Last updated: December 20, 2018
The privacy of your data — and it is your data, not ours! — is a big deal to us. We’ll only ever access your account to help you with a problem or squash a software bug. We’ll never open any uploaded files unless you ask us to. We log all access to all accounts by IP address, so we can always verify that no unauthorized access has happened for as long as the logs are kept.
When you sign up for Basecamp, we ask for your name, company name, and email address. That's just so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you invoices, updates, or other essential information. We’ll never sell your personal info to third parties, and we won’t use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission, either.
When you pay for Basecamp, we ask for your credit card and billing address. That's so we can charge you for service, calculate taxes due, and send you invoices. Your credit card is passed directly to our payment processor and doesn't ever go through our servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number, for account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address to calculate any sales tax due in the United States, to detect fraudulent credit card transactions, and to print on your invoices.
When you write Basecamp with a question or to ask for help, we'll keep that correspondence, and the email address, for future reference. When you browse our marketing pages, we'll track that for statistical purposes (like conversion rates and to test new designs). We also store any information you volunteer, like surveys, for as long as it makes sense.
The only times we’ll ever share your info:
- To provide products or services you've requested, with your permission. List of third-party services we use.
- To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service, or as otherwise required by law.
- If Basecamp is acquired by or merged with another company — we don’t plan on that, but if it happens — we’ll notify you well before any info about you is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
You may have heard about the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) in Europe. GDPR gives people under its protection certain rights with respect to their personal information collected by us on the Site. Accordingly, Basecamp recognizes and will comply with GDPR and those rights, except as limited by applicable law. The rights under GDPR include:
- Right of Access. This includes your right to access the personal information we gather about you, and your right to obtain information about the sharing, storage, security and processing of that information.
- Right to Correction. This is your right to request correction of your personal information.
- Right to Erasure. This is your right to request, subject to certain limitations under applicable law, that your personal information be erased from our possession (also known as the “Right to be forgotten”). However, if applicable law requires us to comply with your request to delete your information, fulfillment of your request may prevent you from using Basecamp services and may result in closing your account.
- Right to Complain. You have the right to make a complaint regarding our handling of your personal information with the appropriate supervisory authority.
- Right to Restrict Processing. This is your right to request restriction of how and why your personal information is used or processed.
- Right to Object. This is your right, in certain situations, to object to how or why your personal information is processed.
- Right to Portability. This is your right to receive the personal information we have about you and the right to transmit it to another party.
- Right to not be subject to Automated Decision-Making. This is your right to object and prevent any decision that could have a legal, or similarly significant, effect on you from being made solely based on automated processes. This right is limited, however, if the decision is necessary for performance of any contract between you and us, is allowed by applicable European law, or is based on your explicit consent.
Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and directly updating your account information. If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us at [email protected].
As part of the services we provide, and only to the extent necessary, we may use certain third party processors to process some or all of your personal information. For identification of these processors, and where they are located, please see our Subprocessor listing. We have signed appropriate data processing contracts that comply with GDPR with each processor.
Basecamp won’t hand your data over to law enforcement unless a court order says we have to. We flat-out reject requests from local and federal law enforcement when they seek data without a court order. And unless we're legally prevented from it, we’ll always inform you when such requests are made.
All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. Data isn’t encrypted while it's live in our database (since it needs to be ready to send to you when you need it), but we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest—you can read more about that on our security page.
For more information about how we keep your information secure, please review our security overview.
When you cancel your account, we'll ensure that nothing is stored on our servers past 30 days. Anything you delete on your account while it's active will also be purged within 30 days (up until then it's available in the trash can).
See our EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield policy.
This Site is operated in the United States. If you are located in the European Union or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to the United States. By using our Site, participating in any of our services and/or providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.
Basecamp may update this policy once in a blue moon — we’ll notify you about significant changes by emailing the account owner or by placing a prominent notice on our site. You can access, change or delete your personal information at any time by contacting our support team.
Questions about this privacy policy? Please get in touch and we’ll be happy to answer them!