What follows is a plain-language summary of our privacy policies.
A full “legalese” version is still pending, but we hope this will answer your most common questions & concerns.
We collect anonymous visitor information before you signup/login (pages visited, rough location, browser type, and other analytics). This information is sent to our “privacy-friendly” analytics platform Plausible.
On signing up, we also collect your email address. We never share your email address with 3rd parties, except for the two services we use to communicate with you (Mailerlite for newsletters & SendGrid for ‘forgot password’ emails and the like).
If you opt-in to receive newsletters when signing up, we’ll send you a “welcome sequence” of emails (around 6 of them). We’ll also send you product updates (every couple months, or even less frequently). Unsubscribing is a one-click process.
NOTE: We used to have an “opt-out” approach in the past, because the gaps between emails were often of a year or more. If you receive an email from us that you didn’t want or expect, the fastest way to prevent that is to click the Unsubscribe link in that email.
We will never access, view, or sell anything you write on the platform.
We may ask for your permission to do access your documents if, for example, it would help us to provide you customer support. But you do not need to grant it, and we have tools in place to help you without viewing your writing.
We use LogRocket to track what features you use, and to see where people are getting stuck/confused. ALL your writing (even document titles) is masked in this case, and we do not (and cannot) use it to see what is written. Nor is it sent or stored anywhere except inside our secure database.
Even though your connection to gingkowriter.com is fully encrypted, the data stored (securely, privately) on the server is not encrypted.
This is a deliberate choice: full end-to-end encryption is a risky protocol to implement even for messaging apps, where all you’re losing is message history. Using end-to-end encryption for important documents is rare for a reason : if you lose your encryption key, no one will be able to retrieve your work (not even the server administrators). We believe that in most cases, it’s safer to keep the data unencrypted (but still in a secure database, accessible only to our team).
We use Stripe.com as our payment processor. At no point are we able to see your payment details, nor are they ever sent to/stored on our servers. We can see what payment type was used (Visa, MasterCard, WePay, etc), and a few card details (last 4 digits, issuing country, etc), but not the full information.