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Privacy Policy

Our philosophy on privacy is simple: your personal data belongs to you. Be Transparent About What We Collect And How We Use it.​

Key Points You Care About

When using an app that has access to your contacts and messages like Hit Em Up, you probably want to know:

  1. We do not sell your personal data to third parties including contact data, messages, your phone number, or other personally identifiable information.

  2. We do not contact your contacts or share their information with third parties.

So why do you access it?

Hit Em Up backs up your groups and lists so that you can access them from all your personal devices. Hit Em Up lets you make groups using your contact data and personalize messages using their information like first name or last name. As you make updates to your contacts on your device, those changes will be reflected in the app.


Why do you need my Phone Number?

To secure your account and store any information regarding your account like subscriptions you bought with that number. If you have trouble with the app we can assist you with it.


Everything else can be read below, but we figured a nice summary of the things you care most about was worth pinning to the top. Let us know if you have any other important questions you want us to answer at the top here 🙂


A good rule of Thumb

When considering how your data is handled with any software service you use, ask: "How does this company make money?" If the software or service is free for everyone, it means they must be profiting off your data or advertising to pay for their infrastructure and other costs. If they charge a fee to access their service like we do, it means they are less likely to sell your data for profit because they have a transparent business model.

The old adage is true. Nothing is free in this world. But popular social media and search engine services hid their true costs and mechanisms of earning profit; conditioning us all to believe software and apps are free. They're not. We like transparency and honesty. We charge a fair price and provide a good, transparent, service, like in the olden days when craftsmen and artists made something and sold it. When contractors told you what the bill was going to be to maintain their craft and did it on time. We miss those days. We value those principles of honest hard work, integrity, and fair prices and we do our best to bring that to how we do business.

Last Updated: Sept 30, 2022​

What's New:​

We wanted to make it even more clear what data we collect, why, and how we use it. We take your privacy very serious and we want you to know and really understand it because many apps don’t take the time to explain it in layman's terms. We hope we have done that here, but if you find anything unclear please contact us at https://www.hitemupapp.com/contact

Policy​

The only data that we may collect from you include our use of cookies, anonymized usage data (to help us improve our app), and feedback. We may also collect metadata from the app such as the number of messages sent during a text blast, crash reports, group names, the number of recipients in a group and other usage data or other related information to help us improve and design the app. In our chat support, you can upload photos and videos to show our agents any issues you are experiencing visually. Those uploads will be retained through the duration of your chat dialog until you request to clear the chat history from one our agents.

By using the app you are also consenting to us sharing this data with our analytics 3rd party tools and services such as, but not limited to Google Analytics or Facebook. Hit Em Up also accesses your Apple contacts on your device and currently only uses said contacts locally on the device to provide you with the full functionality of the app.

You agree to provide your telephone number as a means to identify and create your account for Hit Em Up and provide you with the operability of the Hit Em Up Service.

By providing your telephone number on signup, you agree to having us (Hit Em Up and co) use this number to contact you via text message or telephone call to inform you about new updates, the status of your account, ask for your feedback, or provide you with additional support or app information. Further, we may share your telephone number with our partners as a means of understanding our user demographics and to help us advertise to new people who are similar to you. To be clear, our partner advertising Partners (namely Facebook and Google) will not advertise to you or contact you. Rather, they use your phone number to understand the type of person you are so that they can show our app to more people like you on their platforms. This is very common practice amongst all online businesses. We use a trusted 3rd party services to handle this login functionality and to store it securely.

We do not share your personal information with other parties unless lawfully requested by Law Enforcement or as required per the contractual agreements which govern our ability to collect crash reports, useful app-analytics, identify new prospective customers, and distribute the app to you. We would like to note that you can opt out of interest based advertising and tracking on iOS by going to Settings > Privacy > Advertising (as per instructions here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074).

If we change our privacy policy, we will notify you on this page. To the extent that there are multiple instances of our privacy policy and they may be in conflict, this document prevails and should be considered the official terms to which you are agreeing.

As we create new products and additional services that work together with our current apps we may collect additional information in order to provide those services to you. Get excited! There are some very cool things in the works By using Hit Em Up, you agree that you are at least 13 years old and to the terms of this privacy policy and our terms of use and to hold the Hit Em Up team harmless for a breach of this policy insofar as we are making and will continue to make a good faith effort to keep you informed and your personal information secure.

If you are a minor or otherwise are not legally able to agree to this agreement in your country or region, then your parent or guardian must consent on your behalf. We may periodically update this privacy policy and said updates will be available on this page. We encourage you, if you have questions or suggestions about this policy, to contact us.

Under GDPR, EU citizens are entitled to request their data and what personally identifiable we store. Currently that is, as the above privacy policy points out, just your phone number and subscription information as well as message metadata (the number of blasts you send and the number of messages sent but not any content or recipient information). When version 3.0 of Hit Em Up is released, we may change this policy to reflect any additional data we collect from you. All personally identifiable information can be requested to be deleted in writing on our contact form here. However, there is some information that cannot be removed for the operability of the application and services including this website. This non-removable information includes data that has already been anonymized and a means of identifying your account to maintain your subscription status. We have been transparent about our data practices and protecting your data (by following industry best practices and collecting as little data as possible) to provide a useful service for you since our inception because we believe strongly in your rights to privacy and knowing exactly what you are buying and doing when using our mobile app and website. We hope we can answer all the questions you may have about your data or using our service.

What Data We Collect​

Our website may utilize cookies to keep you logged in if you make comments in the future if you log in and not need to sign in again (though we don’t implement that currently and for most people this does not apply). When you sign up to use Hit Em Up, we store your phone number. We use your phone number to be able to contact you, maintain a record of your account and associated purchases and data you create inside Hit Em Up, and identify you. We may use your phone number in conjunction with trusted third-party partners (namely Google) to help us identify who our users are on a whole (not individually) so that we can better update the app to suit your needs and to understand who uses our app so we can create more targeted advertising with our advertising partners to reach new customers who can benefit from our services. To be clear, this does not mean that your information may be shared with anyone to promote to you. This is simply a means for Hit Em Up to find new customers who are similar to you on more platforms. Your privacy and data are very important to us and we do not share any sensitive data such as your contacts with anyone at this time without your consent. We also store cookies to ensure that you know about various privacy policy practices and your consent state is managed. You can also store your email and name if you press the remember me button on leaving a comment. Our website also uses google analytics to understand how people use our site and to discover areas on our site with issues. Most websites use some sort of analytics program like this. The data we collect helps us see things like how many people visit our site, which country they are from, how many pages they visited, how fast our site loaded, and so on. All data collected is completely anonymous and it does not identify you as an individual in any way.

For the app, Hit Em Up, itself, we retain your telephone number, device name, and UDID on iOS and Secure Android ID on Android, GCM Tokens, and other forms of cookies to track behavior in the app and help us improve the app and reach more customers like you.

As of version 3.0 (beta), we can optionally maintain and store your contacts and groups for the purposes of providing you service on multiple devices. This personal information is not shared with any third parties but may be processed by other services including our webservice and database tool providers who are not authorized to access the data— only process and store it securely.

Our website retains a copy of all comments on blog posts and we retain your support tickets indefinitely in G-Suite by Google until you request us to delete them.

We employ some metrics tracking in our app to understand your usage such as when you click a certain button, at what time, and in what order. This information is anonymized and used solely for improving the app experience. Google Analytics collects this information and stores it per the terms of the retention policy below. Crashalytics also stores your crashes for 90 days for us to find bugs in the app. Google stores metadata such as Installation UUID, Secure Android ID, Mobile ad IDs, and IP Addresses (for 10 seconds for an internal dashboard they provide to us). This data is not associated with your account but is anonymized.

Retention Policy​

Our analytics partners (Firebase/ Google and MixPanel) store analytics data for up to 180 days or until you request from us to have it removed. Facebook only uses your phone number or email address that you used to create an anonymous or semi-anonymous reference to your demographic information for our ad campaigns directed towards new customers who are similar to you. They do not share your contact information and nobody has permission to advertise or contact you except Hit Em Up via Facebook or other platforms by you providing this information to us.

Crash reports and identifiers are stored up to 90 days. Your user profile (telephone number, subscription and purchase data, and message metadata such as the number of messages you send and date of sending) is stored until you request us to delete your information. If we delete certain information such as your telephone number, we cannot provide you service in the future as that information is necessary for the app to function.

Some data can be deleted such as your contacts information or groups and other app settings in version 3.0 beta and above, but it may cause unintended bugs in the functioning of the app would likely make it functionally inoperable if not performed through the app in standard means.

We recommend only deleting your data with us if you do not intend to utilize our services ever again or if you are willing to start over and lose your in-app settings and purchases.