Privacy Policy
What information ReviewHopper collects when you give feedback or administer an account, why we collect it, who receives it, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it.
This policy is written to be read. Where a term has a specific legal meaning we say so plainly rather than leaving it to a definitions list.
About this policy
ReviewHopper is a feedback service. A business gives its customers a link or a code; the customer opens it, rates an experience from one to five stars, and either is invited to post a public review or is shown a private form that goes to that business. This policy explains what happens to information along the way.
It covers two groups of people, and the answers are different for each. If you are a customer who opened a feedback link, the sections about feedback apply to you. If you sign in to administer a business account, the sections about accounts apply to you as well.
It does not cover what a business does with your feedback after it reaches them, or what a review site does with a review you choose to post there. Those are governed by their own policies.
Who is responsible for your information
Data protection law distinguishes the organisation that decides why and how information is used from the organisation that handles it on the first one's instructions. Which of those ReviewHopper is depends on the information.
- If you want feedback you gave to a business corrected or removed, you can ask us and we will act on it, and you can also ask that business directly.
- If your question is about an administrator account, ask us.
- Feedback you give to a business
- That business decides to ask for it, decides what its feedback page says, and receives what you send. It is responsible for that information. We handle it on their behalf and on their instructions, and we do not use it for our own purposes.
- Accounts, security and the running of the service
- We decide why and how this information is used, so we are responsible for it. It covers administrator accounts, our application logs, and the technical records we keep to run the service and keep it secure.
Information we collect
When you open a feedback link and use it, we record:
- The star rating you choose, the page you were shown afterwards, and the review destination you were sent to, if any.
- That the page was viewed, that a rating was given and that a link was clicked, with the time of each.
- Your IP address.
- An approximate city and region, worked out from that IP address at the moment you visit. This is city-level and is not a precise location: we do not use GPS, and we do not ask your browser for your location.
- Your browser's user-agent string, and a broad device class such as mobile, tablet or desktop.
- A job or visit reference, when the business included one in the link it sent you. This is the business's own reference for the work it did for you.
- Your name, email address, phone number and written comments -- but only if you choose to type them.
- Contact details are optional
- You can complete a rating without giving your name, email address or phone number, and nothing on the page requires them. If you leave them, it is so the business can follow up with you.
- If you administer a business account
- We record the username you sign in with, a one-way hash of your password, and a record of your sign-ins and administrative actions. We do not store your password and cannot recover it.
- What we never collect
- We take no payment details from you. There is no customer account and no password to create. We do not collect government identifiers, health information, financial account details, precise location, biometric data, or any of the categories that data protection law treats as special or sensitive -- unless you type something of that kind into the comment box yourself, which we ask you not to do.
Where the information comes from
We do not buy information about you, and we do not obtain it from data brokers, advertising networks or social networks.
- From you: the rating you choose, and anything you type.
- From your device, automatically: your IP address, your user-agent string, and the cookies described below.
- From the business: the job or visit reference in the link it sent you, and the settings that decide what its feedback page says.
- From a location lookup provider: the approximate city and region, derived from your IP address, where the deployment uses one.
Why we use it, and our legal grounds
Where a business is responsible for the information, that business chooses the legal ground and we act on its instructions. Where we are responsible, the grounds are set out below. “Legitimate interests” means we have weighed our reason for using the information against your interests and rights, and you can object -- see your rights, below.
| Purpose | Information used | Legal ground |
|---|---|---|
| Showing you the right feedback page and recording your rating | Rating, page shown, destination, session cookie | The business's instructions; our legitimate interest in providing the service it asked for |
| Passing your feedback and any contact details to the business | Rating, comments, name, email, phone | The business's instructions; your choice to provide contact details |
| Producing the business's reports on its feedback | Ratings, events, approximate city and region, device class | The business's instructions; our legitimate interest in providing the service |
| Recognising a repeat visit so one person's rating is not counted several times | IP address, user-agent, counting cookies | Our legitimate interest in the integrity and accuracy of the results |
| Keeping the service secure and diagnosing failures | Application logs, device and request details | Our legitimate interest in a secure, working service; our legal obligation to protect personal information |
| Administering accounts and authenticating administrators | Username, password hash, sign-in and activity records | Performance of our contract with the business; our legitimate interest in account security |
Cookies and similar technologies
A feedback page sets up to three small cookies. All three are first-party, meaning they are set by this site and read only by this site. None of them is an advertising cookie, none is shared with anyone else, and there is no advertising pixel, no third-party analytics script and no social media tag on any feedback page.
- The feedback pages still work if you block or clear these cookies. We may simply count a repeat visit as a new one.
- Your browser can block cookies, delete them, or refuse them for this site specifically. How to do that depends on your browser, and its help pages explain it.
- We do not respond to browser “Do Not Track” signals, because there is no agreed standard for what a site should do when it receives one. We do not track you across other sites in any case.
- Session identifier (about one year)
- A random value with no meaning outside this service, so that the page view and the rating that follows it can be recognised as one visit. Without it the service cannot tell one visit from another and cannot function as intended.
- Rating counter, one per business (about one year)
- How many ratings this browser has already given to that particular business. Used to recognise a repeat submission.
- Daily browser and network fingerprint, one per business (about one year)
- A short value derived from your browser and network for the day, used for the same purpose.
Where your information is stored
Your information is stored in Microsoft Azure in the United States. Our email provider and, where used, our location lookup provider may process information elsewhere.
This can mean your information is transferred to, or accessed from, a country other than the one you are in, including a country whose data protection laws differ from your own.
Where information protected by United Kingdom or European law is transferred out of those territories, we rely on a transfer mechanism the law recognises -- an adequacy decision covering the destination country, or standard contractual clauses with the recipient, together with any additional safeguards the transfer needs. You can ask us for details of the mechanism that applies to your information.
How long we keep it
We keep information for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, and then delete it or strip what identifies you. The specific windows are below.
- We may keep information longer where we have to for a legal claim, an investigation or a legal obligation, and only for as long as that lasts.
| Information | How long | What happens then |
|---|---|---|
| IP address | 500 days | Cleared automatically by a scheduled job. The record itself survives -- the rating, the event, the city and the region all remain -- and the record is marked to show the address was removed rather than never captured. |
| Approximate city and region | Indefinitely | Kept as statistics. Once the IP address is gone these no longer identify you. |
| Ratings, events, and the reports built from them | Indefinitely | Kept, because they are the record of the service the business bought. They contain no contact details. |
| Comments and contact details you chose to leave | Until deleted on request | Kept so the business can follow up with you, which is why you left them. Deleted when you or the business asks -- see your rights, below. |
| Application logs | The most recent 5,000 entries per category | Older entries are deleted automatically. Logs never contain IP addresses -- see below. |
| Administrator account records | While the account exists | Removed when the account is removed. The record that an action was taken may be kept in the logs for the window above. |
How we protect it
No service can promise perfect security and we do not. These are the measures we take. If a security breach affects your information and the law requires us to tell you, we will, and we will tell the relevant regulator within the time the law allows.
- Pages and form submissions travel over an encrypted connection.
- Information is stored in Microsoft Azure, reached with credentials held in the hosting platform's configuration and never written into the application or shown on a page.
- Administrator passwords are stored only as one-way hashes and cannot be read back, by us or by anyone else.
- Every administrative page requires authentication -- the protection is the check on the page, not the absence of a link to it.
- IP addresses are never written to our application logs. The address is removed before an entry is stored, and removed again before an administrator can view one, so a log entry cannot carry an address past the retention window above.
Your rights over your information
Depending on where you live, some or all of the following apply to you. We do not ask which law you are relying on, and we handle a request the same way wherever it comes from -- so in practice you can ask for any of these.
- Access
- Ask what we hold about you and get a copy of it.
- Correction
- Ask us to correct anything inaccurate or incomplete.
- Deletion
- Ask us to delete it. We will, unless we have to keep it -- for a legal claim or a legal obligation -- in which case we will tell you why.
- Restriction
- Ask us to stop using it while a dispute about its accuracy or our grounds is resolved.
- Objection
- Object to our using it where we rely on legitimate interests. We will stop unless we have compelling grounds that override your interests.
- Portability
- Ask for a copy in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or ask us to send it to someone else where that is technically possible.
- Withdrawing consent
- Where we rely on your consent, withdraw it at any time. That does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.
- Complaint
- Complain to your data protection regulator. You can do that without contacting us first, though we would rather have the chance to put it right.
- No penalty
- We will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or give you a lesser experience because you exercised any of these.
How to make a request
Write to privacy@reviewhopper.com. Tell us what you want and enough detail to find the information -- for a piece of feedback, roughly when you gave it and to which business is usually enough.
- We reply within 30 days. If a request is complex and we need longer, we will tell you inside that window and explain why.
- There is no charge. We may charge a reasonable fee, or decline, only if a request is clearly unfounded or excessive, and we will explain our reasons if so.
- We may need to verify who you are before acting, so that we do not disclose or delete someone else's information on a stranger's say-so. We will ask for the least we can.
- An authorised agent may make a request for you. We will ask for proof that you authorised them, and may still ask you to confirm it directly.
- A person handles these requests. There is no automated self-service route, which is why the reply comes by email.
Automated decisions
Which page you see after you choose a rating is decided automatically, from the rating you gave and the settings the business chose. A higher rating may lead to an invitation to post a public review; a lower one leads to a private form that goes to the business.
That is the whole of it. There is no profiling of you, no scoring of you as an individual, and no automated decision that produces a legal effect for you or anything similarly significant. You are never prevented from saying what you think: the private form accepts any comment you want to make, and it reaches the business.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area
The United Kingdom and EU General Data Protection Regulations give you specific rights. This section explains how they apply here; everything above applies to you as well.
- The legal grounds we rely on are in the table above. Where the ground is legitimate interests, you can ask us for our assessment.
- You have the rights listed above, and you can enforce them through your national data protection authority.
- Where a business is the controller of your feedback, you can bring a request to them or to us -- we will act on it either way, and we will tell them if you came to us.
- You have the right to complain to your supervisory authority. In the United Kingdom that is the Information Commissioner's Office; in the European Economic Area it is the authority for the country you live or work in, or where the issue arose.
If you are in California
California law gives residents of the state specific rights and requires a specific disclosure of the categories of personal information collected. This section provides it; everything above applies to you as well.
- We collect these for the purposes in the table above, from the sources listed above, and disclose them to the recipients listed above.
- We have not sold personal information, and have not shared it for cross-context behavioural advertising, in the twelve months before the date of this policy. Because we do neither, there is no “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link to offer.
- You have the right to know, to delete, to correct, and to be free from retaliation for exercising any of them. Make a request as described above.
- We retain each category for the period in the retention table above, and no longer than is necessary for the purpose it was collected for.
| Category | Do we collect it | What it is here |
|---|---|---|
| Identifiers | Yes | IP address, a session identifier, and the name, email address and phone number you choose to give |
| Customer records information | Yes, if you provide it | Name, phone number and email address left with feedback |
| Protected classification characteristics | No | We do not ask for or infer age, race, sex, religion or any similar characteristic |
| Commercial information | Limited | That you had an experience with a business, the business's own job reference, and your rating of it |
| Biometric information | No | None is collected |
| Internet or network activity | Yes | Page views, the rating submission, link clicks, and your user-agent string |
| Geolocation data | Yes, approximate only | City and region derived from your IP address; never precise location |
| Audio, video and similar information | No | None is collected |
| Professional or employment information | No | An administrator's username is a work contact detail, not employment information |
| Education information | No | None is collected |
| Inferences drawn to create a profile | No | We classify a device as mobile, tablet or desktop; we build no profile of you |
| Sensitive personal information | No | We collect none, and therefore use none for any purpose requiring a right to limit it |
If you are in another United States state with a privacy law
Several states now give residents rights similar to those described above -- to know, to correct, to delete, to obtain a copy, and to opt out of targeted advertising, sale, or profiling with significant effects.
We do not undertake targeted advertising, do not sell personal information, and do not profile anyone in a way that produces a significant effect, so those opt-outs have nothing to apply to here. The remaining rights are available to you on the same terms as everyone else: write to privacy@reviewhopper.com. If we decline a request you may ask us to reconsider, and we will explain the outcome.
Children
The service is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect information from a child, and we do not knowingly sell or share the information of anyone under 16 -- we do not sell or share anyone's.
If you believe a child has given us information, write to privacy@reviewhopper.com and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
The effective date at the top of this page tells you when this version took effect, and the version number identifies it. If we change the substance of this policy we publish a new version with a new date, and the change takes effect when it is published.
The short privacy summary shown on a feedback page carries its own version, and every rating records which version was on screen when it was given -- so it is always answerable which wording a particular person actually saw.
How to contact us
For anything in this policy, write to privacy@reviewhopper.com. For anything else, write to support@reviewhopper.com.
- The data controller is Mindful Conversion, Inc.
- Our postal address is 23318 SE 218th St, Maple Valley, WA 98038, United States.
Questions about this document
Write to privacy@reviewhopper.com and a person will reply.
See also our Terms of Use.