Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how Contrastly collects, uses and discloses information, and what choices you have with respect to the information.

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Contrastly, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information only for as long as we have a reason to keep it or to comply with laws and regulations.
  • We aim for transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Contrastly’s Promise

Our mission to help photographers improve their craft is rooted in the importance we place on establishing trust with our visitors, readers, customers, and the photography community as a whole. To earn and maintain that trust, we commit to communicating transparently, providing security, and protecting the privacy of data on our systems.

We keep your personal information personal and private. We will not sell or otherwise disclose your personal information to anyone except as necessary to provide our services or as otherwise described in this Policy without first providing you with notice and the opportunity to consent.

Definitions

Throughout this Privacy Policy you will come across terms that might need some explaining. Here’s a list of terms below. We hope this helps you better understand the technologies, our role, and the types of data that are mentioned in this Privacy Policy.

  • Personal Data: Personal Data means data about a living individual who can be identified from those data (or from those and other information either in our possession or likely to come into our possession).
  • Usage Data: Usage Data is data collected automatically either generated by the use of the Service or from the Service infrastructure itself (for example, the duration of a page visit).
  • Cookies: Cookies are small pieces of data stored on a User’s device.
  • Data Controller: Data Controller means a natural or legal person who (either alone or jointly or in common with other persons) determines the purposes for which and the manner in which any personal data are, or are to be, processed. For the purpose of this Privacy Policy, we are a Data Controller of your data.
  • Data Processors (or Service Providers): Data Processor (or Service Provider) means any natural or legal person who processes the data on behalf of the Data Controller. We may use the services of various Service Providers in order to process your data more effectively.
  • Data Subject: Data Subject is any living individual who is the subject of Personal Data.
  • User: The User is the individual using our Service. The User corresponds to the Data Subject, who is the subject of Personal Data.

Information Collection And Use

We collect various types of information for different purposes to provide and improve our Service to you. Below are the types of Data collected:

  • Personal Data: While using our Service, we may ask you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify you (“Personal Data”). Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to: Email address, Name, Address, State, Province, ZIP/Postal code, and City. We require a User’s Email address, Name, Address, State, Province, ZIP/Postal code, and City for the sole purpose of completing a purchase transaction which is always initiated by the User. We require a User’s Email Address when a User subscribes to the Contrastly email newsletter (from which Users can unsubscribe at any time.)
  • Usage Data: We may also collect information how the Service is accessed and used (“Usage Data”). This Usage Data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data. Regarding IP addresses: in an effort to keep our User’s data safe, we have systems in place to pseudonymize IP addresses (replacing the last digits of IP addresses with zeros, to ensure that IP addresses cannot be tied to any unique individual).
  • Tracking & Cookies Data: We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on our Service and hold certain information. Cookies are files with small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your device. You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Service.

Use of Data

We use the collected data for various purposes:

  • To provide and maintain our Service
  • To notify you about changes to our Service
  • To allow you to participate in interactive features of our Service when you choose to do so
  • To provide customer support
  • To gather analysis or valuable information so that we can improve our Service
  • To monitor the usage of our Service
  • To detect, prevent and address technical issues
  • To provide you with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless you have opted not to receive such information.

Retention of Data

We will retain your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.

We will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of our Service, or we are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.

Transfer Of Data

Your information, including Personal Data, may be transferred to – and maintained on – computers located outside of your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from your jurisdiction.

We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and no transfer of your Personal Data will take place to an organization or a country unless there are adequate controls in place including the security of your data and other personal information.

Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by your submission of such information represents your agreement to that transfer.

Disclosure Of Data

Business Transaction: If we are involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, your Personal Data may be transferred. We will provide notice before your Personal Data is transferred and becomes subject to a different Privacy Policy.

Disclosure for Law Enforcement: Under certain circumstances, we may be required to disclose your Personal Data if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g. a court or a government agency).

Security Of Data

The security of your data is extremely important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Data, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

Legal Basis for Processing Personal Data Under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are from the European Economic Area (EEA), Contrastly’s legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described in this Privacy Policy depends on the Personal Data we collect and the specific context in which we collect it.

Contrastly may process your Personal Data because:

  • We need to perform a contract with you
  • You have given us permission to do so
  • The processing is in our legitimate interests and it’s not overridden by your rights
  • For payment processing purposes
  • To comply with the law

Your Data Protection Rights Under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are a resident of the European Economic Area (EEA), you have certain data protection rights. Contrastly aims to take reasonable steps to allow you to correct, amend, delete, or limit the use of your Personal Data.

If you wish to be informed what Personal Data we hold about you and if you want it to be removed from our systems, please contact us.

In certain circumstances, you have the following data protection rights:

  • The right to access, update or to delete the information we have on you.
  • The right of rectification. You have the right to have your information rectified if that information is inaccurate or incomplete.
  • The right to object. You have the right to object to our processing of your Personal Data.
  • The right of restriction. You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal information.
  • The right to data portability. You have the right to be provided with a copy of your Personal Data in a structured, machine-readable and commonly used format.
  • The right to withdraw consent. You also have the right to withdraw your consent at any time.

Please note that we may ask you to verify your identity before responding to such requests. We are committed to providing you with the information requested within 30 days of such request.

Service Providers

We may employ third party companies and individuals to facilitate our Service (“Service Providers”), to provide the Service on our behalf, to perform Service-related services or to assist us in analyzing how our Service is used.

These third parties have access to your Personal Data only to perform these tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.

Analytics

We may use third-party Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service.

  • WordPress Jetpack Stats: Jetpack is a WordPress plugin offered by Automattic that offers website owners a myriad of tools. The only tool we use that is part of the Jetpack plugin is Jetpack Stats. Jetpack Stats uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. For more information on the privacy practices of Automattic, please visit Automattic’s Privacy Policy web page. We do no use any other analytics tracking software or application.
  • Google Analytics: We use Google Analytics to track general usage statistics as well as movement of visitors on our website. We do not, and nor does Google Analytics, store any personally identifiable information. Your IP address is automatically anonymized, and the analytics cookies expire after 28 days.

Payments

We may provide paid products and/or services within the Service. In that case, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).

We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information is governed by their own Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. PCI requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information. You can read more about PCI compliance here.

The payment processors we work with are:

  • PayPal: Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
  • Stripe: Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.

Both Paypal and Stripe are integrated with our ecommerce platform, SendOwl. We use SendOwl to offer our customers an easy way to shop on our website, process orders and payments, as well as deliver digital files to our customers. SendOwl keeps a record of each transaction. This data, like every other types of data that we collect at Contrastly, is never shared nor sold to anyone. SendOwl does not store full credit card details. We also use SendOwl for accounting purposes.

Hosting

  • Vultr Hosting: Our website is hosted on a dedicated server instance at Vultr. We have made every possible effort to ensure that we do not keep track of any personally identifiable information. IP addresses recorded by our server are pseudonymized (our server automatically discards the last digits of IP addresses).
  • StackPath: StackPath provides Contrastly with a robust content delivery network which allows us to serve static website assets such as images, CSS, HTML, and Javascript across the world (so our website loads faster by loading resources closer to your location). This allows us to provide website visitors with a faster experience. StackPath does not store any personally identifiable information.

Email Marketing and Newsletter

  • ConvertKit: ConvertKit is our preferred email newsletter platform (ESP). We use ConvertKit to deliver our email newsletters to our email subscribers along with relevant and time sensitive content, promotions, and news. We require a double opt-in consent via ConvertKit (we are committed to being CASL and CAN-SPAM compliant). Subscribing to the Contrastly newsletter requires the user/subscriber to click a confirmation link in an initial email which records consent. An unsubscribe link is placed at the bottom of every single email we send out via Drip along with our company mailing address. When a user clicks the unsubscribe link, they are automatically removed from our email list.
  • Amazon SES: Amazon Simple Email Service is the platform we use to deliver our transactional emails such as order confirmation emails, welcome emails, and password resets emails. Those emails are always in relation to a business transaction (i.e., a customer purchasing an item from our online store). Emails delivered via the Amazon SES platform are not subscriptions, rather they are one-time emails sent in response to users/customers explicitly requesting information (such as a password reset).

Links To Other Sites

Our Service may contain links to other sites that are not operated by us. If you click on a third party link, you will be directed to that third party’s site. We strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy of every site you visit.

We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.

Children’s Privacy

Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 18 (“Children”).

We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Children has provided us with Personal Data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected Personal Data from children without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us by using the contact information we provide on our Contact page.

Our main email address is hello@contrastly.com.

Effective: May 25, 2018