Maintaining your privacy is why we exist. But by running a service on the Internet, Kovurt comes into contact with your personal information. It’s an ironic situation: we do not want to know who you are, yet we need to have contact with you for you to use Kovurt’s services. So we try to minimize both the amount of information we collect from you, and the amount of information we retain about your visits to us.
We have collated all the ways we come into contact with you and your information, and we placed it here in this Privacy Audit so you can understand the extent to which we know, retain, maintain, delete, and ignore your information. Transparency is the best way to ensure your privacy.
We also give you suggestions on how to better anonymize and privatize the information that we do access. We are always looking for smarter and better ways to maintain your privacy, so we welcome your feedback and suggestions.
Kovurt’s Corporate and Server Infrastructure: Kovurt operates through its companies in both the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Hong Kong (HK). Both locations offer us bulletproof legal protection against having to turn over any information to any government. Both BVI and HK have long legal precedents of protecting corporate interests.
Our servers are located around the world. We have servers in Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, London, Salt Lake City, Bucharest, Seattle, Frankfurt, and many other locations. So the question you may ask is: what happens if the American or Japanese governments want access to Kovurt’s servers to monitor its Kovurt Agents? Our first, second, and third responses to those type of requests would be “No.” But if we received a court order to allow access to our servers, we would notify all our users and immediately close that location in that country.
But then you ask: what happens to the data on Kovurt’s servers? All traffic on all of Kovurt’s privacy nodes and servers is run through “RAM”. That means we retain nothing besides bandwidth statistics. We do have the ability to retain IP addresses from where you login, and we may do that sometimes to help troubleshoot any connection problems you may have, but we do not retain that information.
Your Kovurt Registration: When you register on our website, we ask you for your email address, name, password, and answers to security questions. We can view your name and email address, but we cannot view your password because it is encrypted. We also have access to your security answers, because we may use those to verify your account credentials.
To better maintain anonymity, you should anonymize your name and use an email address that is not usually tied to your person. And your answers to your security questions should be unique to Kovurt so they are anonymized against anything else you may use online at other sites.
Your Paid Kovurt Subscription: When you purchase a subscription at Kovurt, we use 3rd party payment processors like PayPal. This protects Kovurt from ever having to touch or know of your credit card details, but it still puts you at potential risk because PayPal may have security or privacy issues. From PayPal, we only collect your email address, so any other information you may have shared with PayPal stays between you and PayPal.
We also offer you an option to pay with Bitcoin. If you are hesitant about using credit cards at PayPal, we encourage you to use Bitcoin when you purchase Kovurt’s service. We do not receive any of your personal information from our 3rd party Bitcoin processor — we only know your email address.
Using Kovurt’s Privacy Software On Your Laptop/Desktop: When you download Kovurt’s software to your computer, our server records the IP address to where it was downloaded. We do retain that information for up to a month, but it is never tied to a single user. We use this information as part of our website analytics to understand where we should sell our services.
Once you are using our Kovurt for Mac or Kovurt for PC apps, you are private on your local networks. For example, if you are using a coffeeshop’s wireless connection, that coffeeshop doesn’t know what sites you visit or have any access to your web surfing history.
Likewise, at Kovurt we do not retain any logs or records of your web surfing habits. If you are using Kovurt and you visit a website such as Yahoo.com and login and provide them your personal details, Yahoo.com may retain your private information, but Kovurt has no access to or retention of any of the data you shared with Yahoo.com.
Using Kovurt’s Mobile iOS App: If you download our iOS app onto your iPhone or iPad, Apple does retain your personal details and they do keep records of what apps you download. And if you use Kovurt on your iPhone and use Apple’s Safari browser, Apple may retain your browser history. But Kovurt does not, and we have no access to your surfing history or any of your online activity while you use your iOS app.
Visiting Kovurt’s Website: We use SSL throughout our website at Kovurt.com. This means that any information you share with us is encrypted and cannot be seen by eavesdroppers on your network. Each time you visit Kovurt’s website, we give your computer a cookie and our server logs your IP address, computer type, and browser type. We give you a cookie because we want to verify user activity on our site for sales and marketing purposes. We encourage you to delete your cookies when you close your browser.
For the server logs, we retain anonymized data for sales and marketing purposes. We check what type of devices users have when they come to our website, and we want to know what from what regions of the world people come to Kovurt.com.
When you seek support and help from us, we may activate debugging mode on your account. We do this to make sure your account is usable and to help if you have concurrent connections that need to be closed. During debugging, we may emulate access to your account, record the number of logins, and record bandwidth usage. However, during debugging we never look for and we never have access to the Internet content, webpages, or any other activity you conduct online — all that activity is not available to us, it is not logged by us, and we take pains to have zero ability to retain that information.
Using Kovurt’s Contact Forms: Have you ever contacted us on our website to ask a question, and then we email you back? If so, we retain and keep your emails and any other details you share with us. We keep this information to assist our helpdesk staff learn how to better service you. So please limit the type of information you share with us if you are worried about not being anonymous.
Using The Online Web Support Chat: On our website, we have a small pop-up chat window that helps us with pre-sales questions from potential Kovurt Agents. This chat window is provided to Kovurt by a company in Singapore named Zopim. This Zopim chat keeps records of your location, the type of computer you are using, and the type of browser. Kovurt does not retain this information on our servers, but Zopim does retain it. So if you are worried about your privacy, we suggest you do not use this pop-up window to communicate with Kovurt. Instead you can register and use our ticketing system.
[divider]
So in a nutshell, here is what our Privacy Audit above states:
What Information Do We Store, Save, and Know About You?
As a provider of online-enabled privacy services, we understand that security of your data and privacy of your data is of utmost importance. So what info do we acquire, retain, and track?
a) When purchasing our services, we require users to provide basic contact information, such as their name and e-mail address, as well as other necessary data, dependent upon the service, to set up and maintain their services with Kovurt. We use customer contact information to send customers information about our company and its products and services. We will NEVER resell or provide your information to a third party unless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to conform with a legal requirement, comply with a legal process, protect and defend the rights or property of Kovurt, enforce this online agreement, act to protect the interests of our customers, or in the situation wherein our company is acquired by another company. We will always do our best to fight any legal order to maintain credibility with our users and to maintain ethical behavior within our business. And we will always strive to not retain any user data.
b) We DO NOT retain credit card or banking information — all credit card details are instead possibly retained by our payment processor, such as PayPal. So you need to check with the payment processor to find out how they maintain your personal details.
c) The customer’s contact information is also used to contact the visitor when necessary if they have subscribed to the mailing list. Paying users may opt-out of receiving some future mailings by choosing to unsubscribe. However, we urge you to maintain your subscription because we do send urgent privacy messages from time to time that could affect your usage of Kovurt.
d) We do use cookies on our website. We use those to make sure you need not log out after refreshing each page. We do log basic webpage statistics so we know how many people are visiting us, but we do not keep any data that tells us specifically who does what and when.
e) We have mobile apps and use other companies to distribute those apps. They may collect their own payment data, so you need to be aware that they are asking for that data and not Kovurt.
f) Most importantly, we do not keep traffic logs or data logs of the sites and services you visit or use while using Kovurt. For example, if you are using Kovurt and visit Google.com, we have no stored data that shows you visited Google.com. So you have privacy not only from the outside world, but also from Kovurt, when using our services. We do measure bandwidth usage, but we are only measuring the flows in and out of our service and we are not keeping records of the sites and services you visit.
Kovurt’s Web site may contain links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices, safety, or the content of other Web sites.
From time to time, we may change this Privacy Policy. We will post those changes on this page so that you will always be aware of what information we collect, and how we use it.
Our site uses forms for customers to request information, as well as purchase products and services. Contact information from these forms are used to send requested order and company information to our customers. The customer’s contact information is also used to contact the customer if necessary to solve a technical issue or other rare instances at our discretion. Unique identifiers, such as account numbers, are assigned to customers to verify the authoritative party for the account and for use in our record system. We may also ask you to confirm your identity by asking for specific information about your account profile.
[divider]
When purchasing services from Kovurt, you can make a payment by credit card or debit card. Your financial details are passed through a secure server using the latest 128-bit or 256-bit SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption technology. If you have any questions regarding our security policy, please contact our customer support center.
[divider]
Close Your Account
If you would like to close your account and have us delete your details, please contact us. We will strive to have all data deleted within days once we can verify your credentials.
