottoPress, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 90 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to these websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong.

Deleted data may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

Security of Your Data

We work very hard to protect data 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 fixing any identified vulnerability as soon as possible.

Connections to all our websites are encrypted, where applicable, and emails to and from us are encrypted if your own mail server supports it.

We use two-factor authentication on our websites, and on all third-party service providers whose services we use that support two-factor authentication.

Your Choices

The following are some of the choices you have regarding sharing your data with us:

  • Limit the data you provide: When providing us your data, such as when filling a form, you can choose not to fill the optional information fields. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this data, certain features of our Services that rely on such data may not work.
  • Opt out of data collection: Where the option is given you to allow us to collect data about you, you may disallow us from doing so by clicking the appropriate button or link.
  • 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: You can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using our websites, with the drawback that certain features of our websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Close your account: If you no longer want to use our services, you can close your account with us. We may continue to retain your data after closing your account, when that data 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

In certain countries, data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by those laws, 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.

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

If ever you would like to access, correct, or delete your personal data, or contact us about one of the other rights, use our contact details below to reach us.

How to Contact Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights with regard to this policy, kindly contact us.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

We may change our privacy policy from time to time. GrottoPress encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to our privacy policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the effective date above.

In some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of our services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.