Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 3, 2024

This policy describes what The WP Squad ("we", "us") does with personal data when you use squadaffiliate.com, buy a licence, or write to support. It covers this website and the licensing that accompanies the Squad Affiliate plugin. It does not describe what the plugin does on your own site. See "The plugin on your site" below, which is a different question with a different answer.

What we collect, and when

  • Purchase and licence data: name, email address and the licence attached to them. Checkout runs on Freemius, which is the merchant of record: card details are entered on their systems and never reach ours. We receive the order, the licence and the contact address that owns it.
  • Support messages: the name, email address, subject, topic and message you send through the support form. These are stored in this site's own database and emailed to our support inbox. Nothing else about the submission is kept except a one-way hash of the network it came from, held for thirty days and used only to stop automated floods; it cannot be turned back into an address.
  • Plugin diagnostics: only if you opt in: when you activate the plugin, Freemius asks whether you wish to share your site URL, WordPress and PHP versions and the plugin's activation state. Declining is a supported answer: the plugin works the same either way, and choosing "skip" means no diagnostics are sent at all. There is no analytics of our own in the plugin, and no tracking script on this website.
  • Server logs: our host records requests to this website, including IP addresses, as part of running and securing a web server. These are ordinary operational logs, kept briefly and not used to build a profile of you.

What we use it for

  • Delivering licences, downloads and updates, and answering the message you sent.
  • Processing payments, refunds and tax obligations, through Freemius.
  • Fixing the product. A support message describing a bug is the most common reason a release exists.

We do not sell personal data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it to make automated decisions about you.

Cookies

This website sets cookies only where WordPress itself needs them. Signing in to the admin, and remembering a comment author. There is no analytics cookie and no advertising cookie, which is why there is no consent banner asking you about one. The Freemius checkout sets its own cookies while a purchase is in progress, under their policy.

Who else processes it

  • Freemius: checkout, licensing, invoicing and update delivery, as merchant of record.
  • Our web host: serving this website and storing its database, including support submissions.
  • WordPress.org: distributes the free plugin. Downloads from the directory are counted by WordPress.org under their privacy policy, not by us.

Each is used because the service cannot run without it, and each processes data on our instructions.

How long we keep it

  • Purchase and licence records: for the life of the licence, and afterwards for as long as accounting and tax law requires.
  • Support messages: while the matter is open and afterwards as history, so a returning question does not start from nothing. Ask and they are deleted.
  • The anti-flood hash on a support submission: thirty days, then cleared automatically. The message stays; where it came from does not.

The plugin on your site

The plugin records affiliate, referral and visit data in your own WordPress database, on your own domain. That data is yours: we cannot see it, it is not sent anywhere, and no request leaves your site to us in order to track a referral. For the people in it. Your affiliates and their customers, you are the controller, and this policy is not the one that governs them. The plugin ships WordPress export and erase support so you can answer their requests.

International transfers

Our processors operate internationally, so data may be handled outside your country. Where it is, the transfer relies on the safeguards those providers publish. Standard contractual clauses and equivalent mechanisms.

Security

Traffic to this site is encrypted in transit, administrative access is limited to the people who need it, and payment data never touches our infrastructure because the checkout is not ours. We hold no card numbers to lose. No system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, object to a use of it, or ask us to restrict it. Ask, and we will do it. We do not require a form or a reason, and there is no charge.

Write to support@squadaffiliate.com, or use the support form. If you are in the EU or UK and unhappy with our answer, you may complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

This is a tool for people running a business, and it is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under sixteen; tell us if we have, and it will be deleted.

Changes

When this policy changes, the date above changes with it. If a change materially affects what happens to data we already hold, we will say so rather than rely on you noticing a date.