Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective Date: May 5, 2018

In the following policy, personalVPN refers to the VPN services offered by Witopia, Inc. (the “Company” or “We”) through the witopia.com, personalVPN.com websites, as well as any alternate domain names used to circumvent censorship, and the software and services provided through them (the “Service”). This Privacy Policy explains (i) what information we collect through your access and use of our Service (ii) the use we make of such information; and (iii) the security level we provide for protecting such information.

By visiting our websites, or using the Services provided, you consent to the terms outlined in this Privacy Policy.

Our Philosophy

As one of the original data privacy services we believe down to our core that the privacy and security of our visitors’ and customers’ information are of the utmost importance. As such, we administer strict policies safeguarding your privacy and security. We take it quite seriously. Below is a summary of our policies concerning what information is gathered and how it is used.

What information do we collect and why?

No VPN Logs or Throttling:

We, by default and design, absolutely do not monitor or store logs of a user’s internet activity, browsing, websites visited, or files downloaded. Additionally, as a strong proponent of network neutrality, we absolutely do not throttle customer VPN traffic.

For the purpose of securing customers’ accounts, and prevent unauthorized logins and/or abuse, we do authenticate login info (username/email address and password) when an account logs in but this is seen as an “account” logging in, not a person. Additionally, users are welcome to provide an alias and temporary anonymous email when signing up for service if preferred. 

Visiting our websites:

We do use a basic installation of website analytics software to research general trend and marketing data. This data is non-personally-identifying bulk information such as; title of the pages on our websites being viewed, referring websites, geographical popularity . Again, this data cannot be used to personally identify users or visitors as we do not capture personally-identifiable information. Cookies are used to facilitate Customer Portal logins and other basic website functions. We deliberately do not use the rather extensive tracking technologies used in many other websites.

Payment:

We use third party payment processors (Stripe and PayPal) to process credit card and PayPal transactions. Payment data is used to manage customer signups, payments, and cancellations. In addition to managing payments, these services do have procedures in place to prevent online fraud that may capture and analyze transaction data.

Account creation:

We store the email address and name you enter when creating an account but you may use an alias, or temporary email address if you prefer. If you ordered a product that requires shipping, such as our VPN Router product, we will store the shipping address entered and share with the shipping carrier chosen. If you are referred to us by a friend, or participant in our referral program, we may associate your account with the referrer to appropriately credit the referrer.

Support and other communications:

If you send us email or use our live chat, we may retain the correspondence in case we need to refer back to it. Our email trouble ticketing system utilizes OTRS. Our online chat service is currently provided by ZenDesk.

• We may retain emails, chats, and other communications that you voluntarily send to us, including through our internal trouble-ticketing system, so we can troubleshoot issues with the Service.
• We may use your email address to: i) send you important updates and announcements related to your use of our Services; ii) respond to your requests or inquiries; iii) send you offers, surveys and other marketing content (you can opt-out of those at any time in your Customer Portal).
• We use tools, such as Mailchimp, to help us optimize email communications and provide you with easy ability to unsubscribe from unwanted emails.  Mailchimp may track events you perform with an email, such as open and unsubscribe.
• If you contact us via our chat-bot on our website, in addition to collecting your contact information, we will be able to see your IP address. This additional information is necessary for our support to determine the user’s country and to see if the user is connected to our servers or not.

Disclosure of Information

Witopia is a company that protects privacy and the privacy rights of our customers. Although we respond to valid and legal subpoena requests, we will scrutinize any legal request we receive for compliance with both the “spirit” and letter of the law. Nevertheless, by default and design, we do not capture or maintain logs of a user’s internet activity, browsing, websites visited, or files downloaded, as well as allow use of aliases and temporary email addresses when you sign up for our service, so we cannot provide information that we do not have.

Third Parties

Witopia does not run any advertising on our websites or share your personal information with any third parties aside from the disclosures already made in this privacy policy.

Applicable Law and Changes to Privacy Policy

Witopia reserves the right to periodically review and change this policy.  Please visit our Terms of Service establishing the use, disclaimers, and limitations of liability governing the use of our websites and services. For customers from the EU, we also adhere to the standards mandated by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  Use of our websites or services, as well as any dispute over privacy, is subject to this Policy and our Terms of Service.

Contacting us

If you have any questions regarding this policy, or wish to request deletion of archived account data, please feel free to contact us using the information below.