Last updated: 19 December, 2022
In this policy, we lay out: what data we collect and why; how your data is handled; and your rights with respect to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will. This policy applies to all products built and maintained by HMCK Group Ltd.
Our principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:
When you sign up for TypeEngine, we ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a company name. That’s so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you product updates and other essential information. We may also send you optional surveys from time to time to help us understand how you use our products and to make improvements. With your consent, we will send you our newsletter and other updates. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products. We’ll never sell your personal information to third parties, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.
If you sign up for a paid TypeEngine plan, you will be asked to provide your payment information and billing address. Credit card information is submitted directly to our payment processor and doesn’t hit our servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number, for purposes of account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address so we can charge you for service, calculate any sales tax due, send you invoices, and detect fraudulent credit card transactions. We occasionally use aggregate billing information to guide our marketing efforts.
We store on our servers the content that you upload or receive or maintain in your TypeEngine account. This is so you can use our products as intended, for example, to save generated content or see past prompt inputs. We keep this content as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we’ll delete the content within 60 days.
For most of our products, we log the full IP address used to sign up a product account and retain that for use in mitigating future spammy signups. We also log all account access by full IP address for security and fraud prevention purposes, and we keep this login data for as long as your product account is active.
We collect information about your browsing activity for analytics and statistical purposes such as conversion rate testing and experimenting with new product designs. This includes, for example, your browser and operating system versions, your IP address, which web pages you visited and how long they took to load, and which website referred you to us. If you have an account and are signed in, these web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account until your account is no longer active. The web analytics we use are described further in the Advertising and Cookies section.
We use third-party CAPTCHA services across our applications to mitigate brute force logins as a means of spam protection. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our apps and the broader Internet community from credential stuffing attacks and spam. When you log into your account and when you fill in certain forms, the CAPTCHA service evaluates various information (e.g., IP address, how long the visitor has been on the app, mouse movements) to try to detect if the activity is from an automated program instead of a human. We retain these data via our subprocessor indefinitely for use in spam mitigation.
TypeEngine runs contextual ads on various third-party platforms such as Google, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Users who click on one of our ads will be sent to the TypeEngine marketing site. Where permissible under law, we may load an ad-company script on their browsers that sets a third-party cookie and sends information to the ad network to enable evaluation of the effectiveness of our ads, e.g., which ad they clicked and which keyword triggered the ad, and whether they performed certain actions such as clicking a button or submitting a form. We also use persistent first-party cookies and some third-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and perform A/B testing as well as support some analytics. A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings and accept or block individual cookies in your browser settings, although our apps won’t work and other aspects of our service may not function properly if you turn cookies off.
When you email TypeEngine with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including your email address, so that we have a history of past correspondence to reference if you reach out in the future. We also store information you may volunteer, for example, written responses to surveys. If you agree to a customer interview, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We will only do so with your express consent.
We use some third-party subprocessors to help run our applications and provide the Services to you. You can view the third-party subprocessors here. We also use third-party processors for other business functions such as managing newsletter subscriptions, sending customer surveys, and providing our company storefront. You can view the list at Company processors.
We may share your information at your direction if you integrate a third-party service into your use of our products. For example, we may allow you, at your option, to connect your Gmail account to your TypeEngine account so that you can use Gmail to login. No TypeEngine human looks at your content except for limited purposes with your express permission, for example, if an error occurs that stops an automated process from working and requires manual intervention to fix. These are rare cases, and when they happen, we look for root cause solutions as much as possible to avoid them recurring. We may also access your data if required in order to respond to legal process (see “When required under applicable law” below).
Where permissible by law and if you have a TypeEngine account, we may share a one-way hash of your email address with ad companies to exclude you from seeing our ads.
If at any point we need to access your content to help you with a support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.
Accessing a customer’s account when investigating potential abuse is a measure of last resort. We want to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us, and we do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will take action as necessary, including notifying appropriate authorities where warranted.
HMCK Group Ltd. trading as TypeEngine is a UK company and all data infrastructure are located in the EU.
Finally, if TypeEngine is acquired by or merges with another company — we don’t plan on that, but if it happens — we’ll notify you well before any of your personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
At TypeEngine, we strive to apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Some of these rights include:
If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at [email protected] or at 63 Fordham House, Clopton Road Stratford Upon Avon CV37 6UE. If an authorized agent is corresponding on your behalf, we will need written consent with a signature from the account holder before proceeding. If you are in the EU or UK, you can contact your data protection authority to file a complaint or learn more about local privacy laws.
All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. In addition, we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest. For more information about how we keep your information secure, please review our security overview. Most data are not encrypted while they live in our database (since they need to be ready to send to you when you need them). Every field containing personal data is encrypted with its own key. The disks storing the data keys are encrypted as well. Our servers decrypt the data to send it to you when you need it.
In many of our applications, we give you the option to delete content. Anything you delete in your product accounts while they are active will be kept in an accessible trash can for about 25 days (it varies a little by product). After that time, the trashed content cannot be accessed via the application and we are not able to retrieve it for you. The trashed content may remain on our active servers for another 30 days, and copies of the content may be held in backups of our application databases for up to another 30 days after that. Altogether, any content trashed in your product accounts should be purged from all of our systems and logs within 90 days. If you choose to cancel your account, your content will become immediately inaccessible and should be purged from our systems in full within 60 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-cancelled accounts. Please refer to our Cancellation policy for more details.
Our products and other web properties are operated in the UK. We store data in a GDPR compliant fashion and do not transfer first party data outside of the UK. If you are based in mainland EU or in the US please note that your information will be transferred to the UK.
We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify users. Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch by emailing us at and we’ll be happy to try to answer them!
Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0
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