Privacy Policy Introduction
Updated August 1, 2023

How BZZN handles your data

Introduction

In our mission to make commerce better for all, we collect and use information about

  • vendors using BZZN to power their business
  • customers who shop at a BZZN-powered business
  • users of BZZN apps and services
  • visitors to BZZN’s websites, or anyone contacting BZZN support

This Privacy Policy will help you better understand how we collect, use, and share your personal information. If we change our privacy practices, we may update this privacy policy. If any changes are significant, we will let you know (for example, through the BZZN admin or by email).

Our Values

Trust is the foundation of the BZZN platform and includes trusting us to do the right thing with your information. Three main values guide us as we develop our products and services. These values should help you better understand how we think about your information and privacy.

Your information belongs to you
We carefully analyze what types of information we need to provide our services, and we try to limit the information we collect to only what we really need. Where possible, we delete or anonymize this information when we no longer need it. When building and improving our products, our engineers work with privacy in mind. In all of this work our guiding principle is that your information belongs to you, and we aim to only use your information to your benefit.

We protect your information from others
If a third party requests your personal information, we will refuse to share it unless you give us permission or we are legally required. When we are legally required to share your personal information, we will tell you in advance, unless we are legally forbidden.

We help vendors meet their privacy obligations
Many of the vendors using BZZN do not have the benefit of a dedicated privacy team, and it is important to us to help them meet their privacy obligations. To do this, we try to build our products and services so they can easily be used in a privacy-friendly way.

Why we process your information

We generally process your information when we need to do so to fulfill a contractual obligation (for example, to process your subscription payments to use the BZZN platform), or where we or someone we work with needs to use your personal information for a reason related to their business (for example, to provide you with a service). Laws in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and in the United Kingdom (“UK”) call these reasons “legitimate interests.” These “legitimate interests” include:

  • preventing risk and fraud
  • answering questions or providing other types of support
  • providing and improving our products and services
  • providing reporting and analytics
  • testing out features or additional services
  • assisting with marketing, advertising, or other communications

We only process personal information for these “legitimate interests” after considering the potential risks to your privacy and balancing any risks with certain measures—for example, by providing clear transparency into our privacy practices, offering you control over your personal information where appropriate, limiting the information we keep, limiting what we do with your information, who we send your information to, how long we keep your information, or the technical measures we use to protect your information.

We may also process your personal information where you have provided your consent. In particular, where we cannot rely on an alternative legal basis for processing, where you direct us to transfer information to a third party, where we receive your data from a third party is sourced and it already comes with consent or where we are required by law to ask for your consent (including in the context of some of our sales and marketing activities). At any time, you have a right to withdraw your consent by changing your communication choices, opting out from our communications or by contacting us.

Your rights over your information

We believe you should be able to access and control your personal information no matter where you live. Depending on how you use BZZN, you may have the right to request access to, correct, amend, delete, port to another service provider, restrict, or object to certain uses of your personal information. We will not charge you more or provide you with a different level of service if you exercise any of these rights. Please note that a number of these rights apply only in certain circumstances, and all of these rights may be limited by law.

If you buy something from or otherwise provide your information to a BZZN-powered store and wish to exercise these rights over information about your purchase or interaction, you need to directly contact the vendor you interacted with. We are a processor and process information on their behalf. We will of course help our vendors to fulfill these requests to the extent required by law, such as by giving them the tools to do so and by answering their questions.

If you are a vendor, partner, Shop user, BZZN employee, website visitor or other individual that BZZN has a direct relationship with, please submit your data subject request here. Please note that if you send us a request relating to your personal information, we have to make sure that it is you before we can respond. In order to do so, we may use a third party to collect and verify identification documents.

If you are not happy with our response to a request, you can contact us to resolve the issue. If you are located in the EEA or UK, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection or privacy authority at any time.

Finally, because there is no common understanding about what a “Do Not Track” signal is supposed to mean, we don’t respond to those signals in any particular way.

Where we send your information

We work with and process data about individuals across the world. To operate our business, we may send your personal information outside of your state, province, or country, including to the United States. This data may be subject to the laws of the countries where we send it. We take steps to protect your information when we send your information across borders. While we do what we can to protect your information, we may at times be legally required to disclose your personal information (for example, if we receive a valid court order)

How long do we retain your information

We will retain your personal data only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we have collected it. To determine the appropriate retention period, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of your personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means and the applicable legal requirements. We will also retain and use your personal information to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our policies. If you stop using our services or if you delete your account with us, we will delete your information or store your information in an aggregated and anonymized format.

Our use of Machine Learning

One of the ways in which we are able to help vendors using BZZN is by using techniques like “machine learning” (some laws, including certain EEA and UK laws, may refer to this as “automated decision-making”) to help us improve our services. When we use machine learning, we either: (1) still have a human being involved in the process (and so are not fully automated); or (2) use machine learning in ways that don’t have legal or similarly significant effects (for example, reordering how campaigns might appear when you view the app).

How we protect your information

Our teams work tirelessly to protect your information, and to ensure the security and integrity of our platform. We also have independent auditors assess the security of our data storage and systems that process financial information. However, we all know that no method of transmission over the Internet, and method of electronic storage, can be 100% secure. This means we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your personal information.

How we use “cookies” and other tracking technologies

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies on our website and when providing our services. Some cookies are necessary to allow you to browse our website, use its features, and access secure areas. The use of these cookies is essential for the website to work. For example, we use user-input cookies for the duration of a session to keep track of a user’s input when filling in forms that span several pages.

We also use functional cookies to remember choices you’ve made or information you’ve provided, such as your username, language, or the region you are in. This allows us to tailor your website experience specifically to your preferences. For example, authentication cookies are functional cookies that are used for the duration of a session (or persistent, if you agree to the “remember me” function) to allow users to authenticate themselves on subsequent visits or to gain access to authorized content across pages. The functional cookies we use include:

  • User-centric security cookies to detect authentication abuses for a limited persistent duration, like repeated failed login attempts. These cookies are set for the specific task of increasing thesecurity of the service.
  • Multimedia content player session cookies (flash cookies) are used for the duration of a session to store technical data needed to play back video or audio content (e.g. image quality, network link speed, and buffering parameters).
  • Load balancing session cookies are used for the duration of the session to identify the same server in the pool in order for the load balancer to redirect user requests appropriately.
  • User interface customization persistent cookies are used to store a user’s preference regarding a service across web pages.

Shopify is dedicated to user experience and we use many tools to help us improve our website and our commerce platform. To this end, we use reporting and analytics cookies to collect information about how you use our website or our merchants’ storefronts, and how often. These cookies only gather information for statistical purposes and only use pseudonymous cookie identifiers that do not directly identify you. The performance cookies we use include:

  • First party analytics cookies - We use these cookies to estimate the number of unique visitors, to improve our websites and our merchants’ websites, and to detect the most searched for words in search engines that lead to a webpage. We use these cookies to learn how our websites and our merchants’ websites are performing and make relevant improvements to improve your browsing experience.
  • Third party analytics cookies - We also use Google Analytics and other third-party analytics providers listed below to help measure how users interact with our website content. These cookies “remember” what our users have done on previous pages and how they’ve interacted with the website. For more information on Google Analytics, visit Google’s information page.

Advertising cookies are used on our website to tailor marketing to you and your interests and provide you with a more personalized service in the future. These cookies remember that you visited our website and we may share this information with third-parties, such as advertisers. Although these cookies can track your device’s visits to our website and other sites, they typically cannot personally identify you. Without these cookies, the advertisements that you see may be less relevant and interesting to you. Read more about how companies use cookies to conduct targeted or retargeted advertising here. We do not set advertising cookies through our merchants’ storefronts ourselves, though merchants may choose to do so independently.

Finally, Social and Content cookies are placed by many social media plugins (for example the Facebook ’like’ button), and other tools meant to provide or improve the content on a website (for example services that allow the playing of video files, or that create comments sections). We integrate these modules into our platform to improve the experience of browsing and interacting with our websites. Please note that some of these third party services place cookies that are also used for things like behavioural advertising, analytics, and/or market research.

How you can reach us

If you would like to ask about, make a request relating to, or complain about how we process your personal information, please contact BZZN Support, or mail us at the address below.

If you buy something from or otherwise provide your information to a BZZN-powered store, the vendor is your data controller and we are acting as a processor on their behalf. If you have questions about how a vendor or store processes your personal information, you should contact the vendor or visit their privacy policy.

BZZN, Inc.
ATTN: Chief Operating Officer
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Virginia
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