Alpine Privacy Policy
When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information. We understand this is a big responsibility and work hard to protect your information and put you in control.
This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what information we collect, why we collect it, and how you can update, manage, export, and delete your information.
Information We Collect
We collect information to provide better services to all our users — from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful, the people who matter most to you online, or which videos or blog posts you might like. The information Alpine collects, and how that information is used, depends on how you use our services and how you manage your privacy controls.
When you’re not signed in to an Alpine Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser, application, or device you’re using. This helps us do things like maintain your language preferences across browsing sessions.
When you’re signed in, we also collect information that we store with your Alpine Account, which we treat as personal information.
Why We Collect Data
We use the information we collect from all our services for the following purposes:
Provide our services
We use your information to deliver our services, like processing the terms you search for in order to return results or helping you share content by suggesting recipients from your contacts.
Maintain & improve our services
We also use your information to ensure our services are working as intended, such as tracking outages or troubleshooting issues that you report to us. And we use your information to make improvements to our services — for example, understanding which search terms are most frequently misspelled helps us improve spell-check features used across our services.
Develop new services
We use the information we collect in existing services to help us develop new ones.
Provide personalized services, including content and ads
We use the information we collect to customize our services for you, including providing recommendations, personalized content, and customized search results.
Depending on your settings, we may also show you personalized ads based on your interests. For example, if you search for “mountain bikes,” you may see an ad for sports equipment when you’re browsing a site that shows ads served by Google. You can control what information we use to show you ads by visiting your ad settings.
We don’t show you personalized ads based on sensitive categories, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, or health.
We don’t share information that personally identifies you with advertisers, such as your name or email, unless you ask us to. For example, if you see an ad for a nearby flower shop and select the “tap to call” button, we’ll connect your call and may share your phone number with the flower shop.
Measure performance
We use data for analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used. For example, we analyze data about your visits to our sites to do things like optimize product design. And we also use data about the ads you interact with to help advertisers understand the performance of their ad campaigns. We use a variety of tools to do this, including Google Analytics. When you visit sites that use Google Analytics, Google and a Google Analytics customer may link information about your activity from that site with activity from other sites that use their ad services.
Communicate with you
We use information we collect, like your email address, to interact with you directly. For example, we may send you a notification if we detect suspicious activity, like an attempt to sign in to your Alpine Account from an unusual location. Or we may let you know about upcoming changes or improvements to our services. And if you contact Alpine, we’ll keep a record of your request in order to help solve any issues you might be facing.
Protect Alpine, our users, and the public
We use information to help improve the safety and reliability of our services. This includes detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, security risks, and technical issues that could harm Alpine, our users, or the public.
We use different technologies to process your information for these purposes. We use automated systems that analyze your content to provide you with things like customized search results, personalized ads, or other features tailored to how you use our services. And we analyze your content to help us detect abuse such as spam, malware, and illegal content. We also use algorithms and analysis to recognize patterns in data.
We may combine the information we collect among our services and across your devices for the purposes described above. For example, if you watch videos of guitar players on YouTube, you might see an ad for guitar lessons on a site that uses our ad products. Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Alpine's services and the ads delivered by Google.
If other users already have your email address or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Account information, such as your name and photo. This helps people identify an email coming from you, for example.
We’ll ask for your consent before using your information for a purpose that isn’t covered in this Privacy Policy.
Exporting, removing & deleting your information
You can export a copy of content in your Alpine Account if you want to back it up or use it with a service outside of Alpine.
Remove your data
You can also request to remove content from specific Alpine services based on applicable law.
To delete your information, you can:
- Delete your content from specific Alpine services
- Search for and then delete specific items from your account using My Activity
- Delete specific Alpine products, including your information associated with those products
- Delete your entire Alpine Account
There are other ways to control the information Alpine collects whether or not you’re signed in to an Alpine Account, including:
Browser settings: For example, you can configure your browser to indicate when Alpine has set a cookie in your browser. You can also configure your browser to block all cookies from a specific domain or all domains. But remember that our services rely on cookies to function properly, for things like remembering your language preferences.
Device-level settings: Your device may have controls that determine what information we collect. For example, you can modify location settings on your Android device.
When you share your information
Many of our services let you share information with other people, and you have control over how you share. For example, you can share photos on a review site publicly or you can decide to keep your photos private. Remember, when you share information publicly, your content may become accessible through search engines, including Google Search.
When you’re signed in and interact with some Alpine services, like leaving comments on a blog post or reviewing a restaurant in a directory, your name and photo appear next to your activity.
When Alpine shares your information
We do not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of Alpine except in the following cases:
With your consent
We’ll share personal information outside of Alpine when we have your consent. For example, if you use one of our booking services to make a reservation, we’ll get your permission before sharing your name or phone number with the restaurant. We’ll ask for your explicit consent to share any sensitive personal information.
With domain administrators
If you’re a student or work for an organization that uses Alpine services (or partner services like Google's G Suite), Alpine may be your domain administrator and these employees who manage your account will have access to your service Account. They may be able to:
- Access and retain information stored in your account, like your email
- View statistics regarding your account, like how many apps you install
- Change your account password
- Suspend or terminate your account access
- Receive your account information in order to satisfy applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request
- Restrict your ability to delete or edit your information or your privacy settings.
For external processing
We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help us with customer support.
For legal reasons
We will share personal information outside of Alpine if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
- Meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request. We share information about the number and type of requests we receive from governments in our Transparency Report.
- Enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
- Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues.
- Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users, or the public as required or permitted by law.
We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners — like publishers, advertisers, developers, or rights holders. For example, we share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services. We also allow specific partners to collect information from your browser or device for advertising and measurement purposes using their own cookies or similar technologies.
If Alpine is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we’ll continue to ensure the confidentiality of your personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
We build security into our services to protect your information
All Alpine products are built with strong security features that continuously protect your information. The insights we gain from maintaining our services help us detect and automatically block security threats from ever reaching you. And if we do detect something risky that we think you should know about, we’ll notify you and help guide you through steps to stay better protected.
We work hard to protect you and Alpine from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of information we hold, including:
We use encryption to keep your data private while in transit
We utilize a range of security features, like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Secure Shell, SFTP, and 2 Step Verification to help you protect your account.
We review our information collection, storage, and processing practices, including physical security measures, to prevent unauthorized access to our systems
We restrict access to personal information to Alpine employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.
Deleting Your Data
We retain the data we collect for different periods of time depending on what it is, how we use it, and how you configure your settings:
Some data you can delete whenever you like, such as the content you create or upload. You can also delete activity information saved in your account, or choose to have it deleted automatically after a set period of time.
Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically after a set period of time, such as advertising data in server logs.
We keep some data until you delete your Alpine Account, such as information about how often you use our services.
And some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention, or financial record-keeping.
When you delete data, we follow a deletion process to make sure that your data is safely and completely removed from our servers or retained only in anonymized form. We try to ensure that our services protect information from accidental or malicious deletion. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems.
SMS Privacy
No mobile information will be shared with third parties/affiliates for marketing/promotional purposes.
All the above categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent (our provider of SMS services); this information will not be shared with any third parties.
Data transfers
We maintain servers around the world and your information may be processed on servers located outside of the country where you live. Data protection laws vary among countries, with some providing more protection than others. Regardless of where your information is processed, we apply the same protections described in this policy. We also comply with certain legal frameworks relating to the transfer of data, such as the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Frameworks.
When we receive formal written complaints, we respond by contacting the person who made the complaint. We work with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of your data that we cannot resolve with you directly.
California requirements
If the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) applies to your information, we provide these disclosures and the tools described in this policy so you can exercise your rights to receive information about our data practices, as well as to request access to and deletion of your information. These tools allow you to review, update and delete your information, as well as export and download a copy of it.
Alpine does not sell your personal information. We only share your information as described in this policy. Alpine processes your information for the purposes described in this policy, which include “business purposes” under the CCPA. These purposes include:
Protecting against security threats, abuse, and illegal activity. Alpine uses and may disclose information to detect, prevent and respond to security incidents, and for protecting against other malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity. For example, to protect our services, Alpine may receive or disclose information about IP addresses that malicious actors have compromised.
Auditing and measurement. Alpine uses information for analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used, as well as to fulfill obligations to our partners like publishers, advertisers, developers, or rights holders. We may disclose non-personally identifiable information publicly and with these partners, including for auditing purposes.
Maintaining our services. Alpine uses information to ensure our services are working as intended, such as tracking outages or troubleshooting bugs and other issues that you report to us.
Research and development. Alpine uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public.
Use of service providers. Alpine shares information with service providers to perform services on our behalf, in compliance with our Privacy Policy and other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we may rely on service providers to help provide customer support.
Advertising. Alpine processes information, including online identifiers and information about your interactions with advertisements, to provide advertising. This keeps many of our services freely available for users. You can control what information we use to show you ads by visiting your ad settings.
Alpine also uses information to satisfy applicable laws or regulations, and discloses information in response to legal process or enforceable government requests, including to law enforcement. We provide information about the number and type of requests we receive from governments in our Transparency Report.
If you have additional questions or requests related to your rights under the CCPA, you can contact Alpine.
When this policy applies
This Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by Alpine Internet Solutions, Inc. and its affiliates, including AlpineNT, AlpineOS, PassportNW, EACSpace, ServeAid, BowlRx, Retribal, Smoresy, and services offered on third-party sites, such as advertising services. This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to services that have separate privacy policies that do not incorporate this Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to:
- The information practices of other companies and organizations that advertise our services
- Services offered by other companies or individuals, including products or sites that may include Alpine services, be displayed to you in search results, or be linked from our services
Changes to this policy
We change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We always indicate the date the last changes were published and we offer access to archived versions for your review. If changes are significant, we’ll provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes).
