Privacy Policy

Last Updated: January 18, 2024

Your privacy is critically important to us. At AutoGive, we have a few fundamental principles:

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
• We aim to make it simple for you to control what information on your website/Group is kept private or shared publicly.
• We aim for transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

Hello! We are the folks behind AutoGive - a Service designed to allow anyone to collect payments online in order to improve their own life or the lives of others. Our mission is to enable people to take action and make the world a better place.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our website (including AutoGive.com and app.AutoGive.com)
• Our mobile applications (including the AutoGive mobile app for Android and iOS)
• Our other AutoGive products, services, and features that are available on or through our website (for example, Payments, Messaging and Banking Deposits)
• Other users’ website/Groups that use our Services, while you are logged in to your account with us;
• Other services where this Privacy Policy is posted.

This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at AutoGive or one of our subsidiaries. Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications, and other products and services where this Privacy Policy is posted collectively as “Services.” Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our 3rd Party Integrations, like Stripe (Payments, Banking Deposits, etc), that have a separate privacy policy. Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We collect information about you — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

• Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for an AutoGive account to provide a name, email address and mobile phone number. If you are the Recipient (receiving payments from your group), you may provide us with more information required to deposit money into your bank account. This will include Full Name, Address, Date of Birth, Last 4-Digits of Your Social Security Number (in the United States), along with the Last 4 Digits of your Bank Account and Routing Numbers.
• Public Group information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for aspects of your Group that are Public. For example, if you are the Organizer or Recipient of an AutoGive Group, your name is visible to those who have the link to your Group. Your Group Landing Page (what those invited will see before joining your Group) will also display the names of the Group Organizer and Group Recipient.
• All incoming Group Members who complete their payment must be manually allowed (or denied) into the Group by the Group Organizer. In doing so, the Group Organizer always knows who has been allowed into the Group.
• Payment and contact information: There are various ways in which you may provide us payment information and associated contact information. For example, you may provide us with financial details to set up a payments integration, like the email address for your Stripe or PayPal account, Last 4-Digits of your Bank Account and Routing Numbers, and/or Last 4-Digits of your Social Security Number or other identifier so we can deposit payments to you. We also keep a record of the payments you’ve made.
• Content information: You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (for example, feedback or testimonial that you allow AutoGive to publish across its website, mobile application, social media or other outlets).
• Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide credentials for your financial institution through trusted and vetted integrations with services like Stripe.
• Communications with us (Hello!): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Customer Service Engineers about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via Contact Form, email, phone, AutoGive comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).
• Job applicant information: If you apply for a job with us — awesome! You may provide us with information like your name, contact information, resume or CV, online profile(s), professional or personal references, similar professional and employment-related data, work authorization verification as part of the application process, and any other information that you choose to provide with your application. We may also collect additional information about you during the process, like background and credit checks (in applicable jurisdictions and only for certain job roles). You may also provide us with demographic information when required by law or to support our diverse workplace initiatives, such as your gender, racial or ethnic origin, veteran status, and disability status if you voluntarily submit such information as part of your application. We collect demographic information in accordance with applicable law.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information from you and about the devices you use to connect to the Services automatically:

• Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services — for example, when you create or make changes to your website/Group using AutoGive.
• Transactional information: When you make a payment through our Services, we collect information about the transaction, such as all transaction details, payment amount, and the date and location of the transaction.
• Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that website/Group Organizers, Members, Recipients & Visitors perform on a website/Group using AutoGive.com or an AutoGive app — in other words, who did what and when. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, support document searches, features enabled for your website/Group, interactions with our Customer Support Team (and other parts of our Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
• Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (like when you post a message or photo with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
• Stored information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile apps. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of the sunrise to your website/Group.
• Interactions with other users’ websites/Groups: We collect some information about your interactions with other users’ sites while you are logged in to your account with us, such as your “Likes” and the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that we can, for example, recommend posts we think may interest you. As another example, we collect information about the comments users make while logged in and use that information to, for example, tally up statistics about your comments and display information about your comments to you or your Group.
• Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website/Group stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website/Group each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on website/Groups and emails. AutoGive uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads.

For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

• Third Party Login: If you create or log in to your AutoGive.com account through another service (like Google using Single Sign On) we may receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your username, your email address) or other information that is provided by the third party using Single Sign On features.
• Social Sharing Services: If you connect your website/Group or account to a social media service (like Twitter) through our Publicize feature, we may receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information, friends list or other information the social media service chooses to provide to us) via the authorization procedures for that service.
• Financial Account Info: If you use a third-party payment processor like Stripe Payments, we’ll receive information relating to your account with that payment processor, such as your email address and phone number. If you already use the payment processor, we may receive your payment information from the payment processor.
• Google Account Information: When you connect your Google account to your AutoGive account, we may access certain Google user data to allow you to access and manage features more seamlessly. The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.

Third-party services may also give us information, like mailing addresses for individuals who are not yet our users. We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, host your website/Group, backup and restore your website/Group, provide customer service, process payments, deposits and orders, and verify user information.
• To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage website/Groups more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.
• To place and manage ads in our advertising program. For example, to place ads on our users’ websites/Groups and some of our own sites as part of our advertising program and understand ad performance.
• To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people opted-in to an upgraded plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
• To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of AutoGive and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.  
• To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
• To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services, recommending content through, and providing new essays and stories through our blog and/or other means for your reading pleasure.
• To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our products, or keep you up to date on AutoGive; or texting you to verify your payment. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)
• To recruit and hire new AutoGivers. For example, by evaluating job applicants (including verifying their identity, experience, and other information submitted) and communicating with them by phone, email, or social media platforms. If the application progresses, we may also collect interview information and background check information. This may also include verifying information required to initiate employment, for purposes such as confirming ability to legally work in a specific location, setting up payroll, and complying with statutory reporting requirements.
  

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below, as well as in the section called Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others:

• Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
• Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors and service providers who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Stripe, which powers Payments & Deposits, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, payment providers you use for your own eCommerce operations, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, data escrow services that allow us to provide domain registration services, and your hosting provider if your site is not hosted by AutoGive); those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); other third-party tools that help us manage operations; and companies that make products available on our website/Groups (like the extensions or plugins provided by other Service Providers), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you.
• Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request. For more information on how we respond to requests for information about AutoGive users, please see our Legal Guidelines.
• To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of AutoGive, third parties, or the public at large.
  For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• Business transfers: In connection with any proposed or actualy merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the event that AutoGive goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party.
• With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so, like when you connected your site to a social media service through our Publicize feature.
• Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.
• Site owners: If you have an AutoGive account and interact with another site using our Services, your information may be shared with the administrators of the other site. For example, if you make a payment (like via Stripe’s Payments feature) to a website/Group, your name, user name, and email address (among other items) may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site.
• Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish the content of that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that may be publicly available (to those who have the link to your website/Group) includes the names of the AutoGive website/Group Organizer, Recipient and certain information about the website/Group such as Average Monthly Gift Amount to encourage others to give generously. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding to use our Services.

How Long We Keep Information

We retain information about you for as long as it is needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information.

For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of AutoGive’s website/Groups, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system. We retain the logs for a period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to AutoGive’s website/Groups and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our website/Groups.

If you are a job applicant, we will keep your personal data during the application process, and for a certain period thereafter. To determine that period, we take into account a number of factors, like our legal and regulatory obligations (such as equal opportunity obligations) and whether we may need to retain personal data for internal business purposes like analyzing our applicant pool.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we take a variety of measuresto protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks. To enhance the security of your account, we require advanced security settings, like Two Step Mobile Authentication.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the information that you provide: Please keep in mind that if you do not provide certain information, our Services will not be accessible. If you are a job applicant, and you choose not to provide certain data elements to us, we may not be able to proceed with the recruitment process.
• Limit access to information on your mobile device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features, like geotagging for photographs.
• Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other transactional communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
• Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, AutoGive does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using AutoGive’s website/Groups, with the drawback that certain features of AutoGive’s website/Groups may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Online analytics: You can do this through your user settings. By opting out, you will stop sharing information with our analytics tool about events or actions that happen after the opt-out, while you’re logged in to your AutoGive account.
  We and our vendors may use third-party analytics services on the Services to help us understand how users engage with the Services, including Google Analytics. These parties may use cookies and other technologies to help collect, analyze, and provide us with reports and/or data. For more information about Google Analytics and how it collects and processes data, please visit: https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. To opt out of Google Analytics using your information for analytics purposes, see: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

• Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account if you no longer want to use our Services. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.
  

Your Information & Personalized Advertising

Our mission to help empower others to improve the world means making our Services accessible to as many people as possible. We may show ads on some of our users’ websites/Groups as well as some of our own sites, and the revenue these ads generate helps maintain and improve our Services. We may allow third-party advertising technologies (e.g., ad networks and ad servers, or other advertising partners) to place cookies or other tracking technologies on your browser or device to collect information about you to assist in the delivery of relevant advertising on other websites you visit and other online services you use. These ads may be based on your current activity or your activity over time and across other websites and online services and may be tailored to your interests.

As part of any current or future advertising program, we and our users may use cookies to share certain device identifiers and information about your browsing activities with our advertising partners, and those advertising partners may use that information to show you personalized ads on some of our users’ websites/Groups and some of our own.

The personal information we share includes online identifiers; internet or other network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP address); and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address).

We neither have access to, nor does this Privacy Policy govern, the cookies or other tracking technologies that may be placed on the device you use to access the Services by such non-affiliated third parties. If you are interested in more information about tailored browser advertising and how you can generally control cookies from being put on your computer to deliver tailored advertising, you may visit the Network Advertising Initiative’s Consumer Opt-Out link, the Digital Advertising Alliance’s Consumer Opt-Out link, or Your Online Choices to opt out of receiving tailored advertising from companies that participate in those programs. You also may opt-out from Google Analytics for Display Advertising or the Google Display Network by using Google’s Ads Settings.

Contacting Us About These Rights

You may be able to access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings or by choosing to Contact Us. We will review these requests on a case-by-case basis accordance with applicable law. When you contact us, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please Contact Us. This is the fastest way to get a response to your inquiry.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

AutoGive’s Services may be offered worldwide, so personal information may be transferred to recipients in other jurisdictions, including to locations with privacy and data protection laws that are less protective than those in your home country.

Third-Party Software and Services

If you’d like to use third-party software or services, please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. For example, some third-party services may request or require access to your (yours, your visitors’, or customers’) data via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services.

Visitors to Our Users’ websites/Groups

We encourage our users to post a privacy policy that accurately describes their practices on data collection, use, and sharing of personal information. Users control the content posted on their sites/Groups, so any disputes regarding content on a user’s site/Group should be made directly to the site/Group owner.

Privacy Policy Changes

AutoGive may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. AutoGive encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. We will post those changes here. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.