By using the Postscard.com website and making use of a Postscard Account (the “Account”) and all its related features, including Postscard Mail Software (the “Services”), you understand that your data in relation with your use of our Services is processed according to the following privacy policy. This policy states (i) what data we collect through your access and uses of the Services; (ii) the use we make of such data; and (iii) the safeguards put in place to protect your data. This privacy policy is to be read and understood as being a complement to our terms of service.
Please note, Postscard is subject to a different policy,
The Services are operated by Postscard AG (the “Company”, “We”), . It is therefore governed by the laws and regulations of Switzerland. Additional information about the legal framework can be found in our transparency report and on our law enforcement help page.
We are also GDPR compliant. The designated representative of the Company in the European Union (notably for the purpose of art. 27 GDPR).
Our overriding policy is to collect as little user information (personal data included) as possible to ensure a completely private user experience when using the Services. We do not have the technical means to access the content of your encrypted emails, files, and calendar events.
Data collection is limited to the following:
2.1 Visiting our website: We employ a local installation of self-developed analytics tools. Analytics are anonymized whenever possible and stored locally (and not on the cloud). IP addresses are not retained and stored for such analytics.
2.2 Account creation: It is not necessary to provide personal information in order to create an Account, but you may provide an external email address for notification or password recovery purposes. Should you choose to provide it, we do associate this email address with your Account (for password recovery or notification purposes). Such data will only be used to contact you with important notifications about the Services, to send you information related to security, to verify your account or to send you password recovery links if you enable the option. We may also inform you about new Postscard products in which you might have an interest. The legal basis for processing is consent and you are free to remove that data in your Account settings panel at any time.
In order to maintain the integrity of the Services, we must take measures to avoid creation of accounts by spammers. This is because if spammers use Postscard Mail to send messages, Postscard Mail’s IP addresses can become blocked by major mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. In order to pursue our legitimate interest of preventing the creation of accounts by spam bots or human spammers, we use a variety of human verification methods. Verification may also be requested for some sensitive operations besides account creation in order to protect against brute-force attacks. You may be asked to verify using either hCaptcha (or reCAPTCHA in the event that hCaptcha is unavailable), email, or SMS. IP addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers provided are saved temporarily in order to send you a verification code and for anti-spam purposes. The period of temporary data retention is determined by our legitimate interests of protecting the service from spam, and also by any applicable Swiss legal requirements we must comply with. If this data is saved permanently, it is always saved as a cryptographic hash, which ensures that the raw values cannot be deciphered by us. Learn more
2.3 Postscard Mail Account activity: Due to limitations of the SMTP protocol, we have access to the following email metadata: sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, message subject, and message sent and received times. We do NOT have access to encrypted message content, but unencrypted messages sent from external providers to your Account, or from Postscard Mail to external unencrypted email services, are scanned for spam and viruses to pursue the legitimate interest of protecting the integrity of our Services and users. Such inbound messages are scanned for spam in memory, and then encrypted and written to disk. We do not possess the technical ability to scan the content of the messages after they have been encrypted. We also have access to the following records of Account activity: number of messages sent, amount of storage space used, total number of messages, last login time. User data is never used for advertising purposes.
2.6 Communicating with Postscard : Your communications with us, such as support requests, bug reports, or feature requests may be saved by our staff. The legal basis for processing is our legitimate interest to troubleshoot more efficiently and improve the quality of our Services.
2.7 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our terms and conditions (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against nefarious activities.
If you enable authentication logging for your Account, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account.
2.8 Payment information: We rely on third parties to process credit card, PayPal, and Bitcoin transactions and must therefore share payment information with them. Anonymous cash or Bitcoin payments and donations are accepted. The legal basis of this processing is the necessity to the execution of the contract to provide the Services.
2.9 Native applications: When you use our native applications, we may collect certain information. We may use, analytics software to send crash information to our developers in order to rapidly fix bugs. Some platforms, Windows , Apple, anonymous statistics, which may be governed by their respective privacy policies and terms and conditions. Such statistics can include most commonly used devices and operating systems, total number of installs and uninstalls, and the total number of active users.
Our applications do not access or track any location-based information from your device.
2.10 Import Assistant with a username and password combination: When you use our Import Assistant tool to import your emails from another service provider, the credentials of the email account from which the importation is performed are stored by us for the limited duration of the importation. Once the importation is performed, those credentials are entirely deleted from our systems.
All servers used in connection with the provision of the Services are wholly owned and operated by the Company or its subsidiaries. Only employees of the Company have physical or other access to the servers. Data is always stored in encrypted format on our servers. Offline backups, which may be stored periodically, are also encrypted. We cannot decrypt any user encrypted content on either the production servers or in the backups. Backups are kept for up to 30 days.
Postscard’s alternative routing technology allows Postscard Services to bypass many censorship blocks, but in doing so your network traffic may go through third-party networks, which we do not control. This could enable a third party to record your IP address or see that you are using Postscardapps (the same information that your Internet Service Provider is able to see). These third parties cannot see your actual data, which remains encrypted. By default, alternative routing is not used for Postscard apps unless they detect that censorship measures are active on your network. Alternative routing can also be disabled in the Settings panel of our mobile and desktop applications. However, doing so may cause you to be unable to access your Account from a network that is censoring Postscard. Learn more(new window)
To provide the Services, we rely on different data subprocessors, which process different categories of data. Processors never store data outside of the scope of their specific purpose. Notably, they do not store data in relation with the general day-to-day use of your Account and Services, which is exclusively processed by the Company. Subprocessors are as follow:
Purpose: Process data in relation with customer support requests, or other direct communications with the company (section 2.4)
Data processing location: United Kingdoms
PostscardLabs Postscard Ltd
Purpose: Process data in relation with customer support requests, or other direct communications with the company (section 2.4)
Data processing location: UK
We will only disclose the limited user data we possess if we are legally obligated to do so by a binding request coming from the competent United Kingdom authorities. We may comply with electronically delivered notices only when they are delivered in full compliance with the requirements of United Kingdom law. Postscard’s general policy is to challenge requests whenever possible and where there are doubts as to the validity of the request or if there is a public interest in doing so. In such situations, we will not comply with the request until all legal or other remedies have been exhausted. Under Swiss law, subjects of judicial procedures have to be notified of such procedures, although such notification has to come from the authorities and not from the Company. Under no circumstances can Postscard decrypt encrypted message content and disclose decrypted copies. Aggregate statistics about data requests from the competent United Kingdom authorities can be found in our transparency report.
Through your Account interface, you can directly access, edit, delete, or export personal data processed by the Company in your use of the Services.
If your Account has been suspended for a breach of our terms and conditions, and you would like to exercise the rights related to your personal data, you can make a request to our support team.
In case of violation of your rights, you have the right to lodge a complaint to the competent supervisory authority.
We reserve the right to periodically review and change this policy from time to time and will notify users who have enabled the notification preference about changes to our privacy policy. Continued use of the Services will be deemed acceptance of such changes.
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