Privacy

CodeHerald operates several websites, including codeherald.com. We are committed to protecting your privacy. This document outlines what data we collect and how it will be used.

What This Policy Covers

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

  • Our websites (including codeherald.com );
  • Other websites that integrate with our Services, while you have an active account with us.

Throughout this policy we will refer to all of the above as “CodeHerald” or “Services” interchangeably.

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

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 this information from three sources: 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

We collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

  • Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a CodeHerald.com account to provide an email address and GitHub username — and that’s it.
  • GitHub profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that is available on your GitHub profile. This includes metadata about any organisations and repositories that you explicitly gave permission to access while signing-up.
  • Credentials: When you sign-up via GitHub, you provide CodeHerald with API credentials to access resources in the repositories you gave CodeHerald an permission to do so.
  • Communications with us (hi there!): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our engineers about a support question, post a question in our public forums. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, comment on GitHub Discussion Board, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).

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 interact with codeherald.com and/or when we receive event information via GitHub Webhooks;
  • Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Service. For example, we collect information about the organisations, repositories and pull requests you create on CodeHerald. In other words, who did what, on what pull request, when and why;
  • GitHub webhook events: As part of the integration with GitHub, CodeHerald will receive metadata about events happening on GitHub in the repositories you explicitly allowed CodeHerald access. We use this information to, for example, provide our Service to you, and debug Service issues.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

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

  • Third party login: When you create or log in to your codeherald.com account through another service (like GitHub) we’ll receive associated login information (e.g. an API token, your username, your email address);
  • GitHub account information: When you connect your GitHub account, we may access certain GitHub data such as your profile information, your organisations and your repositories you gave explicit service access to.

The information we receive depends on which organisations and repositories you use or authorise 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 Service: For example, to setup and maintain your account, to host and process the pull requests and GitHub Events you create, provide customer service, and verify user information.
  • To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Service. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analysing 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 advertising our Services, analysing 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 CodeHerald and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
  • To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
  • 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 CodeHerald; texting you to verify your payment; or calling you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. 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.)

How Long We Keep Information

We do not keep your information for longer than is necessary.

  • Database backups: We keep database backups for up to 2 months. Therefore, when you delete information from your account or close your account completely, your information can still be recovered from our database backups for up to 2 months.
  • Log retention: We keep Service logs for up to 3 months. Therefore, when you delete information from your account or close your account, some of the usage information can still be traced in logs for up to 3 months.

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 fulfil 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 personalise your experience.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

  • 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 Service 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 payment providers and email delivery services); 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, who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them. These vendors are listed in the “List of Data Sub-processors” section below;
  • 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 CodeHerald, 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 CodeHerald 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.
  • 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 Service.
  • Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorised access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks. To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to enable advanced security settings on GitHub, like Two Step Authentication.

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, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Service may not be accessible.

  • Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Service. 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, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, 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.

Usually, you can access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, please see “How To Contact Us” below for our contact details.

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

Other Things You Should Know

Transferring Information

Because CodeHerald is offered worldwide, the information about you, which we process when you use the Service in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by third party processors operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA). 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.

List of Data Sub-processors

Codeherald.com uses these products/services:

  • Amazon Web Services: for storing logs.
  • Cloudflare: for managing domains and DDoS protection.
  • ConvertKit: for signup forms and automated emails.
  • GitHub: for source code management and community discussions.
  • Google Ads: for PPC marketing.
  • Hetzner: for hosting our service and storing data.
  • Netdata Cloud: for infrastructure monitoring.
  • Plausible Analytics: for privacy aware analytics.
  • Statsignal: for Service status page.

Changes To This Policy

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time. Please review it occasionally. If we believe that the changes are material, we’ll let you know by sending you an email about the changes.

  • Oct 22nd, 2023: Initial version.
  • Dec 27th, 2023: Added Google Ads for PPC marketing.

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 mentioned in the “Your Rights” section above, please contact us:

  • Email us at: info [at] this domain

This Privacy Policy was adapted from Wordpress policy, shared under Creative Commons .