Privacy Policy

Effective date: June 14, 2022

vidIQ, Inc. (“vidIQ”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) values your privacy. In this privacy policy (“Policy”), we describe how we collect, use, and disclose information that we obtain about visitors to our websites, apps and devices, including but not limited to, vidIQ.com, app.vidiq.com, support.vidiq.com, academy.vidiq.com (the “Site”), vidIQ applications on The App Store and Google Play Store and vidIQ extension on Chrome Store, Firefox Store and Microsoft Edge store and the services available through our Site including our free product that has many features to allow users to gain access to optimize and get insights on YouTube and TikTok (collectively, the “Services”).

By visiting our Site or using any of our Services, you acknowledge that your personal information will be handled as described in this Policy. Visiting our Site, use of our Services, and any dispute over privacy, is subject to our Terms of Use, including its applicable limitations on damages and the resolution of disputes.

We collect information about you directly through your use of our Site and Services. All visitors to our Site may browse without using our Services, however, to make the most use of our Services you must provide certain information which includes the following:

Information Provided by You Directly

Common Identifiers, being your first and/or last name and initials; Login information, in particular, your email address; Contact information, including email address and phone number; Financial Information, including your credit card details, but not your CVV number; and details of your YouTube or TikTok channel, as applicable.

Information We Collect Automatically

We automatically collect information about your use of our Site and Services through cookies or other tracking technologies: your domain name; your device ID; your browser type and operating system; web pages you view; links, buttons, or other elements you click; mouse position; text, images, audio and videos from pages you view; your IP address; the length of time you visit our Site and/or use our Services; and the referring URL, or the webpage that led you to our Site. We may combine information automatically collected with other information that we have collected about you. Please see the section “Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms” below for more information.

Information Provided Voluntarily

We invite you to post content to our Services, including your comments, pictures, and any other information that you would like to be available on our Services. If you post content to our Services, all of the information that you post and your web alias will be available to all visitors to our Site and users of our Services. If you post your own content on our Site or Services, your posting may become public and we cannot prevent such information from being used in a manner that may violate this Policy, the law, or your personal privacy.

Information Provided by Third-Party Services

vidIQ may collect some data about your YouTube and TikTok channels as permitted by YouTube's and TikTok’s Terms of Service for use by our tools. By using YouTube and TikTok Content within vidIQ’s Sites and Services you are agreeing to be bound to YouTube’s Terms of Service and Google’s Privacy Policy, and/or the TikTok Terms of Services and TikTok Privacy Policy, as applicable. Additionally, when you sign-up for a vidIQ account, you may choose to authenticate to our Services through a method provided by Google. In those cases, you authorize us to access Personal Information and other data held by Google on an ongoing basis in order to provide the Services. By authenticating using a third-party authentication mechanism you acknowledge that you are authorized to perform this authentication and to grant vidIQ any associated privileges to that data. The use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the requirements. Users can revoke access to data collected via YouTube API Services via the steps outlined in Google security settings.

We use your information, including your personal information, for the following purposes:

Providing and Improving Our Services. To provide our Services to you; to communicate with you about your use of our Services; to respond to your inquiries; to perform technical operations, such as updating our Site; and for other customer service and support purposes.

To tailor the content and information that we may send or display to you; to offer personalized help and instructions; and to otherwise personalize your experiences while using our Services.

Marketing. To provide you with news and newsletters, special offers, and promotions; to contact you about products or information we think may interest you; and for other marketing, advertising, and promotional purposes. We may provide you with such updates and promotional materials via email.

Research and Analytics. To analyze how you interact with our Services; to monitor and analyze usage and activity trends; and for other research, analytical, and statistical purposes both on an aggregated and individualized basis including to respond to user desires and preferences.

Protecting Rights and Interests. To protect the safety, rights, property, or security of vidIQ, the Services; to detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues; to prevent or stop activity which vidIQ, in its sole discretion, may consider to be, or to pose a risk of being, an illegal, unethical, or legally actionable activity; to use as evidence in litigation; and to enforce this Policy or our Terms of Use.

Legal Compliance. To comply with applicable legal or regulatory obligations, including as part of a judicial proceeding; to respond to a subpoena, warrant, court order, or other legal process; or as part of an investigation or request, whether formal or informal, from law enforcement or a governmental authority.

We may share your information, including personal information, as follows:

Affiliates. We may disclose the information we collect from you to our affiliates or subsidiaries; however, if we do so, their use and disclosure of your personally identifiable information will be subject to this Policy.

Partners. We exchange data with YouTube and TikTok to enable us to give you insights into videos, audio and channels and post any changes you’ve requested to help you to grow.

Service Providers. We may disclose the information we collect from you to third party vendors, service providers, contractors or agents who perform functions on our behalf, including but not limited to, Google, TikTok, Facebook Advertising, Twitter, Iterable, Sendgrid and Intercom.

We also disclose information in the following circumstances:

Business Transfers. If we are or may be acquired by or merged with another company, if any of our assets are transferred to another company, or as part of a bankruptcy or insolvency proceeding, we may transfer the information we have collected from you to the other company.

In Response to Legal Process. We also may disclose the information we collect from you in order to comply with the law, a judicial proceeding, court order, or other legal process, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena.

To Protect Us and Others. We also may disclose the information we collect from you where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Use, or this Policy, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.

Aggregate and De-Identified Information. We may share aggregate or de-identified information about users with third parties for marketing, advertising, research or similar purposes.

We and our third-party service providers use cookies and other tracking mechanisms to track information about your use of our Site or Services. We may combine this information with other personal information we collect from you (and our third-party service providers may do so on our behalf).

Cookies. A cookie is a text file that a website transfers to your computer’s hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Some cookies allow us to make it easier for you to navigate our Site, while others are used to allow us to track your activities while using our Site or our Services. There are two types of cookies: session and persistent cookies. Session cookies exist only during an online session. They disappear from your computer when you close your browser or turn off your computer. We use session cookies to allow our systems to uniquely identify you during a session or while you are browsing the Site.

This allows us to verify your identity as you use our Services. Persistent cookies remain on your computer after you have closed your browser or turned off your computer. We use persistent cookies to track aggregate and statistical information about user activity, and to display advertising on our Site. To see a full list of our cookies and details of why we use them, please contact us.

Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but if you prefer, you can edit your browser options to block them in the future. The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your computer from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Visitors to our Site who disable cookies will be able to browse certain areas of the Site, but some features may not function (e.g. you may not be able to stay logged into your account).

Local Storage Objects. We may use Flash Local Storage Objects (“Flash LSOs”) to store your Site preferences and to personalize your visit. Flash LSOs are different from browser cookies because of the amount and type of data stored. Typically, you cannot control, delete, or disable the acceptance of Flash LSOs through your web browser. For more information on Flash LSOs, or to learn how to manage your settings for Flash LSOs, go to the Adobe Flash Player Help Page, choose “Global Storage Settings Panel” and follow the instructions. To see the Flash LSOs currently on your computer, choose “Website Storage Settings Panel” and follow the instructions to review and, if you choose, to delete any specific Flash LSO.

Clear GIFs, pixel tags and other technologies. Clear GIFs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on your computer’s hard drive, clear GIFs are embedded invisibly on web or mobile application pages. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. web beacons, web bugs or pixel tags), in connection with our Site to, among other things, track the activities visitors to our Site, help us manage content, and compile statistics about usage of our Site. We and our third-party service providers also use clear GIFs in HTML emails to our customers, to help us track email response rates, identify when our emails are viewed, and track whether our emails are forwarded.

Third-Party Analytics. We use Google Analytics as a third-party analytics company, to evaluate use of our Site and Services. We use this tool to help us understand use of, and to improve, our Site and Services, performance, and user experiences. Google Analytics may use cookies and other tracking technologies, such as web beacons or local storage objects (LSOs), to perform their services. To learn more about Google’s privacy practices, please review the Google privacy policy at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/. You can also download the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to prevent their data from being used by Google Analytics at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Do Not Track. Currently, our systems do not recognize browser “do-not-track” requests, but we do not track your activities after you leave our Site. You may, however, disable certain tracking as discussed in this section (e.g. by disabling cookies).

Users in the United States may opt out of many third-party ad networks. For example, you may go to the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”) Consumer Choice Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by DAA companies. You may also go to the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”) Consumer Opt-Out Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by NAI members. If you are in the EU, you may opt-out of certain third-party cookies that we and other websites may use for targeted advertising through the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (EDAA) Your Online Choices Page or www.aboutads.info.

Opting out from one or more companies listed on the DAA Consumer Choice Page or the NAI Consumer Opt-Out Page will opt you out from those companies’ delivery of interest-based content or ads to you, but it does not mean you will no longer receive any advertising through our Site or on other websites.

Our Site and Services may contain links to third-party websites. Any access to and use of such linked websites is not governed by this Policy, but instead is governed by the privacy policies of those third-party websites. We are not responsible for the information practices of such third-party websites.

We have implemented reasonable precautions to protect the information we collect from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware that despite our efforts, no data security measures can guarantee security.

You should take steps to protect against unauthorized access to your password, phone, and computer by, among other things, signing off after using a shared computer, choosing a robust password that nobody else knows or can easily guess, and keeping your log-in and password private. We are not responsible for any lost, stolen, or compromised passwords or for any activity on your account via unauthorized password activity. Only employees who need personal information to perform a specific job are granted access to it.

We may send periodic promotional emails to you. You may opt-out of promotional communications by updating your marketing preferences in your profile or by emailing us at contact@vidiq.com or calling us at 888-998-8434. Please note that it may take up to 10 business days for us to process opt-out requests. If you opt-out of receiving promotional emails about recommendations or other information we think may interest you, we may still send you emails about your account or any services you have requested or received from us.

In this section, we provide additional information to California residents about how we handle their personal information, as required under California privacy laws including the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”).  This section does not address or apply to our handling of publicly available information lawfully made available by state or federal government records or other personal information that is exempt under the CCPA.

A. Categories of Personal Information Under the CCPA

While our collection, use and disclosure of personal information varies based upon our relationship and interactions with you, in this section we describe how we have collected and disclosed personal information about consumers in the prior 12 months (from the Last Updated data above).

We have collected the following categories of personal information (as defined by the CCPA) about California residents:

Service Provider Disclosures. We provide the following categories of personal information to the service providers listed below:

Do We “Sell” Personal Information? Under the CCPA, a “sale” includes disclosing or making available personal information to a third-party in exchange for monetary compensation or other benefits or value. We do not disclose personal information to third parties in exchange for monetary compensation.  We may disclose or make available certain categories of personal information to third parties in order to receive certain benefits or services, such as when we make browsing information available to third party ad companies (through third party tags on our Sites) in order to improve and measure our ad campaigns and reach users with more relevant ads and content.

Sources of Personal Information. As described in the above section, we may collect personal information from the following sources:

B. California Residents’ Rights

CCPA Rights. In general, California residents have the following rights with respect to their personal information:

Submitting CCPA Requests. California residents may submit CCPA requests to opt out of sales, requests to know (access) and requests to delete their personal information through one of the following methods:Email us at rightsrequest@vidiq.com; or

When you submit a request to know or a request to delete, we will take steps to verify your request by matching the information provided by you with the information we have in our records.  In some cases, we may request additional information in order to verify your request or where necessary to process your request. If we are unable to adequately verify a request, we will notify the requestor.  Authorized agents may initiate a request on behalf of another individual by contacting us at the above email address or telephone number; authorized agents will be required to provide proof of their authorization and we may also require that the relevant consumer directly verify their identity and the authority of the authorized agent.

Financial Incentives. We may make available certain programs or offerings that are considered “financial incentives” under the CCPA.

Your Privacy Rights Under California Shine the Light Law. Under California’s “Shine the Light” law (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.83), California residents who provide us certain personal information are entitled to request and obtain from us, free of charge, information about the personal information (if any) we have shared with third parties for their own direct marketing use.  Such requests may be made once per calendar year for information about any relevant third-party sharing in the prior calendar year. To submit a “Shine the Light” request, email us at rightsrequest@vidiq.com, and include in your request a current California address and your attestation that you are a California resident.

Our Site and Services are not designed for children under 13. If we discover that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we will delete such information from our systems.

The following disclosures apply only to vidIQ’s processing of personal data about EU residents.

The Data Controller of the information collected through the Site and Services is vidIQ, Inc which is headquartered in the United States at 548 Market St #70172, San Francisco, CA 94104. To exercise any rights that you may have with regard to your personal data, you may contact us through one of the following methods:

We use Intercom to manage our customer engagement platform who will manage the data in accordance with their privacy policy available https://www.intercom.com/terms-and-policies#privacy, but they are contracted to only act on our instructions.

The legal bases for using your personal Information. We collect your information as a Data Controller when we have a legal basis to do so. The following legal bases pertain to our collection of data:

Our use of your personal data is necessary to perform a contract or take steps to enter into a contract with you. This applies to our processing activities described at 2A above.

Our use of your personal data is in our legitimate interest as a commercial organization to make improvements to our Site and to provide you with access to the Services as you request. This applies to our processing activities described at 2B, 2C (save where we need consent by local law) and 2D.

Our use of your personal information is necessary to comply with a relevant legal or regulatory obligation that we have in particular, where we are required to disclose personal information to a court or regulatory body in the event of an investigation. This applies to our processing activities described at 2E and 2F.

Our use of your personal information is in accordance with your consent. This applies to our processing activities described at 2C (where required by local law).

If you would like to find out more about the legal bases on which we process personal information, please contact us using the details below.

Your Legal Rights. Subject to certain exemptions, and dependent upon the processing activity we are undertaking, European Union individuals have certain rights in relation to personal information:

Right to access, correct, and delete your personal information:

You have the right to request access to the personal information that we hold about you and: (a) the source of your personal information; (b) the purposes, legal basis and methods of processing; (c) the data controller’s identity; and (d) the entities or categories of entities to whom your personal information may be transferred. You also have the right to request that we correct any inaccuracies or delete your information. We are not required to comply with your request to erase personal information if the processing of your personal information is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation or for the establishment, exercise, or defense of legal claims.

Right to restrict the processing of your personal information:

You have the right to restrict the use of your personal information when (i) you contest the accuracy of the data; (ii) the use is unlawful but you do not want us to erase the data; (iii) we no longer need the personal information for the relevant purposes, but we require it for the establishment, exercise, or defense of legal claims; or (iv) you have objected to our personal information use justified on our legitimate interests verification as to whether we have a compelling interest to continue to use your data. We can continue to use your personal information following a request for restriction, where: (a) we have your consent; or (b) to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (c) to protect the rights of another natural or legal person.

Right to data portability:

To the extent that we process your information (i) based on your consent or under a contract; and (ii) through automated means, you have the right to receive such personal information in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or you can ask to have it transferred directly to another data controller.

Right to object to the processing of your personal information:

You can object to any processing of your personal information which has our legitimate interests as its legal basis, if you believe your fundamental rights and freedoms outweigh our legitimate interests. If you raise an objection, we have an opportunity to demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate interests which override your rights and freedoms.

Right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority:

You have a right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority if you have concerns about how we are processing your personal information. We ask that you please attempt to resolve any issues with us first, although you have a right to contact your supervisory authority at any time.

How to Exercise Your Rights:

If you would like to exercise any of the rights described above, please contact us through one of the following methods:

In your message, please indicate the right you would like to exercise and the information to which it relates.

We may ask you for additional information to confirm your identity and for security purposes before disclosing the personal information requested to you. We reserve the right to charge a fee where permitted by law, for instance if your request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

Cross-border Transfer of Information. We maintain servers and systems in the United States hosted by Amazon Web Services. As a result, where the personal information that we collect through or in connection with the Site or the Services is processed in the United States, we will take steps to ensure that the information receives the same level of protection as if it remained within the European Union. You may have a right to receive details of any safeguards that we have where your data is transferred outside the European Union, (e.g. to request a copy where the safeguard is documented, which may be redacted to ensure confidentiality).

Retention of Personal Data and Access. We will keep your information accurate, complete and up to date. We will retain your personal data for the period necessary to fulfill the different purposes outlined in this Policy, and in particular we will keep data for as long as it takes to respond to a query. Where we are required to do so to meet legal, regulatory, tax or accounting requirements, we will retain your personal data for longer periods of time, but only where permitted to do so, including so that we have an accurate record of your dealings with us in the event of any complaints or challenges, or if we reasonably believe there is a possibility of legal action relating to your personal data or dealings.

If you have questions about the privacy aspects of our Site or Services, or would like to make a complaint, please contact us at privacy@vidiq.com.

This Policy is current as of the Effective Date set forth above. We may make changes to this Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. If you continue to use the Site or Service after those changes are in effect, you agree to the revised Policy.