Privacy Policy
This is a plain language description, in the spirit of the GDPR, of how we use your personal data and is not the Terms and Conditions of Zingword. For the Terms and Conditions legalese, head here. This document isn’t like the others you might see: we are actually trying to describe all the ways and places where your personal data (usually just name and email) is stored or might be stored.
Your “My personal data” dashboard
In an effort to make it easy for you to publish/unpublish your profile, cancel your account, or make data erasure requests, we have created a dashboard just for this. You can find it by navigating to “My personal data” in your user menu.
We use your data to offer the service
Zingword uses the data you provide, like your name, email, and your translation areas of expertise, etc., to be able to provide you with the Site Services and overall participation in the Zingword platform.
We may also use your data to customize content we may display to you, both in the Service and elsewhere online.
How is the data stored
Zingword stores your data on Amazon AWS servers. When you access the Site, we provide a secure, HTTPS connection. Amazon is a popular host for web applications, and we have chosen them for many reasons, including that they are compliant with all the American and European regulations for data security.
Security
We have developed significant means to protect your data, including the authentication system used when you create your account and password, and we have limited social networks’ ability to harvest your activity.
That being said, no security is guaranteed. In the event that your account information is compromised, Zingword will make the necessary notifications and take the actions we deem necessary as soon as possible.
Your choices and rights
We will honor User requests to the extent we can reasonably do so and as required by law, but some information will remain on the Services, such as information you posted publicly.
You can control your personal data or close your account by navigating to your user menu and selecting “My personal data.” If you request us to delete your data, we will take reasonable steps to delete your data, but we will retain your name and email address to protect your identity on our platform (prevent other people from stealing it), and we may retain any information you published while using the Site and Site Services, like reviews of other translation services or comments you may have made while using the Site Services.
Once you publish something on Zingword.com or share it with others, neither you nor Zingword can delete all possible copies of the information that may exist worldwide.
Our Legitimate Interests
We handle Personal Information because it furthers our legitimate interests in commercial activities that we undertake, yet not undermining the fundamental rights and freedoms of the affected individual. Some of these activities include:
- Providing the Site and Site Services
- Improving our business
- Analyzing relevant details or patterns
- Helping third parties analyze such details and patterns with anonymized data
- Marketing and communications
- Addressing the information security needs of Zingword and our Users
- Legal issues
Data retention
Your data is stored for a minimum of five years or for as long as you have an account with us. If you request data erasure, we may retain your name and email address in your legitimate interest to prevent someone from stealing your identity on our platform as well as content you published publicly, like reviews of other translation services, to continue to offer the Site Services to the best of our ability. In any case, your information may persist in copies made for backup and business continuity purposes.
Links to other sites
The Site and Site Services sometimes include links to other websites. For example, a translator links a continued professional development activity to the URL of that activity. It goes without saying that a) a link to a website is not an endorsement and b) in terms of your data, privacy, and security, we can’t control what those other websites are doing. Therefore, always use your own judgement when you click on links that take you off-site.
How we use your data
Algorithms
The data we collect may be used for our algorithms, which attempt to match translators with customers based on your skills, experience, language pairs, and for other tools we develop to improve the services offered by Zingword to our users or to market our platform, including your profile, across the internet.
For email notification messages
Your email address is used to deliver notifications or messages from Zingword that are considered vital to the platform. This includes emails like client request notifications and password resets, but also may include emails about important updates, things you should know, or messages about how you can use Zingword, sharing updates about new releases, reminding you of stuff you forgot to do… there are lots of examples.
As a marketplace, we have several vital interests. For example, that translators are collecting references is vital because it helps us to keep the quality high and to only present the best translators to the best customers. Thus, we consider reminders to “collect references to enhance your profile” to be as vital as the email telling you, “hey, you’ve got a new translation request.”
Likewise, it’s vital to the platform that translators understand how prices work, new features we have added, or how they can better communicate with clients, so we consider communications on those subjects to also be vital.
To improve our products and services
We do use related analytics services to collect information about how you use the platform, which are used by Zingword to identify areas for improvement, to keep track of the overall quality of the Zingword experience, to provide customer service, and to grow our community.
We currently use HEAP Analytics and AutopilotHQ for such purposes. In both cases, your profile data, including name and email, are stored in those platforms.
That being said, we may employ other analytics platforms in the future such as Google Analytics, KISSMetrics, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Pixel, HEAP Analytics, Intercom, Autopilot, Mailchimp, or others.
Your personal data is not always stored in these tools, but sometimes it is. Names, emails, avatars, or other information may used to track help support tickets or analyze the service.
Advertising on social media
We have made a conscious decision not to install like buttons or follow buttons from Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms, because sites that install those buttons provide information to those services about your browsing habits.
As of August, 2020, we do not have any social media tracking codes installed on Zingword, like for example, Facebook Pixel. Those services help provide analytics and targeted advertising on the social media platforms, but they come at a cost: the Facebook user who visits your site is providing their browsing data to Facebook. In such cases, advertising platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or Google are considered your data controller when their analytics codes are installed on any given site, and they use this data in their overall advertising services.
We may use your linked social accounts or personal data to build custom lookalike audiences. Twitter, Linkedin, Google, Facebook, and others sometimes offer custom “lookalike audience” tools, where they can say, “hey, would you like us to show ads to people who are similar to the ones who normally visit your site?” It’s a useful tool for marketing, not just to translators, but also to market translator services to buyers. We are not super keen on doing this, but as we think it benefits translators, buyers, and the community at large, we reserve the right to do so, and it seems to provide less data than installing their tracking codes would.
Finally, even though we don’t have them right now and will try not to have them, we do reserve the right to install a social media tracking code to Zingword for Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter. While technically such a change will appear in our cookie policy, your consent to be tracked with such codes is managed with the pertinent social network, not with Zingword, and we recommend that you check your settings in your social media accounts if this piques your interest.
For helpdesk, in-app notifications, and email messages
We provide customer service using Livezilla. Your personal data may be stored there for the purpose of offering you our helpdesk when you have questions.
We use Livezilla to collect feedback, respond to help requests, send messages based on specific stuff you do in the platform, and other core functions of the Zingword experience. We may change this helpdesk product in the future and use something like Intercom, Drift, or Zendesk. You are comfortable with this.
For Mailchimp records
We also use Mailchimp to keep track of lists of people who sign up for Zingword or other contacts. We won't send you any "non-vital" emails without your separate consent, but we may keep your record in Mailchimp as an organizational thing. Note that this is not where we send newsletters from, so if you want to unsubscribe, you should do so on the mails you actually receive (and which are sent by AutopilotHQ).
To verify claims you make regarding third-parties
If you claim to belong to a translator association, possess a certification, or receive a certain reference, or make other claims on third-parties, we may provide your name, profile link, and email to the appropriate representatives of that association or the certifying organization for the purpose of verifying or maintaining your status, membership, reference, or certification with that person or organization.
To provide our services on association subdomains
If you belong to an association and select that association in your profile, and that association is using Zingword to power their own search and other Zingword tools on a subdomain of their website, you will appear in searches on both their sub-domain as well as on zingword.com pages. You can control where you appear (Zingword.com and/or association). In either case, you are in control of your own data. Navigate to My personal data in your Zingword account to review those controls.
To generate cool statistics
We occasionally work with anonymized data in spreadsheets, like for example to generate cool statistics like the number of Japanese translators who specialize in Film, or the number of translators who are currently part of our community, or the average words per hour of a translator working at 3:00am on summer nights with above average temperatures and full moons. We may do this for our own studies, publish these statistics somewhere, or share them with third-parties who can use them. This data is anonymized, so it does not reveal anything about you, personally, but it can help people understand the industry as a whole.
To create subtle, targeted advertising
We may use your data to display targeted advertisements from customers of the Zingword platform. For example, if you translate subtitles, we may display a small ad in Zingword that shows an ad for a hype new subtitle translation tool.
Other examples would be showing interesting tools for translators who specialize in translating software, like for example tools that offer a good live preview for software GUIs, or tools designed especially for mobile app translations.
In any case, your personal data is not shared with these customers unless you sign up or register for something they offer, which is totally separate from the Zingword platform and what we do here.
In our chat platform
We use Slack to host our internal team chats. This makes us a better company, and allows us to connect other systems to our chatroom to display notifications or do other cool things. We do have a Slack channel that feeds the name and email of people who signup for Zingword into the channel, because it's exciting to see the stream of happy translators signing up. We occasionally use this channel to send a personal message to a recent signup.
We may also connect our other third party tools to our Slack chat, allowing us to answer service and support questions directly from Slack on our computers or phones, or just to get a status update that might be important for our team. Your basic personal data may therefore get into Slack as well, but it isn't used for anything besides communication.
Connecting with other translation systems
We provide separate consent for participation in any API connectivity with other translation systems. Such connectivity may help you market your services to users of other platforms, allowing them to find you and your profile directly in their TMS system. As with other, similar features of Zingword, you can control your participation in such integrations on your My Personal Data dashboard.
In project management tools or collaboration tools
Your name and email are technically personal data. It’s pretty easy to imagine that your name and or email could find its way into Trello (like if you requested a specific design or feature) where we manage some things, or Github (like if you report a bug) where we manage development, or an Excel sheet somewhere (like if we decide to generate a list of all the translators who beta-tested something so we can thank them).
If you have doubts
Finally, in general, we're going to use your personal data to enhance the Zingword experience for our users, including you, the lucky reader of this consent text, in innovative and cool ways. We're also making great GDPR tools for you, and trying to limit the ability of social media advertising companies to harvest your data from our pages. We have tried to list all the third-party applications we use, and why we use them. We have written this ourselves, so as to make the language plain for you.
We host with Amazon, as do countless world-class applications, and have built the best security system we could.
Nevertheless, if you have any doubts about how we use your data, do not hesitate to control your consent at any time by logging into Zingword and navigating to My personal data.
We are trying to be forthcoming in spirit (the spirit of the GDPR). If anything here bothers you, remove your consent or simply do not create an account.
Contacting us
The data protection officer of Zingword is Robert Rogge. You can contact Zingword via email at legalnotices@zingword.com. We do, however, prefer that you simply withdraw your consent at any time by navigating to My Personal Data in your user menu.