Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 25, 2024

Summary: your privacy is important to Avad Solutions. We abide by these fundamental principles:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we need it to run our Products or Services.
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our Products or Services.
• We don’t store payment information on our servers ever.
• We strive for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Avad Solutions operates avadsoltions.org. It is Avad Solutions policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our website.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so. For example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: 1) when you provide information to us through forms on our site, 2) and when signing up for our Products or Services.

Information You Provide to Us

We collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

• Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us (a subscription to a Avad Solutions Product, for example) you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information. No payment information is ever stored on our servers.
• Communications With Us: You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our team about a support question, or join one of our email lists.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Products and Services such as information about what happens when you use our Products or Services (e.g., page views, actions taken, interactions with other parts of our Products or Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to (for example) provide our Products and Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Products and Services so we can optimize them. We use Google Analytics to collect this information.
• Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to (for example) calculate how many people visit avadsolutions.org from certain geographic regions.
• Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Avad Solutions uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Products and Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. Avad Solutions visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Avad Solutions’ website, or visit Avad Solutions using an incognito or private browsing window, with the drawback that certain features of Avad Solutions’ website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

The cookies we use are:

Cookie provider	Purpose
Google Analytics	understanding how visitors browse and use avadsolutions.org
Google Search Console	understanding how users search for keywords related to avadconsulting.org and how Google crawls and indexes content from avadsolutions.org

• To find out more on how to manage and delete cookies, visit aboutcookies.org. For more details on your choices regarding use of your web browsing activity for interest-based advertising visit youronlinechoices.eu (EU based) or optout.aboutads.info (US based). On a mobile device, you may also be to adjust your settings to limit ad tracking.
• You can opt out of Google Analytics by installing Google’s opt-out browser add-on.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

At this time, we do not get information about you from other sources.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Products and Services (for example, backup and restore your website, or charge you for any of our paid Products or Services);
• To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Products and Services, which helps us improve them and make them easier to use;
• To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition. For example, we may analyze how many individuals purchased a membership after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Products and Services after a certain length of time;
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our Products and Services, protect the security of our Products and Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Avad Solutions and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Products and Services;
• To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by Avad Solutions and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on Avad Solutions and our Products and Services; and
• To personalize your experience using our Products and Services, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have a particular membership with us or have been our user for a certain length of time), and serve relevant advertisements.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account–for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid service; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on if you are in the EU.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

• Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide you with our Products and Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
• Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Products and Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you), those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Products and Services (like analytics providers), and companies that extend our Products and Services (such as Email Service Providers), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We only select vendors with robust privacy commitments as a prerequisite for sharing information with them.
• Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.
• To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Avad Solutions, third parties, or the public at large.
• Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Avad Solutions goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
• Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Products and Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
• Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like comments on avadsolutions.org, posts, and other content that you make public via Avad Solutions, are all available to others.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to avadsolutions.org such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to our website and investigate issues if something goes wrong on our website.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Products and Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Products and Services (for example, usage of accounts or communications) may not be accessible.
• Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about Products and Services you have purchased and legal notices.
• Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, Avad Solutions does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Products and Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using the Avad Solutions website, with the drawback that certain features of the Avad Solutions website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Your Rights

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

If you want to access, correct, or delete your personal data or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, email us using this form or via physical mail at the address below.

Avad Solutions
[ADDRESS]

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

US Privacy Laws

Laws in some US states require us to provide residents with additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. You’ll find that information in this section (if you are a California resident, please note that this is the Notice at Collection we are required to provide you under California law).

In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information, depending on the Products or Services used:

• Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
• Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
• Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us or you may choose to voluntarily disclose your race or veteran status as part of your job application);
• Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services, like the actions you take as an administrator of a WordPress.com or WordPress.org site);
• Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
• Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one);
• Professional or employment-related information (for example, your company and team information if you are a Happy Tools user, or information you provide in a job application); and
• Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

If you are a job applicant, we may have also collected:

• Education information, such as the education you disclose in your job application.

In some US states you have additional rights subject to any exemptions provided by your state’s respective law, including the right to:

• Request a copy of the specific pieces of information we collect about you and, if you’re in California, to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, and the categories of third parties we share it with;
• Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Request correction of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information;
• Receive a copy of your information in a readily portable format; and
• Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights.

If you want to access, correct, or delete your personal data or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, email us using this form or via physical mail at the address below.

Avad Solutions
[ADDRESS]

Other Things You Should Know

Third Party Software

If you’d like to use third-party plugins or other third-party software such as that of your Email Service Provider, please keep in mind that when you interact with them you may provide information about yourself (or your site visitors, or your customers, or your subscribers) to those third parties. We don’t own or control these third parties and they have their own rules about collection, use and sharing of information, which you should review.

Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Avad Solutions may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Avad Solutions’ sole discretion. Avad Solutions encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

This Privacy Policy is adapted from that of Automattic, published under Creative Commons Sharealike License.