Principles

Your privacy is critically important to us. At AppBrain we have a few fundamental principles:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it.

• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.

• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.

• In our products, we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, and permanently deleted.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals.

Website visitors

Like most website operators, AppBrain collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. AppBrain’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how AppBrain’s visitors use its website. From time to time, AppBrain may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website. Usage of the AppBrain website is tracked by common industry tracking software (Google Analytics).

Gathering of personally-identifying information

Certain visitors to AppBrain’s websites choose to interact with AppBrain in ways that require AppBrain to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that AppBrain gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up for an AppBrain account to provide a username and email address. In each case, AppBrain collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with AppBrain. AppBrain does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Protection of certain personally-identifying information

AppBrain discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on AppBrain’s behalf or to provide services available at AppBrain’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using AppBrain’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. AppBrain will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, AppBrain discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when AppBrain believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of AppBrain, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an AppBrain website and have supplied your email address, AppBrain may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with AppBrain and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. AppBrain takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. AppBrain uses cookies to help AppBrain identify and track visitors, their usage of AppBrain website, and their website access preferences. AppBrain visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using AppBrain’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of AppBrain’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business transfers

If AppBrain, or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that AppBrain goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of AppBrain may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads

Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by AppBrain and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

AppBrain Android app

The AppBrain android app collects all so-called “package names” of installed applications on an Android phone and stores it on AppBrain servers. For each app, apart from the package name, also the version, the first time the AppBrain app saw this app present on the phone, and a coarse number indicative of usage is sent. On the AppBrain server, this list of apps is stored together with a phone identifier, and the IP address of the user. Apps that don’t match any package name we know about from the market data are discarded from further processing.

App lists and recommendations in the AppBrain app

When a user indicates that the list of apps is public, this data can be displayed publicly and also shared via to other site such as twitter, facebook etc. However a private app lists will never be shared or shown publicly. A user can change the privacy settings of app lists at any time. We hold the right to report aggregate statistics on data contained in private lists, in such a way that there is no possibility of deducing apps contained in individual private lists. The main goal of collecting data is to provide recommendations of applications by linking app preferences between users. These links will also happen in an aggregated fashion, such that it is impossible to find out whether particular users have or use an app when they have indicated this information is private. Any information not directly related to the apps itself (such as the country derived from the IP address, age, and gender) is solely used to better understand which other users might provide valuable signals to provide better application recommendations.

Developer dashboard data

AppBrain offers a service for developers to gain more insight into users of their apps. Protection of the privacy of users is of the utmost importance to us, and we have taken a number of precautions in presenting data to preserve the privacy of users. We only show data to about apps that have at least 20 active AppBrain users. Furthermore, we only show individual data entities (such as a country, age bucket or phone model), when it is present in at least 3 users for that app.

APK data

AppBrain app discovery apps (AppBrain App Market, Hot Apps, Awesome Games, Ad Detector, Price Drops) share information about APK files installed on the users device with AppBrain. This includes information about file names, class names, manifest information from the installed APK file. No personally-identifying or private data is shared in this process.

App discovery apps

AppTornado publishes App Discovery apps: “Find Awesome Games”, “Hot Apps” and “Price Drops”. These apps prominently show an opt-in dialog at the beginning stating that they collect information about the apps a users installs and uninstalls. The packagenames of installed and uninstalled apps on that device are sent to AppTornado servers over a secure connection. This data is deleted after at most 30 days. It’s processed only for the purpose of creating popularity lists for showing in those same apps, creating aggregated reports for popularity of apps and analyzing user behavior to improve our products.

Account and Data Deletion

AppBrain accounts and all data belonging to the account can be easily deleted on the account deletion page. On this page is a “Ok. Delete my account” button, by clicking the button the account of the currently logged in user and data belonging to the account will be permanently deleted. If you have forgotten your account or can’t log in, you can also request account deletion by contacting our support team.

Privacy policy changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, AppBrain may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in AppBrain’s sole discretion. AppBrain encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Further questions

If you have questions about privacy or your personal data please contact our support team.