Pledge of Privacy

Our founding principles

Rapportive integrates with your email, and we understand that this carries a great responsibility. We respect the fact that your email may contain very personal or sensitive information, and we will do everything we can to make sure that it is safe.

That's why we don't just have a privacy policy; we have a pledge of privacy. It's our promise that we will always respect your privacy. We've tried to make it absolutely clear, open and readable, but if you have any questions or concerns at all, please drop us an email.

Please note that this document may change from time to time, to clarify wording or to reflect new features in Rapportive. However, the following principles will not change.

  • Your trust is the most precious thing we have, and we will never betray you.
  • We want you to be in control of your own information.
  • We clearly separate what is public and what is private.
  • We will be very transparent and explain clearly what we do with your information.
  • We will never spam you, and never allow others to spam you.

Where we get data from

Where does Rapportive get its data from?

We combine information from several sources; at the moment, these are Google Profiles, Gravatar, LinkedIn, Plancast, Rapleaf, Stack Overflow and Twitter, as well as thousands of organisations' public websites. In the future we will offer integration with many more data sources, both public (e.g. social networking sites) and private (e.g. your address book and your CRM system).

We make a clear distinction between:

  • Public data, which is information that users have chosen to make public on the internet, and which anyone could find on one of the major search engines. We aggregate public data, take into account corrections and feedback, and show this information to everyone who uses Rapportive.
  • Private data, which is privileged information to which only you have access. In order to provide the Rapportive service, we may need to process this data behind the scenes; however, private data will never be shown or disclosed to any other Rapportive user or any third party (unless you explicitly ask us to share it).

What if Rapportive shows incorrect or inappropriate information?

We make an effort to show you information which is up-to-date and accurate, but we're not perfect and cannot guarantee accuracy. Someone might have deliberately entered false information on a website from which we source data, or we might have simply got our processing wrong.

If you see data which is inaccurate, abusive or otherwise objectionable, we want you to be able to correct it. You can edit much of your information directly from within Rapportive. For other changes, please send us corrections by email and we will deal with them promptly.

If you are making important decisions about people, such as job or loan applications, please do not rely on Rapportive without convincing yourself via independent sources that the information is accurate and relevant.

What we do with data

What does Rapportive do with the data I enter?

What we do with your information depends on the type of information:

  • Data which is private to you (e.g. notes about a contact) is stored securely on our servers. It may be processed by us as part of the routine operations of Rapportive, but it is never shared with any third party (unless you explicitly ask us to).
  • If you edit your own public profile, we will make sure that everybody who views your profile on Rapportive is shown your updated profile. This enables you to take control of your own information.
  • If you edit someone else's public profile, we will show the updated information to you; we may then process the information to determine whether we should also show it to others. This allows us to maintain a high quality of data.

Whenever you enter data, we will make clear what type it is. Independently of the types of data, there are certain things we will never do:

  • We will never use your data to contact anybody without explicit instructions from you.
  • We will never disclose, sell or give away contact details to anybody who might use them to contact people without your permission.

Sharing with third parties

Does Rapportive disclose information to anyone else?

We will never sell, rent or give away private data about you or your contacts. Our business is in making your inbox more powerful, not in selling databases.

In order to search for details about a contact, we need to send pieces of contact information (e.g. an email address) to our servers; in order to search for public information about that person on the internet, we may need to pass that information on to third-party services (data providers). We vet their privacy policies to ensure they meet the same high standards as ours.

We may use the data about your contacts to check whether our publicly available information is accurate, and correct it if necessary. For example, if we got someone's name wrong, we may use the name under which they send emails as a reference. If we find a mistake or omission in publicly available data, we may notify the original source of the information so that they can also correct their records.

The following things are never shared with anyone, unless you explicitly choose to do so:

  • your notes;
  • the subject and contents of your emails;
  • who you are communicating with.

Just one exception to the above: like all trustworthy companies, we will disclose information if required by law or court order.

Confidentiality

Will Rapportive read my email?

Rapportive will never read your email without your explicit permission.

If you do give us that permission, we will only use it to identify information in your email that is useful to you. The contents of your email will not be sent to our servers, and we will never store it anywhere.

We never see your Gmail password, so there is no risk of your sensitive communications being compromised.

Services requiring additional access

Some of our services need to access more of your data than others. These services will be opt-in. Before you opt-in to a service which requires additional access, we will explain in clear words what we will do with your information, and you will have a clear choice whether you want to allow it.

Cookies & tracking

Does Rapportive use cookies?

Like almost all websites today, Rapportive uses cookies to determine whether you are logged in on your computer. Because of the nature of Rapportive's service, this cookie identifies you personally; without this identification, we would not be able to provide the Rapportive service.

Does Rapportive track what I do?

We never see anything else you do on the web outside of your email.

We do track the data you see in Rapportive and how you interact with it. We never disclose tracking data about individuals, but we use it in an anonymised and aggregated form to inform us about how Rapportive is being used, and what we could do to make it better.

Security

How secure are Rapportive's systems?

Our founders have, between them, over 12 years of experience with software security. We take security into account at all times, both in building our software and in our operating procedures.

Rapportive is hosted by our friends at Heroku, who ensure that our servers are always kept up-to-date with security updates. The servers are provided by Amazon Web Services, who employ in-depth security measures — they even keep the location of the data-centres secret.

Rapportive employees use private keys and other secure methods to access our servers, and are bound by strict contractual obligations to safeguard our users' data at all times and to comply with this pledge of privacy.

Please note that, because we never see your Gmail password, the contents of your email would remain secure even in the unlikely event that our servers were compromised. However, we do take every precaution to safeguard any sensitive private data that we do store.

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