Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At HouseGuide App, 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 for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your Digital Guide is shared publicly, indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
• We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

Howdy! We are the folks behind a variety of products and services designed to allow anyone to build and manage a Digital Guide to share with the world. Our mission is to enable a better communication between Hosts and Guests for short rental properties listed on platforms such as Airbnb, Booking, HomeAway, etc.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our website (including houseguideapp.com, houseguide.me, houseguide.app);
• Our mobile applications (including the HouseGuide mobile app for Android and iOS);
• Our other HouseGuide App products and services that are available on or through our websites; and
• Other users’ Digital Guides that use our Services, while you are logged in to your account with us.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, Digital Guides and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy. Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

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: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that 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:

• Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a HouseGuideApp.com account to provide an email address along with name, and that’s it.
• Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a HouseGuideApp.com account, any information you put into your Digital Guide, such as a photo, video or text content. Your public Digital Guide information is just that–public–so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include. We recommend reading our User Guidelines before setting up your Digital Guide.
• Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us–a subscription to a HouseGuideApp.com plan, 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.
• Ecommerce Digital Guide Information: If you use our ecommerce Services to sell products or services to others through your Digital Guide, you may provide us with information about your financial account to set up a payments integration, such as the email address for your Stripe or PayPal account or your bank account information.
• Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about your Digital Guide. For example, if you create a feature that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet, since your Digital Guide is published publicly. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!

• Communications with Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Support Staff about a support question, post a question about your Digital Guide in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services–for example, when you create or make changes to your Digital Guide on HouseGuideApp.com.
• Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that site administrators and users perform on a site using our HouseGuideApp.com services–in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a Digital Guide (e.g., [HouseGuideApp.com username] deleted “[title of feature]” at [time/date]). As another example, our tracker tracks information like your email address, Digital Guide settings, and other features for your Digital Guide, along with information about your Digital Guide, such as the aggregate number of views and unique guest access. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, support document searches at HouseGuideApp.com, features enabled for your Digital Guide, interactions with our Support and other parts of our 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 Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
• 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 our Services 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. HouseGuide App uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

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 Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your Digital Guide, backup and restore your Digital Guide, charge you for any of our paid Services;
• To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their Digital Guides more efficiently;
• To monitor and analyse trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services 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 analyse how many individuals purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of HouseGuide App and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
• To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by HouseGuide App and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on HouseGuide App and our products; and
• To personalise your experience using our Services, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have a particular plan 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 fulfil 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 plan; 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 personalise your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent--for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyse them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

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 our 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 Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyse 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 Services (like analytics providers).
• Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
• 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 HouseGuide App, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• 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 HouseGuide App 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 Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customised 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 your Property’s videos, features, house rules, local recommendations and other content that you make public on your Digital Guide, are all available to others who access your Digital Guide’s Link-for example, the video that you upload to your Digital Guide. 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 one of HouseGuide App’s Digital Guides, 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, analyse traffic to HouseGuide App’s Digital Guides and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our Digital Guides.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorised access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our 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 Services–for example, paid plans will 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 your account and legal notices.
• Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, HouseGuide App does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using HouseGuide App’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of HouseGuide App’s Digital Guides may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services :( :( :( :(, you can close your account (for example, here for HouseGuideApp.com accounts). Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above--for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

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.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us. EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because HouseGuide App’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above.

Visitors to Our Users’ Digital Guides

We also process information about visitors to our users’ Digital Guides, on behalf of our users and in accordance with our user agreements.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, HouseGuide App may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. HouseGuide App encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy. That’s it! Thanks for reading.