This Privacy Policy describes the policies and procedures of Bitly, Inc. (“Bitly”, “we” or “us”) on the collection, use and disclosure of your information on http://bitly.com (the “Site”) and the services, features, content or applications offered by Bitly (collectively with the Site, the “Services”). Bitly receives information about you from various sources, including: (i) if you register for the Site and the Services, through your user account with Bitly (your “Account”); (ii) your use of the Services generally; and (iii) from third party websites and services. When you use the Services, you are consenting to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this Privacy Policy.
This Privacy Policy covers the treatment of personally identifiable information (“Personal Information”) gathered by Bitly when you are using or accessing the Services. This Privacy Policy also covers Bitly’s treatment of any Personal Information that Bitly’s business partners share with Bitly or that Bitly shares with its business partners.
This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that Bitly does not own or control, including but not limited to any third party websites, services and applications (“Third Party Services”) that you elect to access through the Service, such as Facebook or Twitter, or to individuals that Bitly does not manage or employ. While we attempt to facilitate access only to those Third Party Services that share our respect for your privacy, we cannot take responsibility for the content or privacy policies of those Third Party Services. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of any Third Party Services you access.
The information we gather enables us to personalize, improve and continue to operate the Services. In connection with certain aspects of the Services, we may request, collect and/or display some of your Personal Information. We collect the following types of information from our users.
When you create an Account, you will provide information that could be Personal Information, such as your username, password and email address. You acknowledge that this information may be personal to you, and by creating an account on Bitly and providing Personal Information to us, you allow others, including Bitly, to identify you and therefore may not be anonymous. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services, but only rarely when we feel such information is important. You may unsubscribe from these messages through your Account settings, although Bitly regardless reserves the right to contact you when we believe it is necessary, such as for account recovery purposes.
One feature of the Services is the ability to create shortened uniform resource locators (“URLs”). Bitly collects and stores both the original URL and the shortened URL and, if you have an Account and are logged in, associates that information with your Account. Bitly also collects and stores (i) the time and date on which you shortened the original URL and (ii) if you chose to share the URL, information on the channels through which the URL was shared.
Bitly collects information about accesses (such as clicks) of every shortened URL created through the Services. This information includes, but is not limited to: (i) the IP address and physical location of the devices accessing the shortened URL; (ii) the referring websites or services; (iii) the time and date of each access; and (iv) information about sharing of the shortened URL on Third Party Services such as Twitter and Facebook. These metrics and analytics are used by Bitly and its partners to improve their websites and services by, for example, providing value-added features.
Some features of the Services allow you to provide content to the Services, such as written descriptions of URLs, comments, images and video. For example, using the Bundles feature, Bitly users can curate and “bundle together” a set of links, and can add content to those Bundles, such as comments and videos. All content submitted by you to the Services may be retained by Bitly indefinitely, even after you terminate your account. We may continue to disclose such content to third parties in a manner that does not reveal Personal Information, as described in this Privacy Policy.
Some features of the Services allow you to share your Bitly information through your accounts with Third Party Services such as Facebook and Twitter. If you choose to connect Bitly to such Third Party Services, we may collect information related to your use of those Third Party Services, such as authentication tokens that allow us to connect to your Third Party Service accounts. We may otherwise collect information about how you are using the Services to interact with those connected Third Party Services. Note that Third Party Services may have the ability to restrict the information that is provided to us.
We may receive a confirmation when you open an email from us. We use this confirmation to improve our customer service.
We collect statistical information about how both unregistered and registered users, collectively, use the Services (“Aggregate Information”). Some of this information is derived from Personal Information, such as your location (which, in turn, is derived from your IP address). This statistical information is not Personal Information and cannot be tied back to you, your Account or your web browser.
The Services are designed to help you share information with others. As a result, much of the information generated through the Services is shared publicly or with third parties.
Much of your activity on and through the Services is public by default. This includes, but is not limited to:
Registered users may have some of this information associated with their Accounts. Unregistered users will not have this association, but information concerning their use of the Services (such as what Bitly links they click on, when they clicked, from where they clicked, etc.) is tracked anonymously through the use of cookies and stored by Bitly.
For registered users, some of this information is publicly accessible through a unique URL, which that user can make non-public through his/her Account settings when he or she is logged in. Removing access to the unique URL does not, however, make this information non-public, and it may still be accessible through other means, such as Bitly’s API services.
Please also remember that if you choose to provide Personal Information using certain features of the Service, then that information is governed by the privacy settings of those particular features and may be publicly available. Individuals reading this information may use or disclose it to other individuals or entities without our control and without your knowledge. Therefore, we urge you to think carefully about including any specific information you may deem private in content that you create or submit through the Service.
While we collect and store IP address information, that information is not made public. We do at times, however, share this information with our partners, service providers and other persons with whom we conduct business. We may share hashes of your IP address with other third parties, but these hashes cannot feasibly be reversed into the IP addresses themselves or linked to you individually.
When creating a shortened URL, you can elect to share that URL through Third Party Services. Any information that you elect to distribute through Third Party Services is instantly provided to them and may then become accessible to users of those services. Therefore, in addition to reviewing this Privacy Policy, you should also review the terms of services and privacy policies of such Third Party Services that you access through the Services.
You may otherwise access other Third Party Services through the Services, for example by clicking on links in the Statistics page for a Bitly shortened URL. Bitly is not responsible for the privacy policies and/or practices of these Third Party Services, and you are responsible for reading and understanding those Third Party Services’ privacy policies. This Privacy Policy only governs information collected on the Services.
We share Aggregate Information with our partners, service providers and other persons with whom we conduct business, in order to do product development, marketing optimization and research, and other kinds of services. We share this kind of anonymous statistical data so that our partners can understand how and how often people use our Services and their services or websites, which facilitates improving their services and online marketing, and how Bitly interfaces with them.
As part of the Services, you may occasionally receive from Bitly email and other communication relating to your Account. These emails will only be sent for purposes important to the Services, such as password recovery.
User profile information including your username, Twitter account name and Facebook account name (to the extent you have linked your Account with those services), and other information you enter may be displayed to other users to facilitate user interaction within the Services. Users’ email addresses will not be directly revealed to other users by Bitly.
We employ and contract with people and other entities that perform certain tasks on our behalf and who are under our control (our “Agents”). We may need to share Personal Information with our Agents in order to provide products or services to you. Unless we tell you differently, our Agents do not have any right to use Personal Information or other information we share with them beyond what is necessary to assist us. You hereby consent to our sharing of Personal Information with our Agents.
In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, user information is typically one of the transferred business assets. Moreover, if Bitly, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Bitly 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 Bitly may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy.
Bitly also reserves the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as it reasonably believes is necessary to (i) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (ii) enforce these Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, (iv) respond to user support requests, or (v) protect the rights, property or safety of Bitly, its users and the public. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and spam/malware prevention.
Except as set forth above, you will be notified when your Personal Information may be shared with third parties, and will be able to prevent the sharing of this information.
Your Account information is protected by a password for your privacy and security. You need to prevent unauthorized access to your account and Personal Information by selecting and protecting your password appropriately and limiting access to your computer and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your account.
Bitly endeavors to protect Account information to ensure that it is kept private; however, Bitly cannot guarantee the security of any Account information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors, may compromise the security of user information at any time.
Bitly otherwise stores all of its information, including your IP address information, using industry-standard security techniques. Bitly does not guarantee or warrant that such techniques will prevent unauthorized access to information about you stored by Bitly, Personal Information or otherwise.
If you are a registered user, you can access information associated with your Account by logging into the Site. This information includes a history of the URLs you have shortened, and access to the metrics pages for those URLs.
If you are not a registered user, you can access the metrics pages for your shortened URLs by adding the “+” symbol to the end of the URL.
Registered and unregistered users can access all of the above information.
In the interest of ensuring that existing bitly links continue to function for all of our users, bitly links currently cannot be deleted or disabled. As such, shortening and sharing activity that has already occurred on your account currently cannot be deleted. However, your user history can easily be set to private from within your bitly account settings, and individual links can be archived from within your bitly user history. If you have concerns about unauthorized usage of your bitly account moving forward, please contact us at support@bitly.com and we will disable future shortening activity on your account.
Bitly may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time. Use of information we collect now is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is used. If we make changes in the way we collect or use information, we will notify you by posting an announcement on the Services or sending you an email. A user is bound by any changes to the Privacy Policy when he or she uses the Services after such changes have been first posted.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, please send us a detailed message to: support@bitly.com. We will make every effort to resolve your concerns.
Effective Date: June 14, 2011.