Privacy Policy

Last updated January 5, 2023

Thanks for visiting us! This Privacy Policy describes what information we collect, how it's used and shared, and how you can manage it. Any capitalized terms not defined in this Privacy Policy have the meanings described in our Terms of Use. We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your Personal Information obtained by reason of your access or use of Designware. This policy explains the type of Personal Information we collect, how it is used, and the steps we take to ensure your Personal Information is handled appropriate. Our policies and practices have been designed to comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Canada) and corresponding provincial privacy acts.

If you don’t agree with the terms of this Privacy Policy, you may not access or use Designware. We’ve included descriptive section headers, and annotations in boxes, which have no legal effect but make it easier to understand the text. If you have any comments or questions about this Privacy Policy, please email us.

1. Core Principles

When it comes to your Personal Information we believe in transparency, not surprises. So before we get into the details, we want to share with you a few of our core privacy principles. First, we don’t sell your Personal Information to anyone. It’s just not the type of business we’re in. Second, we don’t ask for your Personal Information unless we need it to provide or improve Designware for you. Third, we don’t share your Personal Information unless you’ve specifically allowed it, or for the very limited purposes described below. Finally, we appreciate that when you use Designware, you trust us with your information, and we take that responsibility very seriously. This Privacy Policy holds us accountable for protecting your rights and your privacy, including the right to be forgotten at any time.

To summarize this entire policy, we don’t ask for your info unless it’s relevant, we don’t sell your info, we take data security very seriously, and you have privacy rights that we are accountable to.

2. Your Personal Information

“Personal Information” means information that directly or indirectly identifies or could be used to identify an individual, and is a part of User Content. Except as described in this Privacy Policy, we will not give, sell, rent, or loan any Personal Information to any third party. Personal Information does not include anonymized or aggregated data that does not contain personally identifying information, which we may collect about groups of services, features, or users in order to understand how Designware is used and to make it better.

We collect Personal Information, but don’t share or monetize unless it’s for the specific purposes described.

3. Our Relationship With You

We are GDPR-compliant, representing the highest legal standard for data protection. In order for you to understand our data protection obligations and your rights to your Personal Information under this Privacy Policy, it is important for you to understand and identify the relationship that you have with us. By visiting, accessing, or using Designware, you are an individual user of the Services (referred to as “you” or “your”), for whom we are a “data controller” (the direct steward of the respective data). Additionally, you may be a paying customer of the services, and for such related information transfer we are a “data processor” (a passive conduit through which data is collected). We have no direct relationship with your Audience, including anyone that provides their own Personal Information to you. We do not control the purposes nor the means by which any Audiences’ Personal Information is collected by you, and we are not in a direct relationship with your Audience.

By visiting or using Designware, we manage or process some of your data as you would expect with any website or platform. We have elected to be GDPR-compliant, which is the European Union’s legal standard for data protection, and the strongest standard in the world today. Under GDPR terminology, we are a “data controller” for information that we directly store (like names and email addresses), and a “data processor” for payment information (should you be a paying customer), since that gets directly passed on to our payments processor, and we do not store sensitive payment info ourselves.

4. Notice

We provided notice to you through posted privacy policies, and may provide additional “just-in-time” disclosures about the data collection, use, and sharing practices for specific aspects of Designware. As a data processor, we are not able to provide notice to or obtain consent from your or any user’s Audiences. To the extent required by law, we support your data protection compliance efforts, but it is up to you to ensure that the appropriate data protection safeguards are in place before processing the Personal Information of your Audience.

Our policies on privacy and other “just-in-time” methods like notifications and popups are used to inform you how we gather, use, and share your data. It’s up to you to make sure you’re informing the users of your published projects how you’re handling their data.

5. Information We Collect

We collect the following types of Personal Information:

• Account information, which is your full name, email address, password, and any optional biographical, portfolio, or social media information. We use this information in the ways you would expect, such as to set up your user account, contact you, and support your voluntary interactions with other users.

• Interaction information, being emails or other messages to sent to us by you, your forum or blog posts on our managed Services, security questions, authentication information, and other data collected via cookies and similar technologies.

• Payment information, collected if you elect to start a project subscription plan. This includes payment card information, billing information, and the transaction history.

• Online identifier information that consists of geolocation details, browser and OS details, and IP addresses, used to understand how you access Designware and to customize its presentation.

Any information that is anonymized or aggregated is not “Personal Information”. Any information that is disclosed in the forums or blogs we manage becomes public information. This means that your posts are available to the public and may appear in search engines or other publicly available platforms, and may be crawled or searched by third parties. Your public posts can also be read, collected, or used by others to send you unsolicited messages. Be careful when posting on public parts of our Services and do not post any information that you are not comfortable sharing publicly.

We collect the various types of personal info that you’d normally expect for an online platform, and all of this data is protected by this Privacy Policy. Any anonymized info is not included, since it’s not personal. Any info you post or share in a public space, like our forum or blog, becomes publicly visible and searchable on the open web.

6. Purposes of Processing

Unless otherwise permitted by law, we may process your Personal Information (i) if you consent to the processing, including where necessary for us to carry out our obligations from any contracts we have with you, or to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contract with you, (ii) to satisfy our legal obligations, (iii) in your interests, (iv) in the public interest, (v) for our legitimate business interests, including to protect our property, rights, the safety of Designware, or others (including other users).

We collect information about your account usage and monitor your interactions with Designware. We may use any of your Personal Information collected in Designware for these purposes. The consequences of not processing your Personal Information for such purposes is the termination of your account, as we cannot perform our Services in accordance with our terms. Under regulation we are obligated to inform you of our purposes for processing your Personal Information, and the legal basis for doing so as follows:

• To provide Designware itself, customer service, and ensure quality control, on the basis that processing is necessary for the performance of our contract with you, or prior to our contract with you at your request.

• To communicate with you, in order to provide administrative, transactional, or account information, to update you on Designware news, features, and statuses, or to alert you to relevant security issues or updates; on the basis that processing is necessary for the performance of our contract with you, or prior to our contract with you at your request. In cases where communications are for marketing or promotional purposes, the basis for processing is necessary for our legitimate business interests. You can opt out of such marketing or promotional communications at any time and free of charge.

• To ensure data, network, and information security, on the basis that processing is necessary for us to comply with our legal obligations to you and applicable laws.

• To enforce our terms and agreements, including to investigate, prevent, or mitigate prohibited or illegal activities, enforce our agreements with third parties, or collect fees based on your use of Designware, on the basis that it is necessary for the performance of our contract with you, or prior to our contract with you at your request.

• For research and development, to understand how you access and use Designware and how we can modify and improve it, on the basis that processing is necessary for our legitimate business interests.

• To facilitate mergers, acquisitions, or other business transactions, on the basis that processing is necessary for our legitimate business interests.

• To protect against fraud or error.

• To perform statistical analyses of user behaviour and characteristics, in order to measure interest in and use of Designware so as to improve design and navigation and to gather marketing information. Only aggregated data from these analyses, not individual data, will be used for this purpose.

• To fulfill any other purpose that would be reasonably apparent to the average person at the time we collect it from you.

We will only use your Personal Information for the purposes above or for compatible reasons. If we wish to share your Personal Information with third parties that are not described in this Privacy Policy, we may request your permission as required by law. You may opt out of having your Personal Information shared with third parties, or from allowing us to use your Personal Information for any purpose that is incompatible with the purposes for which we originally collected it or subsequently obtained your authorization. However, if you limit the way we use your Personal Information, certain features or Services may not be available to you.

We process your information for the under the following circumstances: with your consent, to satisfy legal obligations or fulfill a contract with you, or in the interests of you, the public, or our legitimate business activities. We’ll ask your permission to share your info with third parties not listed here, when required by law. You can opt out of such sharing, but it might limit your use of Designware.

7. Third Party Sources and Recipients

We only collect Personal Information about you from third parties that you voluntarily choose to connect with our Services. For example, you can share Personal Information with us when you access our Service through a third-party connection, or when you log in or connect an application to Designware. We process this information for the purposes of performance of our contracts with you.

We conduct the majority of data processing activities required to provide you with the Services. However, we do engage third party service providers to assist with supporting Designware, including vendors like payment processors, cloud storage providers, IT and security providers, and tools for development, marketing, analytics, and customer support. Each service provider is vetted and bound by contractual obligations that are equivalent to or greater than the provisions of this Privacy Policy.

The designware.io website may contain links to other websites not operated or controlled by us (“Third Party Sites”). The information that you share with Third Party Sites will be governed by the specific privacy policies and terms of service of the Third Party Sites and not by this Privacy Policy. By providing these links, we do not imply that we endorse or have reviewed these sites. Please contact the Third Party Sites directly for information on their privacy practices and policies.

We only collect personal info from third parties that you choose to connect with Designware. To provide our service, we run most data processing ourselves, but do use some third party vendors to help handle specific activities like payments and messaging. All of these vendors are accountable to privacy policies equivalent to this one.

8. Information Retention

We limit our storage of your Personal Information to the amount of time necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we collected the Personal Information, including to satisfy any legal, accounting, or reporting obligations, or to resolve disputes. Some specific retention practices include: (i) product analytics data may be archived for multiple years but are otherwise subject to automated deletion, (ii) contact information collected for marketing purposes, like your name and email address, are retained on an ongoing basis until you unsubscribe from our marketing communications (and thereafter your contact information is added to a suppression list indefinitely, to respect your right to unsubscribe), and (iii) browser interaction data such as cookies and trackers are kept for a period of up to one year from expiry of the cookie or date of collection.

We only store your info for as long as is necessary to fulfill the reason it was collected for. This may vary by data type and jurisdiction.

9. Security

We take the security of your Personal Information seriously. Our measures include using commercially reasonable virtual, physical, and administrative security safeguards to protect the confidentiality and security of your Personal Information within Designware. When you enter confidential information (such as login credentials) we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). These technologies, procedures, and other measures are used in an effort to ensure that your data is safe, secure, and only available to you and third parties you authorized to access your data. However, no internet, email, or other electronic transmission is ever fully secure or error-free, so you should take care in deciding what information you send to us in this way. Additionally, we are not responsible for the functionality or security measures of any third party.

Your information security is of the upmost importance to us, and we apply a variety of measures to provide that security. We are however not responsible for the security measures of third parties, since we don’t own them.

10. International Data Transfer

We may host, transfer, and process data, including User Content and Personal Information, in various countries through us and third parties that we use to operate and manage Designware. These countries may have data protection laws that differ from those in your country of residence. We use a variety of safeguards, including contractual and technical measures, to protect the data we transfer.

Designware was built for international users, and the data we host and transfer on your behalf will cross borders in many cases. We take steps to ensure transfers are secure and compliant with applicable laws.

11. Promotional Emails

Any emails we send to you that only consist of advertising or promoting products and services can be opted out of entirely by selecting any “unsubscribe”-type link at the bottom of such emails. Transactional communications about your account or Designware, like account activity and service notices, are not considered promotional in nature.

You can opt out of our promotional emails at any time, using the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of those emails. Transactional emails may continue to be sent to you, as they may pertain to your account activity and important service notifications.

12. Your Rights

You have the rights to your Personal Information described below. You can exercise your rights by emailing us at [e-mail] so that we may consider taking appropriate action under applicable laws. When responding to rights-related requests, we may need to verify your identity before fulfilling the request in order to protect your privacy and security. You have: (i) the right to withdraw consent at any time, however withdrawal of consent does not affect the lawfulness of our processing prior to the withdrawal, (ii) the right to receive a copy of your Personal Information in a reasonable timeframe, subject to an administrative fee as permitted by law, and provided such copy does not adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others, (iii) the right to update your Personal Information to ensure accuracy, (iv) the right to be forgotten, where Personal Information is erased to the extent permitted by law and our Terms of Use, (v) the right to data portability, specifically to receive your Personal Information in a commonly-used digital format, and to have us transfer your Personal Information directly to another data controller, where technically feasible, unless exercise of this right adversely affects the rights and freedoms of others, (iv) the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing of your Personal Information, including profiling, which produces legal or similarly significant effects on you, and (v) the right to restrict our further processing of your Personal Information, provided that you contest the accuracy of the Personal Information, object to the processing, declare the processing as unlawful, or require Personal Information to establish, exercise, or defend a legal claim prior to Personal Information being deleted, provided that we may continue to process Personal Information if it is necessary for the defence of legal claims, or for any other exception permitted by applicable law.

Where applicable, you have the right to be forgotten, to receive a copy of your info, to update or move your info, or to withdraw consent or object to us processing your info.

13. Limitations to Your Rights

Your rights to your Personal Information are not without limits. Access and requests may be denied when required or authorized by law, when granting access would have a negative impact on other’s privacy, doing so protects our rights and properties, or where the request is frivolous.

Your rights regarding personal info may be denied under certain circumstances.

14. Children’s Information

We do not knowingly collect Personal Information from anyone under the age of consent as defined by their jurisdiction. If we are aware of or suspect that a user of the Services is under the age of consent, we will require them to terminate their account or we may terminate it ourselves, and we will take steps to delete their Personal Information as soon as possible. Please notify us if you know of any individuals under the age of consent using Designware.

We don’t knowingly collect the data of people aged below their local age of consent. If and when we are notified of this occurring, we take steps to delete all of their info.

15. Policy Changes

We may change this Privacy Policy at any time, and the changes will apply to any Personal Information we already manage and to any new Personal Information collected after the change occurs. If we make any material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will endeavour to notify you by email or by posting a prominent notice on the Services before the change becomes effective. We encourage you to periodically check this page for the latest on our privacy practices. You may refer to the “Last Updated” date of this Privacy Policy to determine if the Privacy Policy has changed since the date of your last visit, and your continued use of Designware constitutes an acceptance of any amended terms of this Privacy Policy.

When you use Designware, you’re agreeing to and accepting these privacy terms and policies. We may update our Privacy Policy at any time, but will let you know in advance if it’s going to be a significant change.

16. Contact Us

We are committed to providing you with understandable and easily available information about our policy and practices related to management of your Personal Information. This Privacy Policy and any related information is available at all times on our website, designware.io under “Privacy Policy” or on request. If you have any questions, concerns and complaints about the privacy of your Personal Information or our privacy policies and procedures, please email us.