Privacy Policy

Last Updated November 1, 2019

Hello! We are the team that runs Referrals Hired.

You may be wondering about the information that we collect about you when you use our website and other products and services – which we’ll refer to 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.

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 set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for an account to provide an email address along with a username or name. You may provide us with more information — like your address and other information you want to share — but we don’t require that information to create an account.
  • Billing and Contact Information: If you buy something from us, you will provide additional personal and payment information, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
  • Content Information: If you fill out a form to make a request, we will have that information and make it accessible for others to see. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!
  • Communications with Us: You may also provide us information when you email us questions, sign up for our newsletter, respond to surveys, or other means. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, 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, such as 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.
  • Usage Information: We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
  • 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. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. We uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you connect your website or account to a social media service (like Twitter), we will receive information from that service (such as your username, basic profile information, and friends list) via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available. We may also get information, such as a mailing address, from third party services about individuals who are not yet our users (…but we hope will be!), which we may use, for example, for marketing and advertising purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our services.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, or to enable you to post requests that others can respond to;
    To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy;
  • To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
  • To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals made a purchase after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
  • To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Referrals Hired and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
  • To communicate with you. For example, we may email you to solicit your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on Referrals Hired; text you to verify your payment; or call 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. (Please keep in mind that even if you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account); and
  • To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have been our user for a certain length of time), and serve relevant advertisements.

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 service; 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; 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–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

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, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
  • 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 Referrals Hired, 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 Referrals Hired 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 with which you authorize us to do so.
  • Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
  • Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.
  • Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, postal and 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), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. Current third party groups include:
    • Facebook – We use Facebook for advertising. Facebook Privacy Policy
    • Google Adwords – We use Google Adwords for advertising. Google Privacy Policy
    • Google Analytics – We use Google Analytics to understand effectiveness of ads and user behavior. Google Analytics Privacy Policy
    • HubSpot CRM – We use HubSpot CRM to store our contact data. HubSpot Privacy Policy
    • LinkedIn Ads – We used LinkedIn Ads for advertising. LinkedIn Privacy Policy
    • Mailchimp – We use Mailchimp to send our newsletter as well as marketing emails. Recipients can opt-out of their subscription by using the unsubscribe link included in the emails. Mailchimp Privacy Policy
    • Stripe – We use Stripe to process payments. Stripe is an industry leading provider and follows PCI regulations, which means that your sensitive payment data is never stored on our servers. Stripe Privacy Policy

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly. That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on our website are all available to others. And we hope you get a lot of views! Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to our website, such as 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 and investigate issues if something goes wrong. As another example, when you delete a post, page, or comment from the website, it stays in a Trash folder for thirty days just in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content–because starting again from scratch is no fun, at all. After the time period is up, deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

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, such as monitoring 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, profile information, and transaction and billing 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 usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using our website, with the drawback that certain features of our website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services, you can close your account. 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 countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you 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 may contact us for assistance with the above.

Privacy Policy Changes

Referrals Hired may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Referrals Hired encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

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.

 

Regards,

The Referrals Hired team