Balloon Privacy Policy

Last updated: May 24, 2018

Thank you for using Balloon. We are committed to protecting your privacy and, for that reason, we have adopted this Privacy Policy to memorialize our data collection and disclosure practices for the Balloon website and mobile applications, and their related tools and services (collectively, the “Services”). The Services are owned and operated by Balloon, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“we”, “us” or “our”). This Privacy Policy applies to information collected through the Services, as well as other information provided to us online or offline by customers or users of our Balloon; however, it does not apply to information collected from our employees, contractors or vendors.

This Privacy Policy describes, among other things:

  • Personal and other information we collect about you
  • How we use your information
  • How we may share your information with third parties
  • Your choices regarding the personal information we collect about you

1.     Consent

By using the Services, you consent to this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Services or Balloon. Information gathered through the Services may be transferred, used, and stored in the United States or in other countries where our service providers or we are located. If you use the Services, you agree to the transfer, use and storage of your Personal Information (as defined below) in those countries. The data protection and other laws of the United States and other countries might not be as comprehensive as those in your country. You agree that all transactions relating to the Services or Balloon are deemed to occur in the United States, where our servers are located. This Privacy Policy is intended to comply with all applicable laws and regulations, including but not limited to the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) of the European Union.

2.     Collection of Your Personal and Other Information

When you use our Services, we collect Personal Information. By “Personal Information” we mean information that can identify you, such as:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Information contained in any image, photograph or profile you choose to submit to us

Additionally, if your account requires billing information, we will also ask for:

  • Personal or business address, and
  • Credit card information (which you submit for payment purposes)

We do not collect any "special categories of personal data," as defined in the GDPR.

Our Services integrate with internet platforms which provide single sign-on functionality, including Slack, and if you choose to connect such an account to Balloon, then we will collect authentication information that permits us to connect to the account. We will also collect information from the account (such as your name and email address).

Certain aspects of the Services will also access certain features of your mobile device, including its camera, and collect information from those features, such as photographs.

You may always choose not to provide Personal Information or prevent Balloon from accessing certain features of your mobile device, but this may prevent you from receiving certain Services.

We also collect non-Personal Information, that is, information that does not personally identify an individual. The non-Personal Information we collect includes how you interact with the Services, information generally collected or “logged” by Internet websites or Internet services when accessed or used by users, and information about your web browser or device accessing or using the Services.

Examples of the non-Personal Information we collect are:

  • Your Internet Protocol (IP address),
  • Information about your operating system and browser, such as its maker or version
  • The pages of our website that you viewed during a visit or the features of the app you use
  • The city and state in which you are located (but not your precise geographic location), and
  • Unique Identifiers, meaning arbitrary codes or series of characters we create to identify unique users without Personal Information.

We will not use non-Personal Information to try to identify you, and if we associate any non-Personal Information with information that personally identifies you, then we will treat it as Personal Information. As discussed in more detail below, we sometimes use cookies and other automatic information gathering technologies to gather non-Personal Information.

Information collected by the Services may be collected by us or one of our service providers, but in either case, this Privacy Policy will govern the collection, use and sharing of the information.

3.     Use of Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

  • Assist us in providing the Services
  • Set up accounts
  • Improve online operations
  • Process transactions (credit card or other payment account information will only be used for this purpose)
  • Provide customer service
  • Provide you with newsletters, notifications and/or other communications or services which you have signed up for or otherwise agreed to receive
  • Send account- or transaction-related communications, such as welcome letters or notifications
  • Perform research and analysis aimed at improving our products and services, and
  • Manage our systems

We will only use your Personal Information in the way we specified when it was collected (including as described in this Privacy Policy). We do not use personal information to make automated decisions.

4.     Disclosure of Your Information

We will not disclose your Personal Information to third parties except as described below. We also will not sell or disclose your Personal Information to third parties for their own marketing purposes unless you have explicitly and affirmatively granted us permission to do so.

We will disclose Personal Information to provide the Services, which will be apparent when you use or access Balloon or when you authorize or instruct us to do so, for example when you choose to use the Services to transmit messages that are viewable by other users of the Services. We may also disclose Personal Information to companies, agents, contractors, service providers or others engaged to perform functions on our behalf (such as processing of payments, provision of data storage, hosting of our website, marketing of our products and services, conducting audits, and performing web analytics).

We will disclose Personal Information to the following third parties in order to provide the Services:

  • Amazon Web Services - for cloud computing services, upon which our Services are run
  • Intercom - for customer messaging, support, and engagement
  • SendGrid and Mandrill - for sending transactional emails (e.g., account notifications)

We may also disclose your Personal Information to third parties when we believe, in good faith and in our sole discretion, that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) enforce or apply the terms and conditions of the Services, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (b) comply with legal or regulatory requirements or an enforceable governmental request, (c) protect the rights, property or safety of us, our users or other third parties, (d) prevent a crime or protect national security, or (e) detect, prevent or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.

Finally, we reserve the right to transfer information (including your Personal Information) to a third party in the event of a sale, merger, or transfer of all or substantially all of the assets of our company relating to Balloon, or in the unlikely event of a bankruptcy, liquidation or receivership of our business. You will be notified via email or prominent notice on our website for 30 days of any such change in ownership or control of your Personal Information.

Lastly, we may also disclose non-Personal Information, anonymously aggregated with information about our other users, to our clients, business partners, merchants, advertisers, investors, potential buyers and other third parties if we deem such disclosure, in our sole discretion, to have sound business reasons or justifications.

5.     Cookies and Automatic Information Gathering Technologies

Every time you access our Services, or one of its web pages, we collect Non-Personal Information (discussed above in Section 2). To assist the Services in collecting and storing Non-Personal Information, we may a variety of technologies, including “Cookies,” local browser storage and “Web Beacons.” A “Cookie” is a small amount of data a website may store in your web browser that it can access when you visit it. A cookie also refers to web-browser-based storage provided by Adobe’s Flash plugin (a “Flash Cookie”). Cookies may contain user preferences, unique identifiers and other non-Personal Information. A “Web Beacon” is a small, usually-transparent image placed on a web page that allows us or our partners to collect non-Personal Information.

You can erase information stored in cookies, flash cookies, and local browser storage at any time, but you may be forced to login to the website again and you may lose some preferences or settings. You can also set your browser to refuse all website storage or to indicate when it is permitted, but some features of our Services may not function properly without it. We do not use Cookies, Web Beacons or similar technologies to store Personal Information.

Every time you open or use Balloon, we collect non-Personal Information (discussed above in Section 2). For example, using the Services may trigger the transmission of information between the app and our servers, and each time that occurs, our servers collect non-Personal Information.

Balloon also automatically collects information about how people use the Services. For example, to improve our Services, we collect how, when, and which parts of the app or its features you use, which internet services you connect to the app, and when, how, and what you post to Balloon through those services.

To help us collect this information, we use third-party software and services. Also, we may use your device’s unique identifier (UDID), media access control address (MAC Address), or other unique identifiers to assist us in collecting and analyzing this data.

6.     Transparency and Choice

When you use our Services, we make good faith efforts to provide you with access to your Personal Information and either to correct this data if it is inaccurate or to delete such data at your request, in either case if it is not otherwise required to be retained by law or for legitimate business purposes. We ask individual users to identify themselves and the information requested to be accessed, corrected or removed before processing such requests, and we may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive or systematic, require disproportionate technical effort, jeopardize the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backups), or for which access is not otherwise required. In any case, where we provide information access and correction, we perform this service free of charge, except if doing so would require a disproportionate effort.

Please e-mail us at privacy@getballoon.com with any questions, if you need assistance accessing or changing your Personal Information, or if you would like to have your Personal Information deleted. Please be aware that if you delete your Personal Information, you may not be able to continue to use Balloon or the Services. Also, even if you request that we delete your Personal Information, we may need to retain certain information for a limited period of time to satisfy our legal, audit and/or dispute resolution requirements.

We do not use, or allow third party advertising networks to use, information about web browsing activity collected through the Services for targeted or behavioral advertising. Balloon supports the development and implementation of a standard "do not track" browser feature that provides customers with control over the collection and use of information about their web-browsing activities. Once a standardized "do not track" feature is released, we intend to adhere to the browser settings accordingly.

You can opt out of receiving marketing e-mails from us by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link in the e-mails. Please note that it may take up to ten (10) business days for your opt-out request to be processed. Also, even if you opt of marketing e-mails, we may continue to send you certain account-related e-mails, such as notices about your account and confirmations of transactions you have requested.

7.     Information Security

We utilize reasonable information security measures to safeguard your Personal Information. For example, we utilize Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology when sensitive data is transmitted over the Internet, and use firewalls to help prevent external access into our network. Unfortunately, however, no data transmission over the Internet and no method of data storage can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee its security.

We restrict access to Personal Information to our employees, contractors, service providers and agents who need to know that information in order to operate, develop or improve our Services. These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.

8.     Your California Privacy Rights

A California resident who has provided personal information to a business with whom he/she has established a business relationship for personal, family, or household purposes (“California Customer”) is entitled to request information about whether the business has disclosed Personal Information to any third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. In general, if the business has made such a disclosure of Personal Information, upon receipt of a request by a California Customer, the business is required to provide a list of all third parties to whom Personal Information was disclosed in the preceding calendar year, as well as a list of the categories of Personal Information that were disclosed.

However, under the law, a business is not required to provide the above-described lists if the business adopts and discloses to the public (in its privacy policy) a policy of not disclosing customer’s Personal Information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes unless the customer first affirmatively agrees to the disclosure, as long as the business maintains and discloses this policy. Rather, the business may comply with the law by notifying the customer of his or her right to prevent disclosure of Personal Information to third parties for direct marketing purposes and providing a cost free means to exercise that right. To prevent disclosure of your Personal Information for use in direct marketing by a third party for its own purposes, do not opt in to or authorize such use when you provide Personal Information on Balloon. Please note that whenever you allow your Personal Information to be shared with a third party to communicate with you, your information will be subject to that third party’s privacy policy. If you later decide that you do not want that third party to use your information, you will need to contact the third party directly. You should always review the privacy policy of any party that collects your information to determine how that entity will handle your information.

California Customers may request further information about our compliance with California’s privacy law by e-mailing privacy@getballoon.com. Please note that we are only required to respond to one request per customer each year, and we are not required to respond to requests made by means other than through this e-mail address.

9.     Third Party Websites

The Services may link or integrate with third party sites, services or apps.   We are not responsible for the privacy or security policies or practices or the content of such third parties. Accordingly, we encourage you to review the privacy and security policies and terms of service of those third parties so that you understand how those websites collect, use, share and protect your information.

10.  Changes to this Policy

We may modify or update this Privacy Policy periodically with or without prior notice by posting the updated policy on this page. You can always check the “Last Updated” date at the top of this document to see when the Privacy Policy was last changed. If we make any material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will notify you by e-mail or post a notice of the changes on our website or through our mobile app prior to the changes becoming effective. We encourage you to check this Privacy Policy from time to time. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO FUTURE CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY, YOU MUST STOP USING BALLOON AND SERVICES AFTER THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF SUCH CHANGES (WHICH IS THE “LAST UPDATED” DATE).

11.  Data Protection Officer

Balloon has appointed an internal data protection officer for you to contact if you have any questions or concerns about our personal data policies or practices. Our data protection officer’s name and contact information are as follows:

Noah Bornstein
Balloon, Inc.
268 Bush St. #3936
San Francisco, CA 94104
Email: privacy@getballoon.com

12.  Questions

To ask questions about our Privacy Policy, submit a user access request (i.e., a Subject Access Request, or "SAR"), or to lodge a complaint, contact us at:

Balloon, Inc.
268 Bush St. #3936
San Francisco, CA 94104
Email: privacy@getballoon.com

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