Part I – Information Zoho collects and controls
What information Zoho collects about you
We collect information about you only if we need the information for some legitimate purpose. Zoho will have information about you only if (a) you have provided the information yourself, (b) Zoho has automatically collected the information, or (c) Zoho has obtained the information from a third party. Below we describe the various scenarios that fall under each of those three categories and the information collected in each one.
Information that you provide us
i. Account signup : When you sign up for an account to access one or more of our services, we ask for information like your name, contact number, email address and country to complete the account signup process. You'll also be required to choose a unique username and a password for accessing the created account. You may also provide us with more information such as your photo, time zone and language, but we don’t require that information to sign up for an account. After signing up, you will have the option of choosing a security question and an answer to the security question — if you provide these, they will be used only while resetting your password.
ii. Event registrations and other form submissions : We record information that you submit when you (i) register for any event, including webinars or seminars, (ii) subscribe to our newsletter or any other mailing list, (iii) submit a form in order to download any product, whitepaper, or other materials, (iv) participate in contests or respond to surveys, or (v) submit a form to request customer support, get a quote or to contact Zoho for any other purpose.
iii. Payment processing : When you buy something from us, we ask you to provide your name, contact information, and credit card information or other payment account information. When you submit your card information, we store the name and address of the cardholder, the expiry date and the last four digits of the credit card number. We do not store the actual credit card number. For quick processing of future payments, if you have given us your approval, we may store your credit card information or other payment information in an encrypted format in the secured servers of our Payment Gateway Service Providers.
iv. Testimonials : When you authorize us to post testimonials about our products and services on websites, we may include your name and other personal information in the testimonial. You will be given an opportunity to review and approve the testimonial before we post it. If you wish to update or delete your testimonial, you can contact us at privacy@zohocorp.com
v. Interactions with Zoho : We may record, analyze and use your interactions with us, including email, telephone, and chat conversations with our sales and customer support professionals, for improving our interactions with you and other customers.
Information that we collect automatically
i. Information from browsers, devices and servers : When you visit our websites, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices and servers make available, such as the internet protocol address, browser type, language preference, time zone, referring URL, date and time of access, operating system, mobile device manufacturer and mobile network information. We include these in our log files to understand more about visitors to our websites.
ii. Information from cookies and tracking technologies : We use temporary and permanent cookies to identify users of our services and to enhance user experience. We embed unique identifiers in our downloadable products to track usage of the products. We also use cookies, beacons, tags, scripts, and other similar technologies to identify visitors, track website navigation, gather demographic information about visitors and users, understand email campaign effectiveness and for targeted visitor and user engagement by tracking your activities on our websites. We mostly use first-party cookies and do not use third-party cookies or other third-party tracking technologies on our websites for non-essential or intrusive tracking. You can learn more about the cookies used on our websites here. You can also learn more about Zoho's stance against non-essential and intrusive third-party cookies and tracking technology here. We also use first-party Local Storage Objects (LSOs) such as HTML5 to store content information and preferences to provide certain features.
iii. Information from application logs and mobile analytics : We collect information about your use of our products, services and mobile applications from application logs and in-house usage analytics tools, and use it to understand how your business use and needs can improve our products. This information includes clicks, scrolls, features accessed, access time and frequency, errors generated, performance data, storage utilized, user settings and configurations, and devices used to access and their locations.
Information that we collect from third parties
i. Signups using federated authentication service providers : You can log in to Zoho Services using supported federated authentication service providers such as LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google. These services will authenticate your identity and give you the option to share certain personal information with us, such as your name and email address.
ii. Referrals : If someone has referred any of our products or services to you through any of our referral programs, that person may have provided us your name, email address and other personal information. You may contact us at privacy@zohocorp.com to request that we remove your information from our database. If you provide us information about another person, or if another person gives us your information, we will only use that information for the specific reason for which it was provided to us.
iii. Information from our reselling partners and service providers : If you contact any of our reselling partners, or otherwise express interest in any of our products or services to them, the reselling partner may pass your name, email address and other information to Zoho. If you register for or attend an event that is sponsored by Zoho, the event organizer may share your information with us. Zoho may also receive information about you from review sites if you comment on any review of our products and services, and from other third-party service providers that we engage for marketing our products and services.
iv. Information from social media sites and other publicly available sources : When you provide feedback or reviews about our products, interact, or engage with us on marketplaces, review sites or social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram through posts, comments, questions and other interactions, we may collect such publicly available information, including profile information, to allow us to connect with you, improve our products, or better understand user reactions and issues. We must tell you that once collected, this information may remain with us even if you delete it from these sites. Zoho may also add and update information about you, from other publicly available sources.
Purposes for using information
In addition to the purposes mentioned above, we may use your information for the following purposes:
- To communicate with you (such as through email) about products that you have downloaded and services that you have signed up for, changes to this Privacy Policy, changes to the Terms of Service, or important notices;
- To keep you posted on new products and services, upcoming events, offers, promotions and other information that we think will be of interest to you;
- To ask you to participate in surveys, or to solicit feedback on our products and services;
- To set up and maintain your account, and to do all other things required for providing our services, such as enabling collaboration, providing mail hosting, and backing up and restoring your data;
- To understand how users use our products and services, to monitor and prevent problems, and to improve our products and services;
- To provide customer support, and to analyze and improve our interactions with customers;
- To detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, to report spam, and to protect the rights and interests of Zoho, Zoho’s users, third parties and the public;
- To update, expand and analyze our records, identify new customers, and provide products and services that may be of interest to you;
- To analyze trends, administer our websites, and track visitor navigations on our websites to understand what visitors are looking for and to better help them;
- To monitor and improve marketing campaigns and make suggestions relevant to the user.
Legal bases for collecting and using information
Legal processing bases applicable to Zoho : If you are an individual from the European Economic Area (EEA), our legal basis for information collection and use depends on the personal information concerned and the context in which we collect it. Most of our information collection and processing activities are typically based on (i) contractual necessity, (ii) one or more legitimate interests of Zoho or a third party that are not overridden by your data protection interests, or (iii) your consent. Sometimes, we may be legally required to collect your information, or may need your personal information to protect your vital interests or those of another person.
Withdrawal of consent : Where we rely on your consent as the legal basis, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time, but this will not affect any processing that has already taken place.
Legitimate interests notice : Where we rely on legitimate interests as the legal basis and those legitimate interests are not specified above, we will clearly explain to you what those legitimate interests are at the time that we collect your information.
Your choice in information use
Opt out of non-essential electronic communications : You may opt out of receiving newsletters and other non-essential messages by using the ‘unsubscribe’ function included in all such messages. However, you will continue to receive essential notices and emails such as account notification emails (password change, renewal reminders, etc), security incident alerts, security and privacy update notifications, and essential transactional notices and payment related emails.
Disable cookies : You can disable browser cookies before visiting our websites. However, if you do so, you may not be able to use certain features of the websites properly.
Optional information : You can choose not to provide optional profile information such as your photo. You can also delete or change your optional profile information. You can always choose not to fill in non-mandatory fields when you submit any form linked to our websites.
Who we share your information with
All Zoho group entities listed here have access to the information covered in Part I. We do not sell any personal information. We share your information only in the ways that are described in this Privacy Policy, and only with parties who adopt appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
Employees and independent contractors : Employees and independent contractors of relevant Zoho group entities have access to the information covered in Part I on a need-to-know basis. We require all employees and independent contractors of Zoho group entities to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
Third-party service providers : We may need to share your personal information and aggregated or de-identified information with third-party service providers that we engage, such as marketing and advertising partners, event organizers, web analytics providers and payment processors. These service providers are authorized to use your personal information only as necessary to provide these services to us.
Domain registrars : When you register a domain through Zoho from domain name registrars, we share your name and contact information such as your physical address, email address and phone number with them as per the ICANN domain registration rules.
Reselling partners : We may share your personal information with our authorized reselling partners in your region, solely for the purpose of contacting you about products that you have downloaded or services that you have signed up for. We will give you an option to opt out of continuing to work with that partner.
Marketplace application developers : When you install or purchase any application developed using Zoho's APIs that is posted on Zoho’s online marketplace, your name and email address will be shared with the developer of the application, so they may engage with you directly as the provider of that application or service. Zoho does not control the use of your personal information by the developers, which will be based on their own privacy policies.
Other cases : Other scenarios in which we may share the same information covered under Parts I and II are described in Part III.
Your rights with respect to information we hold about you as a controller
If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), you have the following rights with respect to information that Zoho holds about you. Zoho undertakes to provide you the same rights no matter where you choose to live.
Right to access : You have the right to access (and obtain a copy of, if required) the categories of personal information that we hold about you, including the information's source, purpose and period of processing, and the persons to whom the information is shared
Right to rectification : You have the right to update the information we hold about you or to rectify any inaccuracies. Based on the purpose for which we use your information, you can instruct us to add supplemental information about you in our database.
Right to erasure : You have the right to request that we delete your personal information in certain circumstances, such as when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was originally collected.
Right to restriction of processing : You may also have the right to request to restrict the use of your information in certain circumstances, such as when you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
Right to data portability : You have the right to transfer your information to a third party in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, in circumstances where the information is processed with your consent or by automated means.
Right to object : You have the right to object to the use of your information in certain circumstances, such as the use of your personal information for direct marketing.
Right to complain : You have the right to complain to the appropriate supervisory authority if you have any grievance against the way we collect, use or share your information. This right may not be available to you if there is no supervisory authority dealing with data protection in your country.
Retention of information
We retain your personal information for as long as it is required for the purposes stated in this Privacy Policy. Sometimes, we may retain your information for longer periods as permitted or required by law, such as to maintain suppression lists, prevent abuse, if required in connection with a legal claim or proceeding, to enforce our agreements, for tax, accounting, or to comply with other legal obligations. When we no longer have a legitimate need to process your information, we will delete or anonymize your information from our active databases. We will also securely store the information and isolate it from further processing on backup discs until deletion is possible.