Doodle takes great care to protect your privacy and to secure the data that is stored on the Doodle servers. Doodle employs several security professionals who implement the technical and organizational security during development and operations. Doodle takes measures to protect personal information against loss, misuse, unauthorized access, unauthorized disclosure, manipulation, or destruction.
This Privacy Policy describes how Doodle handles the data it has access to.
Overview
When you use Doodle, you send pieces of data to Doodle; this can be a name, an e-mail address, or information relating to your appointment. Other data is generated implicitly by your use of Doodle, e.g. log data. We use this information for internal analytical purposes to improve the product for you. Furthermore we employ other companies to perform tasks on our behalf and may need to share this information with them to provide services to you. We do not sell your data to third parties.
Log data
Doodle records certain requests and transactions in log files. This log data is used for troubleshooting, statistics, analytics, quality assurance, and to monitor system security and can be analyzed to that end. Doodle can publish anonymous statistics under the condition that no personally identifiable information can be derived from such statistics.
Doodle also uses Google Analytics and Google Firebase Analytics (for iOS and Android apps) to compile usage statistics. These services are provided by Space Pencil, Inc. and by Google, Inc., respectively. Their privacy policies can be found at http://www.google.com/privacy and https://firebase.google.com/terms/analytics. Doodle anonymizes IP addresses before they are sent to Google Analytics.
Doodle also employs NET-Metrix and AGOF to certify its traffic statistics in Switzerland and Germany. Detailed information (in German) on how this certification works and what information is collected can be found here: NET-Metrix and AGOF. An appendix at the end of the German version of this policy also provides further information on how information is collected for web traffic that originates from Germany.
Doodle works with Crashlytics, Inc (“Crashlytics”) and Bit Stadium GmbH (“HockeyApp”) to report any bug affecting our iOS and Android Apps. HockeyApp’s software is built into our iOS App and Crashlytics' software is built into our Android App. If either app crashes during normal use, the app will send certain information about the incident to Crashlytics or HockeyApp as applicable. This information consists of the device type, OS version and certain hardware information about your mobile device, and the time of the crash, the state of the application at the time of the crash, and stack traces. The information does not include your IP address or any other information that could be used to identify you or your mobile device individually, and does not include any other information from your mobile device. Click here to review Crashlytics' privacy policy, and here for HockeyApp’s privacy policy.
Cookies
When you use Doodle, the service can store cookies on your computer. Cookies are little pieces of information that can help identify your browser and that can store information, e.g. application settings. Doodle uses cookies to track usage, to improve ease-of-use and the overall user experience, and to manage advertising inventories.
Advertising
Advertising is one of Doodle’s revenue streams. Therefore, Doodle displays advertisements on some of the services, e.g. on certain web pages or in e-mails. These advertisements can be targeted based on the information that is available to Doodle, e.g. language, IP address, poll content, etc. This targeting is always an automated process; none of the information used for targeting is analyzed manually or made available to advertising customers. In some cases, Doodle displays advertisements from Google’s AdSense or AdExchange network. These advertisements can be targeted based on the poll content. Google does not disclose that information and only uses it for the intended purpose. You can review Google’s Ads Privacy Policy here: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ads/. Furthermore, you can use Google's Ads Preferences Manager to configure the right ads settings for you.
Doodle's paid services (Premium Doodle) are ad-free.
Outdated and completed polls
You can delete outdated or completed (or, in fact, any) polls manually at any time using the admin link. When deleting a poll, that poll’s information will be deleted from the Doodle application databases but may be archived in some other form for internal analytical purposes to improve the product for you. Log data will not be deleted. Furthermore, outdated polls are automatically deleted from time to time, but no earlier than 30 days after the last date in the poll, or 30 days after the last access to a poll without dates. Polls created with premium accounts will not be deleted automatically as long as the subscription remains active. Should the subscription expire, the deletion rules mentioned above apply to all polls associated to the account after 30 days of expiry.
Inactive accounts
Doodle can delete user-accounts if they remain inactive (i.e. not accessed) for 1 year or longer.
Unauthorized access
Doodle implements several mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access to polls, accounts, or other data.
To access a poll, you use the unique link which Doodle provides and which contains a random access code. This link is an important element to prevent unauthorized access to a poll. You should send this link only to authorized people, i.e., the people you wish to participate in your poll.
User-accounts are protected by passwords. You should choose a secure password and ensure its confidentiality to prevent unauthorized access to your account.
Inviting from Doodle
As an option, you can contact and invite people to participate in a poll from Doodle. In this case, Doodle needs to know the e-mail addresses of the people to be contacted. You can enter these e-mail addresses in the corresponding form. Doodle stores these e-mail addresses in your user-account for your convenience; Doodle will be able to offer you the same contacts again next time you use the service. You can have Doodle delete all stored e-mail addresses any time using the corresponding function in your user-account.
General remark: Like all other personal information, Doodle will not share participants' e-mail addresses with third parties. Doodle will not send any e-mail communication to participants' e-mail addresses without your consent.
Contacts integration
As an alternative (or complement) to the Doodle contacts, you can use your existing Google contacts to gain access to the e-mail addresses of the people to be contacted. In this case, you authorize Doodle to access your Google contacts. Your Google contacts will still be stored at Google. Please note also: The process of accessing your Google contacts is set up (thanks to OAuth) to make sure that Doodle at no time has access to your Google password.
Calendar integration
You can connect Doodle with your calendar to make the scheduling process even easier and more efficient. There are two types of calendars: online and offline.
Online calendars like Google calendar are constantly accessible via their respective interfaces. Doodle can store certain calendar data temporarily to improve performance (caching).
In either case, calendar data on Doodle can be deleted at any time.
Communication between you and Doodle
If you send Doodle a message, this message can be stored to process it, to compile statistical information, to improve our services and support, or to get in touch with you.
Payment processing
Doodle supports the leading payment processing provider, PayPal. You can find their privacy policies here: PayPal. To make payments as easy and user-friendly as possible, Doodle sends your name and e-mail address to Paypal during a payment process. All this information would be requested by the provider anway.
Location of data
The Doodle databases are mainly located in Switzerland. For failover purposes the data is also kept on cloud servers in Ireland.
Sharing personal information
Doodle uses personal information according to the Terms of Service and this Privacy Policy.
Doodle may share personal information with other companies or individuals only in the following limited circumstances: (i) Doodle has your consent; (ii) Doodle has good faith that there is a legal obligation to share the data; (iii) Doodle needs to access or share the data to protect the security of the service or of others users’ data; (iv) Doodle needs to access or share the data to protect Doodle’s rights and property or to enforce the Terms of Service.
Changes
Doodle reserves the right to update this Privacy Policy at any time. The most current version of this policy is available at doodle.com/privacy-policy.
December 7 2016