Q2U Privacy Policy
When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information. We understand this is a big responsibility and work hard to protect your information and put you in control.
This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what information we collect, why we collect it, and how you can update, manage, export, and delete your information.
Effective November 30, 2023
Our QR Referral and Protection service is available to millions of people around the world.
You can use our services in a variety of ways to manage your privacy. For example, you can sign up for a Q2U Account if you want to access and manage the list of content associated with the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned. And you can use some Q2U services when you’re signed out or without creating an account at all, like proceeding directly to a website linked to a Q2U QR Code and still have the peace of mind the webpage linked to the Q2U QR Code has been assessed and if the webpage has been identified as a potential source of malware, unwanted software, or a social engineering exploit that you will be notified and will not be forwarded to the website. You can adjust your privacy settings to control what we collect and how your information is used.
To help explain things as clearly as possible, we’ve added examples and definitions for key terms. And if you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, you can contact us.
Information Q2U collects
We want you to understand the types of information we collect as you use our services
We collect information to provide better services to all our users. This information broadly breaks down into two categories, the information you provide us and the information you generate by using our services. The information Google collects, and how that information is used, depends on how you use our services and how you manage your privacy controls.
When you’re not signed in to a Q2U Account, we store the information we collect with unique identifiers tied to the browser you’re using. This allows us to do things like maintain your preferences across browsing sessions, such as your preferred language or your messaging address, if you have asked us to remember it, to avoid you having to re-type it when scanning future Q2U QR Codes. You can also ask us to Forget You within a particular browser so that when you scan future Q2U QR Codes, they will not be automatically linked with your messaging address or Q2U Account.
Things you create or provide to us
When you create a Q2U Account, you provide us with personal information that includes your name, email, a password, and optionally some generic demographic information. Even if you aren’t signed in to a Q2U Account, you might choose to provide us with information — like an email address to communicate with Q2U or receive messages related to our service, such as summary information and links to the content associated with the Q2U QR Codes you scanned that day.
We also collect the content you create and upload when using our service. This includes things like titles, summary text, and images related to the Q2U QR Codes you create within the service.
Information we collect as you use our services
Your apps, browsers & devices
We collect information about the browsers and devices you use to access our service, which helps improve the look and functionality of our service on these devices as well as protect your account from being associated with fake scans. As an aside, the best way to protect your account is to configure it to require the browser be logged into your account when scanning Q2U QR Codes. Can you enable this by clicking here. <– Insert link
The information we collect may include unique identifiers, browser type and settings, device type and settings, and operating system. We also collect information about the interaction of your browser with our services, including IP address, crash reports, system activity, and the date, time, and referrer URL of your request.
Your activity
We collect information about your activity in our services, which allows us to do things like send you summary content associated with the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned and link these scans to your Q2U Account. The activity information we collect may include:
- Q2U QR Codes you scan
- Views and interactions with content and ads
You can visit your Q2U Account to find and manage activity information that’s saved in your account.
Your location information
We collect information about your location when you use our services, which helps protect you by strengthening our system against fake scans being associated with your account.
Your location can be determined with varying degrees of accuracy by:
- GPS from your device when you authorize the device to share the information with us
- IP address
The types of location data we collect and how long we store it depend in part on your device and if you have authorized your device to share it.
We use various technologies to collect and store information, including cookies, pixel tags, local storage, such as browser web storage, databases, and server logs.
Why Q2U collects data
We use data to build better services
We use the information we collect from all our services for the following purposes:
Provide our services
We use your information to deliver our service, like sending you summary messages containing information related to the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned over the last day or two and providing you a list summary content related to the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned and linked to your Q2U account.
Maintain & improve our services
We also use your information to ensure our services are working as intended, such as tracking outages or troubleshooting issues that you report to us. And we use your information to make improvements to our services — for example, when searching for content in your Q2U Scan List, which terms tend to be misspelled or related to content that doesn’t actually use that term in the text.
Develop new services
We use the information we collect in existing services to help us develop new ones.
Provide personalized services, including content and ads
We use the information we collect to customize our services for you, including which information we provide in the summary messages we send you and which summary information is showed in your Q2U QR Scan list screen. For example, if you have scanned a Q2U QR Code for a vacation resort in Mexico we will include the summary information related to the Q2U QR Code you scanned for the resort in your daily summary email and Q2U QR Scans screen within your Q2U Account. Note, you can change the frequency of your summary email between none, daily, weekly, or monthly here. <– Update link
Depending on your settings, we may also show you personalized ads based on your interests. Continuing with the above example, you may see an ad for travel insurance.
- We don’t show you personalized ads based on sensitive categories, such as race, religion, sexual orientation, or health.
- We don’t share information that personally identifies you with advertisers, such as your name or email, unless you ask us to.
Measure performance
We use data for analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used. For example, we analyze data about your visits to our site to do things like optimize product design. And we also use data about the ads you interact with to help advertisers understand the performance of their ad campaigns. We use a variety of information to do this, including which Q2U QR Codes you have scanned and which content links you have followed. The privacy of the information that personally identifies you is central to what we do and why when providing demographics to advertisers related to the characteristics of people using our service to access the advertiser’s content, we only provide aggregated results. For example, 732 people from New York city between the ages of 18-24 scanned this Q2U QR Code in the month of December.
Communicate with you
We use information we collect, like your email address, to interact with you directly. For example, we may send you a notification if we detect suspicious activity, like an attempt to sign in to your Q2U Account from a device you haven’t used in the past or from a different geographic location. Or we may let you know about upcoming changes or improvements to our services. And if you contact Q2U, we’ll keep a record of your request in order to help solve any issues you might be facing.
Protect Q2U, our users, and the public
We use information to help improve the safety and reliability of our services. This includes detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, security risks, and technical issues that could harm Q2U, our users, or the public.
We use different technologies to process your information for these purposes. We use automated systems that analyze the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned to provide you with things like customized summary messages, personalized ads, or other features tailored to how you use our services. And we analyze your content to help us detect abuse such as spam, malware, and illegal content. We also use algorithms to recognize patterns in data.
We’ll ask for your consent before using your information for a purpose that isn’t covered in this Privacy Policy.
Your privacy controls
You have choices regarding the information we collect and how it’s used.
This section describes key controls for managing your privacy across our service.
Managing, reviewing, and updating your information
When you’re signed in, you can always review and update information on the settings page within your Q2U Account. For example, if your email address has changed you can provide a new email address, or maybe you have moved from New York to London!
You can also update your demographic information or ask us to forget it so that it isn’t aggregated in your future Q2U QR Code scans or when you visit content related to those scans. For example: If you had told us you were a 32 year old women in Toronto, asked us to forget the demographic data linked to your account, and then visited a link supporting the local children’s hospital, we would not include your scan in the count of 85 women between the ages of 30 and 40 from Toronto that visited the link.
Exporting, removing & deleting your information
You can export a copy of content in your Q2U Account if you want to back it up or use it with a service outside of Q2U.
Export your data
To delete your information, you can:
- Delete the QR Codes you have created within your Q2U Account
- Delete the links to Content associated with the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned.
- Delete your entire Q2U Account
Inactive Account Manager allows you to give someone else access to parts of your Q2U Account in case you’re unexpectedly unable to use your account.
And finally, you can also request to remove content from the Q2U service based on applicable law and our policies.
There are other ways to control the information Q2U collects whether or not you’re signed in to a Q2U Account, including:
- Browser settings: For example, you can configure your browser to indicate when Q2U has set a cookie in your browser. You can also configure your browser to block all cookies from a specific domain or all domains. But remember that our services rely on cookies to function properly, for things like remembering your language preferences.
Sharing your information
When Q2U shares your information
We do not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of Q2U except in the following cases:
With your consent
We’ll share personal information outside of Q2U when we have your consent. For example, if you pose a question to a content provider through our service. We’ll ask for your explicit consent to share any personal information.
For external processing
We provide personal information to our affiliates and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use Google to host our service and Microsoft to transmit messages to our users.
For legal reasons
We will share personal information outside of Q2U if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
- Meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request.
- Enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
- Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues.
- Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Q2U, our users, or the public as required or permitted by law.
We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners — like publishers, advertisers, developers, or rights holders. For example, we share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services.
If Q2U is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we’ll continue to ensure the confidentiality of your personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
Keeping your information secure
We build security into our services to protect your information
All Q2U products are built with strong security features that continuously protect your information. The insights we gain from maintaining our services help us detect and automatically block security threats from ever reaching you. And if we do detect something risky that we think you should know about, we’ll notify you and help guide you through steps to stay better protected.
We work hard to protect you and Q2U from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of information we hold, including:
- We use encryption to keep your data private while in transit
- We offer a range of security features, like checking if a website has been identified as a potential source of malware, unwanted software, or is a social engineering exploit.
- We review our information collection, storage, and processing practices, to prevent unauthorized access to our systems
- We restrict access to personal information to Q2U employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.
Exporting & deleting your information
You can export a copy of your information or delete it from your Q2U Account at any time
You can export a copy of content in your Q2U Account if you want to back it up or use it with a service outside of Q2U.
Export your data
To delete your information, you can:
- Delete the QR Codes you have created within your Q2U Account
- Delete the links to Content associated with the Q2U QR Codes you have scanned.
- Delete your entire Q2U Account
Delete your information
Retaining your information
We retain the data we collect for different periods of time depending on what it is, how we use it, and how you configure your settings:
- Some data you can delete whenever you like, such as your personal info or the content you create or upload, such as titles, descriptions, and images associated with a Q2U QR Code you have created. You can also delete the links to scan activity that is associated with your account. We’ll keep this data in your Q2U Account until you remove it, choose to have it removed, or it exceeds our retention policy rules.
- Other data is deleted or anonymized automatically after a set period of time, such as advertising data and server logs.
- We keep some data until you delete your Q2U Account, such as information about how often you use our services.
- And some data we retain for longer periods of time when necessary for legitimate business or legal purposes, such as security, fraud and abuse prevention, or financial record-keeping.
When you delete data, we follow a deletion process to make sure that your data is safely and completely removed from our servers or retained only in anonymized form. We try to ensure that our services protect information from accidental or malicious deletion. Because of this, there may be delays between when you delete something and when copies are deleted from our active and backup systems.
You can read more about Q2U service’s data retention periods, including how long it takes us to delete your information.
Compliance & cooperation with regulators
We regularly review this Privacy Policy and make sure that we process your information in ways that comply with it.
Data transfers
We maintain in Canada and the US and your information may be processed on servers located outside of the country where you live. Data protection laws vary among countries, with some providing more protection than others. Regardless of where your information is processed, we apply the same protections described in this policy.
When we receive formal written complaints, we respond by contacting the person who made the complaint. We work with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of your data that we cannot resolve with you directly.
About this policy
When this policy applies
This Privacy Policy applies to all of the services offered by Q2U.
This Privacy Policy doesn’t apply to:
- The information practices of other companies and organizations that advertise through our service or use Q2U QR Codes to link to their services.
Changes to this policy
We change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We always indicate the date the last changes were published and we offer access to archived versions for your review. If changes are significant, we’ll provide a more prominent notice.