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Privacy Policy

Thank you for using engageSPARK! 

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. This Privacy Policy is a part of our Terms of Service. By signing up for an account, you are agreeing to this Privacy Policy.  This Privacy Policy also explains how engageSPARK uses the personal data we collect from you when you use (including when you visit) our website.  

We respect and protect the privacy of our customers and those who use our website and our products and services. This Privacy Policy provides details about how your personal information is collected and used. Personal information is any information that identifies you or would enable someone to contact you, such as your name, email address, phone number and other non-public information that is associated with such information. This Privacy Policy applies to the Website and Service.  

Words used in this Privacy Policy that begin with a capital letter have the definitions given to them in our Terms of Service. To make it easier for you to understand this Privacy Policy, we will restate some of those definitions:  

engageSPARK (“engageSPARK” or the “Service”) is a messaging service offered through the URL www.engagespark.com (we will refer to it as the “Website”) that allows or will allow you to create, send, receive, and manage messages or rewards through multiple communication channels, including short message service (“SMS” or “text message”), voice, email, chat apps such as WhatsApp, airtime topups, data topups, and/or other communication channels (we will refer to each inbound or outbound message or reward, regardless of communication or reward channel, as a “Message”).  

engageSPARK, Inc. is a Delaware, United States corporation (“engageSPARK,” “we,” or “us”). engageSPARK has one or more parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, related companies, shareholders, officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, partners, and licensors (we will refer to engageSPARK and all of those entities and individuals collectively as the “engageSPARK Entities”). As a customer of the Service, a visitor to our Website, or a representative of an entity that is a customer of the Service or visitor to our Website, you are a Member according to this Agreement (we will refer to you as both a “Member” and as “you”).  

In the course of providing the Service, we may collect Personal Information, which means information about our Members. As part of using the Service, you may submit, post, upload, type, enter, import, or otherwise bring into contact with the Service different types of data, including but not limited to text, graphics, photos, phone numbers, or other materials or information (we will refer to all of that data collectively as “Content” and to your bringing any Content in contact with the Service as “submitting” Content).  In some cases, you will be submitting Content about individuals because you will be using the Service to communicate with those individuals in some way (we will refer to those individuals as “Contacts”). Whenever we use the term Content, we also include Contacts and any information we have about them.  

This Privacy Policy is a part of, and is incorporated into, our Terms of Service. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Murat Knecht, at our email: privacy-requests@engagespark.com. 

Compliance with GDPR, DPA, CCPA/CPRA, and other relevant data privacy legislation 

The GDPR is an EU-wide privacy and data protection law that defines how EU residents’ data must be protected and gives EU residents certain rights over their personal data. We comply with the GDPR and explain how we do this in the rest of this policy. 

Following Brexit, the UK established the UK GDPR and DPA, to which we comply as well. 

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) establish a right to opt out of data selling or sharing. As a matter of policy, we do not sell or share your data. You do not need to ask us for it—we already do not do it.  

Please note that we give you control over your data and protect it regardless of where you are located or which country you are running campaigns in. 

What data do we collect?  

We collect data about you and about your Contacts.  Please see the How Do We Collect Data section below to understand when we collect different kinds of data.

We may collect the following Data about you, which we collectively refer to as “Your Personal Information”:  

  • Your personal identification information (name, email address, phone number, physical address)  
  • The name of the organization you work for  
  • Your IP address  
  • Your credit card information
  • Your online profile URLs or usernames
  • Websites you visited before coming to the engageSPARK website  

We may collect the following Data from you, that is not Your Personal Information: your device type, browser type, plugin details, language preference, time zone, screen size.  

We will collect the following Data about your Contacts, which we collectively refer to as “Your Contacts’ Personal Information”:  

  • Their phone number  

We may collect any other information about your Contacts; there are no limits on what information we may collect about your Contacts.  

How do we collect your data?  

You directly provide engageSPARK with most of the data we collect.  We collect and process your data when you:  

  • register to use the Service
  • communicate with any member of our team  
  • send us an email  
  • post on our blog  
  • pay us using a credit card  
  • use or view our website  

We also may receive your data indirectly from other sources such as  

  • publicly available online profiles  

You directly or indirectly provide engageSPARK with the data we collect about your Contacts.  We collect and process Your Contacts’ Personal Information when you:  

  • submit your Contact’s data to the Service via tools provided by the Service (e.g., uploading a spreadsheet with your Contacts’ data or by using our APIs)  
  • set up campaigns or phone numbers or other data collection methods via the Service that collect Your Contacts’ Personal Information via the Service  
  • send our support team (via email, live chat, chat apps, Voice, or other methods) your Contact’s data for troubleshooting or other reasons  

How will we use your data?  

We may use and disclose Your Personal Information only as follows:  

  1. To promote the use of our Services. For example, if you leave Your Personal Information when you visit our Website and don’t sign up for the Service, we may send you an email asking whether you want to sign up. And if you use the Service, and we think you might benefit from learning about new features, promotions, or other services we offer, we may send you an email telling you about it.  You can always opt out of such email notifications.  
  2. To bill and collect money owed to us. This includes sending you emails, invoices, receipts, notices of delinquency, and alerting you if we need a different credit card number or other payment method information. We use third parties for secure credit card and other payment method transaction processing, and we send billing information to those third parties to process your orders, credit card payments, and other payment method payments. To learn more about the steps we take to safeguard that data, see the Section titled Safeguarding Your Information below.  
  3. To facilitate account creation and the logon process. We require your email address for you to be able to sign up and login to the Service.  We use it, along with your password and two-factor authentication, if setup, to authenticate you when you log in.  
  4. To send you system alert messages. For example, we may let you know about temporary or permanent changes to the Service, like planned outages, new features, version updates, releases, abuse warnings, and changes to our Privacy Policy, Terms, or other policies.  
  5. To enforce compliance with our Terms of Service and applicable law. This may include developing tools and algorithms that help us prevent violations.  
  6. To provide customer support, including technical support.  
  7. To protect the rights and safety of our Members and third parties, as well as our own.  
  8. To provide information to representatives and advisors, like attorneys and accountants, to help us comply with legal, accounting, or security requirements.  
  9. To prosecute and defend a court, arbitration, or similar proceeding.  
  10. To communicate with you about your account for informational, not promotional, reasons.  
  11. To transfer your information in the case of a sale, merger, consolidation, or acquisition. In that event, any acquirer will be subject to our obligations under this Privacy Policy. If required, engageSPARK will notify the applicable data protection agency in each jurisdiction of such a transfer in accordance with the notification procedures under applicable data protection laws.  
  12. To send you informational and promotional content that you may choose (or “opt in”) to receive. You can stop receiving our promotional emails by following the unsubscribe instructions included in every email.  
  13. To meet legal requirements, like complying with court orders and valid subpoenas. Occasionally, we have to disclose information about our customers to meet legal requirements. Third-party disputes are a common example: If two parties have a dispute, and one of them used engageSPARK in a way that is relevant to the dispute, then we might get a request for user data. Whether we say no way or comply is in our sole discretion and depends on the subpoena.  
  14. To protect our systems and provide our Service. Our servers record the incoming IP addresses of visitors to our websites (whether or not the visitor has an engageSPARK account) and store the IP addresses in log files. We use these log files for purposes such as system administration and maintenance, record keeping, tracking referring web sites, inferring your location, and security purposes (e.g., controlling abuse, spam and DDOS attacks). We also store IP addresses along with certain actions you take on our system. By agreeing to this privacy policy, you expressly consent to engageSPARK using your IP address for the foregoing purposes. If you wish to opt out from the foregoing consent to use your IP address, you must cancel your account (if you have one). 
  15. To better understand how you are using our Service. We are using Matomo, a privacy-first web analytics tool, to learn how our Service is being used and how to make it better for you. It uses cookies to track users and stores an anonymized version of the IP address. You can opt out of these analytics at any time, see the Cookies section. Again, we do not share or sell this data. 

Other than as stated above, we do not use Your Personal Information or share it with third parties. 

What are your Data Protection Rights? 

engageSPARK would like to make sure you are fully aware of all of your data protection rights.  Every Member is entitled to the following:  

  1. The right to access. You have the right to ask engageSPARK for copies of your personal data.  We may charge you a small fee for this service.  
  2. The right to rectification. You have the right to request that engageSPARK correct any information you believe is inaccurate.  You also have the right to ask engageSPARK to complete information you believe is incomplete.  
  3. The right to erasure. You have the right to request that engageSPARK erase your personal data, under certain conditions.  If you do so, we will need to close your account or assign it to someone else at your organization.  
  4. The right to restrict processing. You have the right to request that engageSPARK restrict processing of your personal data, under certain conditions. If you do so, we will need to close your account or assign it to someone else at your organization.  
  5. The right to object to processing. You have the right to object to engageSPARK’s processing of your personal data, under certain conditions. If you do so, we will need to close your account or assign it t someone else at your organization.  
  6. The right to data portability.  You have the right to request that engageSPARK transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions.  

If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.  If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us at our email: privacy-requests@engagespark.com 

If we need to close your account because you exercise any of these rights, you will not receive a refund of any Deposited Funds.  

Cookies  

To understand what cookies are, how we use cookies, what types of cookies we use, and how you can manage cookies, please visit our Cookie Policy, which is incorporated into and is a part of this Privacy Policy.  

Our Cookie Policy, like this Privacy Policy, applies to all visitors and users, regardless of their geographic location, residence, or citizenship.   

Any terms in the Cookie Policy that conflict with this Privacy Policy are deemed null and void and are superseded by this Privacy Policy.  

How will we use your contacts’ data? 

Content that you submit to the Service is stored on secure servers. Content that you submit may include Your Contacts’ Personal Information and other information that you may want to keep private.  

When you send or receive Messages, they may bounce around through servers on the Internet and may pass through different third parties’ systems. For example, an SMS Message that you send through the Service could pass from our servers to our suppliers’ servers to telecommunications companies’ systems and then to the recipient’s mobile phone handset. Along the way, any of these third parties may be able to read what you send or receive.  

We may use, disclose, or share your Content, including Your Contacts’ Personal Information, as follows:  

  1. We may share your Contacts’ data with our service providers. We use service providers who help us to provide you with our services. We give relevant persons working for some of these providers access to your information, but only to the extent necessary for them to perform their services for us.  See also the section about third-party processing below.We will use your Contacts’ data to provide the Service.  This includes for troubleshooting purposes, to improve the Service, and to enforce our Terms of Service, including our Anti-Spam Policy. 
  2. We may use your Contacts’ data in aggregated and anonymized ways for billing, statistics, and other similar purposes.  We may share this aggregated and anonymized data internally and with our third-party service providers.  
  3. To meet legal requirements, such as processing a Contact’s direct opt-out request, e.g., if your Contact texts STOP to a phone number we provided to you in a country where we are legally obligated to honor such opt-out requests. 

Except as described elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, we do not contact any Contacts whose Personal Information you submit to the Service, market to any of those Contacts, or use, sell, or share your Contact lists. Only authorized employees have access to view the Personal Information of your Contacts, and only under certain conditions such as internal approvals or approvals by you. You may export Content, including Your Contacts’ Personal Information, that you submitted to (and did not previously delete from) engageSPARK at any time via the methods available on the Website.  You also may delete any (or all) Contacts’ Personal Information at any time via the methods available on the Website.  

What are Your Contacts’ Data Protection Rights?  

We are not the data controller of your Contacts’ data; rather we are the data processor of their data.  Therefore, we will never engage directly with your Contacts about their data or their data protection rights.  

If an individual Contact reaches out to us about their data, we will try to identify which of our Members is the data controller for that Contacts’ data and will notify that Member to take action. We may communicate back and forth with that Contact to gather more information from them (such as confirming they control a phone number that they are inquiring about or asking for screenshots of messages they received through our platform).   

The Contact will need to exercise its data protection rights with you, the Member, and then you will need to take steps with us to effectuate any requests from your Contacts.  

Your Responsibilities as Data Controller of Your Contacts’ Data  

  1. Data controller. engageSPARK, whose contact information is listed above, is the data controller for registration, billing, and other account information that we collect from you. However, the data controller for Content that you submit to the Service, including your Contacts’ Personal Information, is you.  
  2. Your responsibilities. By using the Service, you agree to comply with all applicable legal requirements when collecting Content outside or through the Service and submitting any Content to the Service.  

By clicking “I Agree” or any other button indicating your acceptance of this Privacy Policy, you expressly consent to the following:  

You consent to the collection, use, disclosure and processing of your personal information in the manner described in this Privacy Policy, including our procedures relating to cookies, IP addresses and log files.  

Our servers are based in Germany, so your personal data will be primarily processed by us in Germany. You consent to the transfer and processing of your personal data in Germany by engageSPARK.  

You consent to us sharing your personal data with relevant persons working for service providers who assist us to provide our services.  

If you have enabled cookies on your web browser, you consent to our use of cookies as described in this privacy policy.  

Security Breach Notice  

If a security breach causes an unauthorized intrusion into our system that materially affects you or Contacts that you submit to the Service, then we will notify you and relevant government authorities as soon as feasible.  

Safeguarding Your Information  

To protect your information, our credit card processing vendor uses the latest 256-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology for secure transactions. Our vendor is certified as compliant with card association security initiatives, like the Visa Cardholder Information Security and Compliance (CISP), MasterCardŽ (SDP), and Discovery Information Security and Compliance (DISC).  

engageSPARK accounts require an email address and password to log in, and in some circumstances require you to satisfy additional security or verification measures, such as two-factor authentication (“2fa”). You must keep your password, your 2fa authenticator app, your 2fa seed code, and your 2fa backup codes secure, and never disclose any of them to a third party. Because the Content you submit to the Service is so sensitive, account passwords are encrypted, which means we cannot see your passwords. We cannot resend forgotten passwords either. We can only reset them.  

Third-party Processing & International data transfers 

We use third parties to provide our service, such as payment processors, CRMs, and email service providers. These subprocessors may process and store your data, as well as your Contacts’ data. Please contact us to obtain a list of these subprocessors. 

We implement reasonable contractual and technical protections to ensure that the confidentiality of your Personal Information and Content is maintained, that the data is processed only for the provision of their services to us, handled in accordance with this Privacy Policy, and is deleted or returned after a service contract ends. 

As part of providing our service, we or these subprocessors may transfer your data internationally. The above-mentioned contractual and technical protections also apply to international data transfers. 

We perform an initial assessment for each subprocessor that these protections are in place, and regularly confirm that these protections stay in place. 

Accuracy of Data, Transparency, and Choice  

We do our best to keep your Personal Information accurate and up to date, to the extent that you provide us with the information we need to do that. If your Personal Information changes (like a new email address), then you are responsible for notifying us of those changes.  

We only store data about you for as long as it is reasonably required to fulfill the purposes that gave us the right to access it in the first place. We keep some data indefinitely, regarding when Messages were sent or received; where Messages were sent or from where they were received; which Messages were delivered and which were not (if we are able to determine that information); which Messages resulted in a complaint, and similar information, because we use it to help us screen out people who violate SPAM laws, and for other reasons explained in this policy.  

We will give you access to any Personal Information about you that we hold within 30 days of any request for that information you make to our support team. Unless it is prohibited by law, we will remove any Personal Information about you from our servers at your request. Under certain circumstances, we may terminate your account if you ask us to remove Personal Information about you from our servers. In that case, you will not receive a refund of any Funds in Your Account.  

Safety of Minors  

The Service is not intended for and may not be used by minors. “Minors” are individuals under the age of majority in their place of residence (or under 13 in the United States). engageSPARK does not knowingly allow minors to register for an account with engageSPARK. If it comes to our attention that we have collected personal data from a minor, we may delete this information without notice. If you have reason to believe that this has occurred, please contact our support team.  

Public Information and Third Parties  

Our Websites include links to other websites, whose privacy practices may be different from engageSPARK’s. If you submit Personal Information to any of those sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy policy of any website that you visit.  

Changes to our Privacy Policy  

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we do, we will send an email to the last email address you gave us to let you know of any changes. If you object to changes in the Privacy Policy, we will have to terminate your account. If you do not object to the changes to the Privacy Policy within 20 days of our emailing you the changes, and you continue to use the Service, your continued use will constitute your acceptance of our new Privacy Policy.  

English Version Controls  

Any non-English translations of this Privacy Policy are provided for convenience. In the event of any ambiguity or conflict between translations, the English version is authoritative.  

Enforcement  

We regularly review our compliance with this Privacy Policy. If we receive a written complaint, then we’ll respond to the person who made it. We work hard to resolve any complaints we receive from our Members.  

Thank you for taking the time to learn about engageSPARK’s Privacy Policy! 

Previous versions

The version above was published on Aug 16, 2024. For your reference, please find past versions of our Privacy Policy here:

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