Privacy Policy - Ablestar
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Privacy Policy

Last Updated: November 22, 2022

Your privacy is extremely important to us. At Ablestar, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  • We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information is used or permanently deleted.
  • We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
  • We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.

Below is Ablestar’s privacy policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

We are the people behind a variety of products and services designed to allow anyone–from individuals, small business owners, and enterprises–to build and manage an ecommerce store.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

  • Our websites (including Ablestar and 2can Apps subdomains);
  • Our Shopify applications (including those not listed on the Shopify App store); and
  • Any other products and services that are available on or through our websites.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, Shopify applications and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us.

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. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that 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 use our services. For example, when you install one of our Shopify apps you grant permission for us to see basic information about your store including your name, email address and location.
  • Shopify Data: If you install a Shopify app we might request access to additional information from your Shopify store. For example, if you install our Bulk Product Editor app, we request permission to read and update your products. Our apps will require the minimum necessary access needed in order to run effectively.
  • Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide us with credentials for your website (like API credentials or a username and password). For example, our Woo Importer app asks for API credentials so it can migrate your data from WooCommerce to Shopify, or to allow us to troubleshoot problems on your site more quickly.
  • Communications with Us: You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our customer service team about a support question, or post a question about your site in a public forum.
  • Job applicant information: If you apply for a job with us you may provide us with information like your name, contact information, resume or CV, and work authorization verification as part of the application process.

Information We Collect Automatically

We 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, including 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 — for example, when you install one of our apps on your Shopify store.
  • Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users  perform in our apps. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, support document searches at support.ablestar.com, features enabled for your store and other parts of our Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, browser name and version). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and track down issues or bugs.
  • Approximate 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.
  • 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. Ablestar uses cookies to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

  • Third Party Login: If you log in to Ablestar through another service (like Shopify) we’ll receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your email address, your store name)

The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, run our Shoify apps, provide customer service, and verify user information.
  • To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage websites more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.
  • To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
  • To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Ablestar and others, which may result in us, for example, terminating Services.
  • To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
  • To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications for our Services.
  • To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on Ablestar. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A 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 the applicable 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 to understand our 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.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below:

  • Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
  • Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information 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 Shopify, cloud storage services, 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, and by placing ads to market our services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); other third-party tools that help us manage operations.
  • Legal and regulatory requirements: 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 Ablestar, 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 information related to the emergency without delay.
  • 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 Ablestar 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 when you authorize us to do so.
  • Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.

We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is disclosed publicly. That means information public Shopify App reviews or other content that you make public on your website or online store are all available to others.

How Long We Keep Information

In accordance with Shopify’s policies, we remove information related to your Shopify store and personally-identifiable information 48 hours after you uninstall all our apps. Outside of that, we generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it. For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Ablestar’s websites, like 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 websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

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. We monitor 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, and profile information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible.
  • Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
  • Set your browser to reject cookies: You can choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Ablestar’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Ablestar’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Uninstall our Shopify apps: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you uninstall our apps from the Shopify Admin if you no longer want to use our Services. After 48 hours of your uninstalling all our apps we will delete your store’s data. 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.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain 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.

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

You can also make a GDPR request for a customer through the Shopify admin.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

  • Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
  • Commercial information (information from your Shopify store, for example);
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services, like the actions you take in one of our apps);
  • Geolocation data (such as your approximate location based on your IP address);
  • Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such images uploaded to your Shopify store);
  • Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information in the Information We Collect section above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

  • Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
  • Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
  • Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
  • Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us” to find out how to reach us. When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.

Controller and Responsible Company

Ablestar LLC, a US-based company, is the controller for the processing activities across all of our Services worldwide. The chart below explains the current controllers for processing your personal information.

Ablestar LLC. 7901 4th St. N Suite 575 St. Petersburg, FL 33702

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us through our web form or via email.

Other Things You Should Know

Transferring Information

Because Ablestar’s 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 entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with entities based in countries outside the EEA. You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Ablestar may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Ablestar encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by updated the date at the top of this page, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

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