Privacy Policy

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.

This policy applies to our handling of information about site visitors, prospective customers, and customers and authorized users. We refer collectively to these categories of individuals as “you” throughout this policy.

What we collect and why

Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:

Identity and access

When you sign up for a Upgrading PostgreSQL, we ask for identifying information such as your name and 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 will 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.

Billing information

If you sign up for a paid Upgrading PostgreSQL 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.

Product interactions

We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your Upgrading PostgreSQL account. This is so you can use our product as intended. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 90 days.

General Geolocation data

We 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.

Website interactions

We collect information about your browsing activity for analytics and statistical purposes such as conversion rate testing and experimenting with new product designs. This includes, for example, your browser and operating system versions, your IP address, which web pages you visited and how long they took to load, and which website referred you to us. If you have an account and are signed in, these web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account until your account is no longer active.

Advertising and Cookies

We use persistent first-party cookies and some third-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and perform A/B testing as well as support some analytics.

A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings and accept or block individual cookies in your browser settings, although our apps won’t work and other aspects of our service may not function properly if you turn cookies off.

Voluntary correspondence

When you email 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.

When we disclose your information

To provide products or services you’ve requested. We use some third-party subprocessors to help run our application and provide the services to you. We also use third-party processors for other business functions such as managing newsletter subscriptions or sending customer surveys. The processors and subprocessors we use are described further in the Processors and subprocessors section.

To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding restricted uses. 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.

Aggregated and de-identified data. We may aggregate and/or de-identify information collected through the services. We may use de-identified or aggregated data for any purpose, including marketing or analytics.

When required under applicable law.

  • Requests for user data. If the law enforcement authorities have the necessary warrant, criminal subpoena, or court order requiring us to disclose data, we must comply.
  • Preservation requests. We do not disclose preserved data unless required by law or compelled by a court order that we choose not to appeal.
  • If we are audited by a tax authority, we may be required to disclose billing-related information. If that happens, we will disclose only the minimum needed, such as billing addresses and tax exemption information.

Finally, if Upgrading PostgreSQL is acquired by or merges with another company — we don’t plan on that, but if it happens — we’ll notify you well before any of your personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Your rights with respect to your information

We strive to apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Some of these rights include:

  • Right to Know. You have the right to know what personal information is collected, used, shared or sold. We outline both the categories and specific bits of data we collect, as well as how they are used, in this privacy policy.
  • Right of Access. This includes your right to access the personal information we gather about you, and your right to obtain information about the sharing, storage, security and processing of that information.
  • Right to Correction. You have the right to request correction of your personal information.
  • Right to Erasure / “To Be Forgotten”. This is your right to request, subject to certain limitations under applicable law, that your personal information be erased from our possession and, by extension, from all of our service providers. Fulfillment of some data deletion requests may prevent you from using ou services because our applications may then no longer work. In such cases, a data deletion request may result in closing your account.
  • Right to Complain. You have the right to make a complaint regarding our handling of your personal information with the appropriate supervisory authority.
  • Right to Restrict Processing. This is your right to request restriction of how and why your personal information is used or processed, including opting out of sale of your personal information.
  • Right to Object. You have the right, in certain situations, to object to how or why your personal information is processed.
  • Right to Portability. You have the right to receive the personal information we have about you and the right to transmit it to another party.
  • Right to not Be Subject to Automated Decision-Making. You have the right to object to and prevent any decision that could have a legal or similarly significant effect on you from being made solely based on automated processes. This right is limited if the decision is necessary for performance of any contract between you and us, is allowed by applicable law, or is based on your explicit consent.
  • Right to Non-Discrimination. We do not and will not charge you a different amount to use our products, offer you different discounts, or give you a lower level of customer service because you have exercised your data privacy rights. However, the exercise of certain rights may, by virtue of your exercising those rights, prevent you from using our services.

Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and updating your account information. Please note that certain information may be exempt from such requests under applicable law. For example, we need to retain certain information in order to provide our services to you.

In some cases, we also need to take reasonable steps to verify your identity before responding to a request, which may include, at a minimum, depending on the sensitivity of the information you are requesting and the type of request you are making, verifying your name and email address. If we are unable to verify you, we may be unable to respond to your requests. If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at [email protected] .

Processors and subprocessors we use

As part of the services we provide, we use third party processors and subprocessors to process some or all of your personal information:

  • Hetzner. Cloud services provider.
  • Backblaze. Cloud storage for our backups and data.
  • Paddle. Payment processing services.
  • Cloudflare. Content delivery network services.
  • Sentry. Error reporting software.
  • Skylight. Application performance monitoring.
  • Mailgun. Transactional email service.

How we secure your data

All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The off-site server and database backups are also encrypted. Data isn’t encrypted while it’s live in our database (since they need to be ready to send to you when you need them).

What happens when you delete content in your account

If you choose to cancel your account, we’ll delete the associated data from our databases immediately. However, your personal data may still be available in our backups and logs. We back up our servers and databases. We keep our backups for the past 90 days, older data are deleted permanently.

Data retention

We keep your information for the time necessary for the purposes for which it is processed. The length of time for which we retain information depends on the purposes for which we collected and use it and your choices, after which time we may delete and/or aggregate it. We may also retain and use this information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Through this policy, we have provided specific retention periods for certain types of information.

Location of site and data

Our marketing and application sites run on servers located in the European Union. If you are located in the EU, please be aware that any information you provide to us can be transferred to and stored outside the EU. By using our websites or services and/or providing us with your personal information, you consent to this transfer.

Changes and questions

We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date on this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify users.

Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch by emailing us at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to try to answer them!

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0

Last updated: October 1, 2023