Privacy Policy

The privacy of your data — and it is your data, not ours! — is a big deal to us. Here’s the rundown of what we collect and why, when we access your information, and your rights.

What we collect and why

Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here’s what that means in practice:

Identity & access

When you sign up for a Giga Cypher Systems product, we typically ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a business name. That’s just so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you updates, or other essential information. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products, but we do not normally look at or access that picture. 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.

Geolocation data

We log all access to all accounts by full IP address so that we can always verify no unauthorized access has happened. We keep this login data for as long as your product account is active. We also log full IP addresses used to sign up a product account.

Website interactions

When you browse our applications, your browser automatically shares certain information such as which operating system and browser version you are using. We track that information, along with the pages you are visiting, page load timing, and which website referred you for statistical purposes like conversion rates and to test new designs. We sometimes track specific link clicks to help inform some design decisions. These web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account if applicable and you are signed into our Services. We blind all of these individual identifiers after 30 days. Other web analytics we utilize are described further in the Cookies and Do Not Track section.

Cookies and Do Not Track

We do use persistent first-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and support some in-house analytics.

A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser. It may help remember login information and site preferences. It might also collect information such as your browser type, operating system, web pages visited, duration of visit, content viewed, and other click-stream data. You can adjust cookie retention settings in your own browser. To learn more about cookies, including how to view which cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, please visit: www.allaboutcookies.org.

At this time, our sites and applications do not respond to Do Not Track beacons sent by browser plugins.

Voluntary correspondence

When you write Giga Cypher Systems with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including the email address, so that we have a history of past correspondences to reference if you reach out in the future.

We also store any information you volunteer like surveys. Sometimes when we do customer interviews, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We only do so if you give your express consent.

Information we do not collect

We don’t collect any characteristics of protected classifications including age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or physical and mental abilities or disabilities. You may provide these data voluntarily, such as if you include a pronoun preference in your email signature when writing into our Support team.

We also do not collect any biometric data. You are given the option to add a picture to your user profile, which could be a real picture of you or a picture of something else that represents you best. We do not extract any information from profile pictures: they are for your use alone.

How we approach mobile app permissions

Our philosophy is to ask for the bare minimum of permissions from you to give you a great app experience with maximum privacy. By default, we have access to the network to ensure the app can connect to and communicate with the Internet. In most cases, we ask for permission just-in-time so that you can decide if you want to grant access to things like contacts, camera, and calendar.

Android apps do not require permission to send push notifications.

For our Giga Cypher Systems app on Android 5, the OS will prompt for permission upon installation to read and write to your device files so that you can select attachments from your device to upload and download files from our apps to your device.

It’s impossible for our apps to try to use a sensitive OS feature without requesting access explicitly from you, so you’ll always know exactly when and what we’re requesting. You will never be required to grant any permission (although a given feature may not work or work well without it).

When we access or share your information

Our default practice is to not access your information. The only times we’ll ever access or share your info are:

To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your account to help you with a Support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.

When required under applicable law.

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Giga Cypher Systems, Ltd is a Kenyan company and all data infrastructure are located in the US.

• If Kenyan law enforcement authorities have the necessary warrant, criminal subpoena, or court order requiring we share data, we have to comply. Otherwise, we flat-out reject requests from local and federal law enforcement when they seek data. And unless we’re legally prevented from it, we’ll always inform you when such requests are made. In the event a government authority outside the Kenya approaches Giga Cypher Systems with a request, our default stance is to refuse unless the US government compels us to comply through procedures outlined in a mutual legal assistance treaty or agreement.
• Similarly, if Giga Cypher Systems receives a request to preserve data, we refuse unless compelled by either the Data Protection Act of Kenya, or a properly served Republic of Kenya subpoena for civil matters. In both of these situations, we have to comply. In these situations, we notify affected customers as soon as possible unless we are legally prohibited from doing so. We do not share preserved data unless absolutely required under the Data Protection Act of Kenya or compelled by a court order that we choose not to appeal. Furthermore, unless we receive a proper warrant, court order, or subpoena before the required preservation period expires, we destroy any preserved copies we made of customer data once the preservation period lapses.
• If we get an informal request from any person, organization, or entity, we do not assist.
Finally, if Giga Cypher Systems, LLC 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.

Your rights with respect to your information

At Giga Cypher Systems, we apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. These rights include:
1. Right to Know. You have the right to know what personal information is collected, used, shared or sold. We outline both the categories and specific bits of data we collect, as well as how they are used, in this privacy policy.
2. 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.
3. Right to Correction. You have the right to request correction of your personal information.
4. Right to Erasure / “To be Forgotten”. This is your right to request, subject to certain limitations under applicable law, that your personal information be erased from our possession and, by extension, all of our service providers. Fulfillment of some data deletion requests may prevent you from using Giga Cypher Systems services because our applications may then no longer work. In such cases, a data deletion request may result in closing your account.
5. Right to Complain. You have the right to make a complaint regarding our handling of your personal information with the appropriate supervisory authority.
6. Right to Restrict Processing. This is your right to request restriction of how and why your personal information is used or processed, including opting out of sale of personal information. (Again: we never have and never will sell your personal data.)
7. Right to Object. You have the right, in certain situations, to object to how or why your personal information is processed.
8. Right to Portability. You have the right to receive the personal information we have about you and the right to transmit it to another party.
9. Right to not be subject to Automated Decision-Making. You have the 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 law, or is based on your explicit consent.

Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and directly updating your account information.




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 gigacyphersystems@gmail.com.

For requests to delete personal information or know what personal information has been collected, we will first verify your identity using a combination of at least two pieces of information already collected including your user email address. If an authorized agent is corresponding on your behalf, we will first need written consent with a signature from the account holder before proceeding.

How we secure your data

All data is encrypted via [SSL/TLS] when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted.

Every field containing personal data is encrypted with its own key. The disks storing the data keys are encrypted as well. Our servers decrypt the data to send it to you when you need it.

What happens when you delete data in your product accounts

In our applications, we give you the option to delete your data. Anything you trash on your product accounts while they are active will be deleted from our system and logs. After that, the trashed data are no longer accessible via the application. Retrieving data for a single account from a backup is cost-prohibitive and unduly burdensome so if you change your mind you’ll need to do so before your data are deleted from our active servers.

We also delete your data after an account is cancelled. In this case, there is no period of data being kept in an accessible trash can so your data are purged within 60 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-cancelled accounts.

Changes & questions

We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will also announce them via our email gigacyphersystems@gmail.com.

Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch by emailing us at gigacyphersystems@gmail.com. and we’ll be happy to answer them!