Shieldly Privacy and Cookie Policy
Effective January 6, 2020
This is Shieldly’s Privacy Policy. Shieldly is a service that protects your computer and data. Shieldly offers both a website and downloadable computer software. In order to provide you with our services, we collect and use certain information. The purpose of this policy is to explain what kind of information we collect and how we use it.
Do you collect information about me? Yes. In using Shieldly, you provide us with information and authorize us to collect information.
What information do I provide you? Shieldly’s website is interactive, so when you manually enter information into Shieldly or push a button, that information is sent to us.
a. Account: When you create an account with the Shieldly website, you provide us with information such as your name, company, email address, phone number, a password and credit card. That information is stored on our servers and is used to build your profile, which is available to you via the dashboard.
b. Customer Support: If you run into a problem, the Shieldly website has a customer support feature that let you initiate a chat with a Shieldly representative. When you fill out that form, the content of your message is sent to us so that we can assist you.
Do you use cookies and similar technologies? Yes. Shieldly.com is an interactive website. You can use the website to sign up for Shieldly’s services, log in, access your dashboard, access customer support and more. To make that interactivity work, Shieldly and its partners use cookies to collect information about who is asking for what to be done. Shieldly also uses cookies for internal purposes, such as monitoring the traffic coming to and away from its site.
What information do you collect from me using Shieldly’s downloadable software? When you sign up for Shieldly’s security service, you are asked to download and install the Shieldly software. The software collects the information that we need to provide you with our security services. For example:
a. Native Protection: In order to protect your computer, Shieldly collects information about your computer’s hardware and software. Using this information, Shieldly can figure out what drivers or programs on your computer need updating or patching. You can see much of this information via the devices tab on the dashboard.
b. Web Protection: In order to protect you against threats on the Internet, Shieldly needs to know who you are are on the Internet (e.g., your IP address) and where you are trying to go (e.g., websites requested). Using this information, Shieldly is able to warn you when someone is trying to go to a website that may harm your computer or network.
c. Backup: In order to securely backup your files so that they aren’t lost if you accidentally delete them or your computer fails, Shieldly makes a copy of your files, securely encrypts it, and backs it up to our secure servers. These backups are available to you via the backup tab on the dashboard.
How do you use my information? Yes. We use the information collected to provide you with and improve upon our services. For example:
a) User Profile: Shieldly uses the information you submit to build your profile and provision you an account for our services.
b) Provide you services: Shieldly uses the information it collects to secure your computer and data: to protect you from malicious websites, to protect you from malicious local applications, to patch vulnerable software on your computer, to protect your files from ransom attacks, to keep your PC at peak performance, and to backup your files.
c) Metrics: In order to enhance our services and make them more useful to our customers, Shieldly may anonymize, aggregate and use the information collected to gain insights into the problems, concerns and needs of our users.
d) Communicate with our customers: There are time when Shieldly uses your contact information to communicate with you about your account or our products and services.
Do you sell my information? No.
Do you share my information with other companies? Yes. As a general matter, Shieldly tries not to unnecessarily share any of your information with third parties. Shieldly will only share your information with third parties in the following instances:
a) Corporate Clients: Shieldly is available to individuals and to corporate administrators managing a group of computers. When using a corporate account where multiple computers are on a single account, the account holder has verified that they are allowed to lawfully access those computers and their data. Thus, we allow the account holder to access the data collected for those machines.
b) Partners: We may share information with our partners if needed in order to provide you with our services. For example, Shieldly uses a third party to process payments. When we do so, we ensure that our partners use appropriate confidentiality and security measures to guard that information.
c) Shieldly’s Corporate Family: We may share information between our entities within our corporate family (parent, affiliate, subsidiaries and companies under common control or ownership). When we do so, we ensure that our affiliates use appropriate confidentiality and security measures to guard that information.
d) Social: Various social media platforms provide buttons so that you can follow a company on social media. If you choose to enable that functionality, then you authorize us to share certain information with that social network to make that happen.
e) Legal: There are certain instances where Shieldly is compelled to provide information to comply with the law. For example, Shieldly may be required to provide information in response to a lawsuit, a government investigation, subpoena or other governmental or judicial process. If Shieldly is compelled to provide any of your information, we will try and provide you with prior written notice to the extent that it is allowed by law.
f) Consent: Shieldly may share your information with third parties with your explicit or implicit consent.
Explicit Consent: Shieldly may share your information with a third party if it receives explicit instructions from you to do so.
User Access Generally: Shieldly allows access to your information through the Shieldly dashboard. To protect unauthorized access to your information, Shieldly encourages users to choose a strong password, guard that password, enable two factor authentication, and to notify Shieldly if your password is compromised.
g) Anonymized information: In certain instances, Shieldly may anonymize your data so that is cannot be reasonably used to identify you and share that data with third parties. For example, Shieldly may aggregate the number of its users that are using Google’s Chrome browser and make that anonymized statistic available to its third party partners.
How long do you keep my data? We attempt to store the information we collect only for as long as we need to in order to fulfill the purposes for which we collected it. In certain situations, we may retain information for longer if required by law.
What are my options?
a) Seeing your data: You can log onto your Shieldly account via the Shieldly website. Once logged in you can view, edit and manage your profile, payment information, information collected about your computer, and the files backed up from your computer. You can also contact us anytime at privacy@shieldly.com.
b) Deleting your data: You are in control over your data. You can edit or delete much of that data via the dashboard. You can also contact us anytime at privacy@shieldly.com to edit or delete any of your information.
c) Stopping the use of cookies: Many web browsers allow you to block the use of cookies or delete the cookies already on your computer. We have included helpful links as a starting point below: Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. However, please be aware that by deleting or blocking cookies used by Shieldly, certain functions of the Shieldly website may not work properly for you.
d) Deleting your account: In addition to deleting your data, you can also cancel or delete your Shieldly account altogether at any time.
Shieldly Is Not Designed for Use by Children: Shieldly is targeted for use by users over the age of 16. Shieldly does not allow or encourage use of its services for those under the age of 16.
Changes to This Policy: We may change this privacy policy from time to time. If we do, we will revise the date at the top of this policy to indicate that it has been changed. If the change is material, we will call out such a material change via the Dashboard or via email. By continuing to use Shieldly after any changes to our policy you are agreeing to be bound by the revised policy.