Privacy policy

Last updated: November 24, 2023

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.

This policy applies to all products built and maintained by Sidenote, Lda. including StandupBot and future products.

What we collect and why

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

Identity & access

When you sign up for a Sidenote product, we ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a company name. 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 Sidenote 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 Sidenote servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number, for purposes of account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address so we can charge you for service, calculate any sales tax due, send you invoices, and detect fraudulent credit card transactions. We occasionally use aggregate billing information to guide our marketing efforts.

Product interactions

We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your Sidenote product accounts. This is so you can use our products as intended. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 60 days.

Geolocation data

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.

Website interactions

We collect anonymous 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, 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. The web analytics we use are described further in the Advertising and Cookies section.

Anti-bot assessments

We use CAPTCHA across our applications to mitigate brute force logins and as a means of spam protection. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our apps and the broader Internet community from credential stuffing attacks and spam. When you log into your Sidenote accounts and when you fill in certain forms, the CAPTCHA service evaluates various information (e.g., IP address, how long the visitor has been on the app, mouse movements) to try to detect if the activity is from an automated program instead of a human. The CAPTCHA service then provides Sidenote with the spam score results; we do not have access to the evaluated information.

Advertising and Cookies

Sidenote runs contextual ads on various third-party platforms such as Google, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Users who click on one of our ads will be sent to our Service’s marketing site. We don’t use third-party cookies, only measuring campaign ROI through anonymous URL referral codes.

We also 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 Sidenote 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 for each of our products: StandupBot, Folding Burritos. We also use third-party processors for other business functions such as managing newsletter subscriptions, sending customer surveys, and providing our company storefront. You can view the list at Company processors.

No Sidenote 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 Sidenote 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.

Sidenote, Lda. is an European Union (EU) company based in Portugal and all data infrastructure are located in the EU when it depends on us and our service providers allow it.

Requests for user data. Our policy is to not respond to government requests for user data unless we are compelled by legal process or in limited circumstances in the event of an emergency request. However, if EU law enforcement authorities have the necessary warrant, criminal subpoena, or court order requiring us to share data, we must comply. Likewise, we will only respond to requests from government authorities outside the EU if compelled by the EU government through procedures outlined in a mutual legal assistance treaty or agreement. It is Sidenote’s policy to notify affected users before we share data unless we are legally prohibited from doing so, and except in some emergency cases.
Preservation requests. Similarly, Sidenote’s policy is to comply with requests to preserve data only if compelled by EU law or by a properly served subpoena for civil matters. We do not share preserved data unless required by law or compelled by a court order that we choose not to appeal. Furthermore, unless we receive a proper warrant, court order, or subpoena before the required preservation period expires, we will destroy any preserved copies of customer data at the end of the preservation period.
If we are audited by a tax authority, we may be required to share billing-related information. If that happens, we will share only the minimum needed, such as billing addresses and tax exemption information.

Finally, if Sidenote, Lda. or one of its products 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

At Sidenote, 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 Sidenote 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 personal information. (Again: we never have and never will sell your personal data.)
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. If you want to export data from your accounts, you can do so by contacting our team.
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.

If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at [email protected] or at Sidenote, Lda., Av. da República, 50, 2º, 1050-196 Lisboa, Portugal. If an authorized agent is corresponding on your behalf, we will need written consent with a signature from the account holder before proceeding.

If you are in the US or UK, you can contact your data protection authority to file a complaint or learn more about local privacy laws.

How we secure your data

All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. In addition, we go to great lengths to secure your data in backups and logs. 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).

What happens when you delete content in your product accounts

In our applications, we may give you the option to trash or delete content. Anything you trash in your product accounts while they are active will be kept in an accessible trash can for about 25 days (it varies a little by product) — on the other hand, if you delete will be immediately unavailable. After that time, the trashed or deleted 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 or deleted 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-canceled accounts. Please refer to our Cancellation policy for more details.

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, including product interactions, deleted content and cancelled accounts.

Location of site and data

Our products and other web properties are operated in the European Union. If you are located in the US, UK, or elsewhere outside of the European Union, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to and stored in the European Union. By using our websites or Services and/or providing us with your personal information, you consent to this transfer.

Changes & questions

We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. You can view a history of the changes to our policies since early-2023 on GitHub. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of 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!

Sidenote policies are open source, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0