What personal data does SAPIEN collect and store? We get this question repeatedly in many forms—be it spreadsheets to complete, PDF forms created by corporations, or through online portals of assorted government agencies. But it is fair to say that nowadays, everyone should care about the data stored about them.
Five situations where we collect and store personal data
1. Registering as a SAPIEN User
If you register as a SAPIEN user—for example, to post in the forum—we require your username, a valid email address, and a password. We strongly recommend that you make your user ID something different from your email address since your user ID is displayed in the forum. Aside from requiring the email address to be valid (i.e., able to receive emails), we do not care what you use. If you can get toothfairy@gmail.com and make your user id ‘toothfairy’, you are quite anonymous, and that is fine by us.
What we store is your username, email address, a password hash (not your actual password), your IP address, and the time you logged in last.
2. SAPIEN Customer purchasing from our store
If you purchase software directly from our online store, you need to have a SAPIEN ID (see above). We only store your name and billing address alongside your order if that is associated with your payment method.
We do not store your actual payment method. We pass that information to our payment processor, which also only stores your Credit Card data if you tell them to do so. The processor stores enough data to process a refund in case that is required. Stripe’s privacy policy can be found here. PayPal’s privacy policy can be found here. Either one of the payment processors may store additional data depending on the payment method and if you decide to store your payment method with them. We do, however, not store or have access to this data if you choose to do that.
If you are a customer from the European Union, we will also collect and store your VAT ID, if you have one, and your country. EU regulations require this to process VAT correctly.
3. User unlocking software
When you purchase a copy of any SAPIEN software, you need to unlock it. For that, you need to have a SAPIEN ID.
For the unlock process, the software will transmit your user ID, password, and the activation key. This transmission uses HTTPS and current TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols to keep your data safe. We also transmit what product and version you are unlocking; for statistical reasons, we transmit your OS version. Because this all goes across the internet, your IP address comes along with that process. This is logged (minus the password) so we can look at what happens when things go wrong.
4. User posting in the forum
Aside from needing the ever-present SAPIEN ID, we store whatever you post. So please do not attach credit card data, billing information, or activation keys in the forum.
The forum software stores your IP address (as with everything online), the time and date of the post, and your last login.
5. Sending data with support requests
Occasionally, we ask a user to upload files relevant to a problem. This can be scripts, project files, output captured, or intermediate files—whatever is needed to help you. These files are stored on our website for a maximum of two months, after which they are automatically purged. The person helping you will, of course, look at your files on their computer for a while. We delete user files by policy after a problem has been verified or addressed. We ask that you anonymize any data files you send
so that they do not contain any user IDs, passwords, encryption keys, names, etc.
We do not collect or store any data from your computer. We do not sell or trade your email address—we never did and never will do that. We hate SPAM just as much as you do. The only use for storing your email address is to contact you with pertinent information about the product you purchased or registered. We ask that you provide a secondary email address for account recovery. But that is, of course, not mandatory.
We also do not store any phone numbers. Unless you call us and leave a message, we have no need for that. Even then, we will not save that number with your account. So, if anyone calls you and pretends that you won the SAPIEN lottery and will receive that new version, a sweatshirt, or millions of dollars from your lost account in some African state, none of that will be true.
SAPIEN Technologies Inc. Privacy Policy
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Questions or comments? Please post below or contact sales@sapien.com if you prefer privacy.
