Protecting your Privacy
It’s not just the trees that need protection, your information is just as important to us as the trees.
Selling Data to Advertisers?
Selling data that is collected over websites is sold by many companies. These websites collect data and sell to data acquirers without a user’s permission. We don’t do this at all, all your data is kept in confidentiality.
Anonymized Searches
Personal profiling is something we don’t indulge in at all. This is normally done through search history, all searches of our users are anonymized within a week.
Encryption based Searches:
The searches you make can be used by advertisers for their ads strategy. We use encryption based search system that doesn’t allow this.
External Tracking Tools Usage:
Our website doesn’t use any sort of external tracking tool. Some websites use these tools to create a better optimized performance but put their user’s data at risk. As we don’t use any, your data is secured.
Turning off Tracking:
We do track a proportion of your data but that is only used to gain some insight in terms of improving user experience. However, if you don’t want it to be tracked then you can simply turn off tracking through your browser.
How Does Givanza Provide Protection to my Privacy?
Givanza is built on a fully encrypted, self-hosted and a secured analytics system. We don’t use any third party software or tool as everything is managed by our in-house experts. We don’t practice selling or buying data, hence all your data will remain secure and will not be shared with anyone. No third party will be allowed to gain access to your search data if it isn’t directly involved.
What are some of the Steps Givanza Undertake to protect my Privacy?
The following are some of the direct steps we undertake to protect your privacy:
1) Your IP Address will always appear anonymous to us. A few digits of your IP address will only be shown whereas the other will be hidden.
2) All data collected over our website will only be sent under an SSL-secured encryption
3) Any analytical data is kept encrypted
4) All searches will appear anonymized after 7 days
5) You have the option of not getting tracked at all by enabling don’t track from your browser.
6) SSL certificates from the most trusted provider is installed on our website
Why does Givanza Collect Data?
One of the aims of Givanza is to make sure you have a great experience on our search engine. For this, we need to collect data so that a better strategy in terms of user experience can be crafted. This data is not sold to any third party, but is only used to run statistical analysis and to decipher ways through which we can make sure you have a great experience. This data is used in numerous ways, for example we might use to understand what features you don’t like or can be improved.
This is the reason we use an in-house secure and encrypted search engine which helps to gather data. Once this data is gathered, it brings in insights so as to how you react to our products. The best part is that after a week we remove all the information or is anonymized. Another reason why we collect data is to help us in identifying any bugs or errors or issues within the platform. Hence, the reason why we collect data is to improve your experience only!
Does Givanza has Cookies?
Yes, a cookie can simply be termed as a text file that is sent your device by a website. This file has all the information such as the settings of your browser. This file or a cookie would have all your settings which helps the browser to read the page better. Here is the information that our cookies store for you:
1) Your country and language
2) Your search counter’s value
3) Any adult filter setting
4) Any installed extension
5) Your interaction with our website before
6) How you found about Givanza
7) When you made your last search
No personal information is stored in the Cookie
Is your data ever going to be shared with 3rd Parties?
Inherently, it's a resounding no but to some times your data has to be shared with services that work with us in providing an answer to your search query. This data tends to be shared with related services like Bing, which helps us in answering your search request. Other than this your data is never shared with anyone or anything else for anything that relates to Givanza search pages (other than queries).
We do use the third party tools for our non-search pages. These are the pages which do not perform any tasks relating to any of you search queries. These third parties abide by strict US privacy laws. For this, they have to secure data securely and they do not hand over it to unauthorized persons.
? We use MailChimp for our new newsletters
? For applications of jobs, we make use of Workable
? For Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) functionality, we use Zendesk
? We use Ghost for blogs
? Sentry, HockeyApp, Papertrail are used for running data about our servers
? For surveys, we use: Typeform
? Branch.io is used for sending a text to mobile phones to download our app
This being said, we assure we only use these for our marketing purposes. For example, we can use the data from the Typeform app to see if our site working well with customers. This way if there is a problem, we can try to improve on the problems mentioned in the surveys. It can be one part of our marketing strategy. The strategy can save Givanza money that can be conversely spent on doing something green like planting a tree. If you do not consent on these third party tools collecting data you can revoke the consent through the links provided below:
? Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
? Adwords: https://adssettings.google.com
What kind of data is shared with search engines like Bing?
To answer your search results perfectly, we do indeed work with third parties. With many of our partners, we do not share your data such as your IP address. But, at times we do have to do that with some of them, especially the ones who help us answer your queries.
For example, for a search query that you type on Givanza search engine, we forward certain important information to our search results partner, Bing. This information includes user agent string, search term, IP address, location and language settings.
Moreover, through Givanza partnership with Bing, it has to set a "Client ID" parameter for creating a Bing specific quality query in the search results. When you enable "Do Not Track" in your browser (or if you have it already enabled), we disable the "Client ID" automatically.
You can enable or disable it from your browser’s user settings.
We should also tell you that Bing always anonymizes your unique ID and your search history in just four days. For more information on the privacy policy of Bing, click here.
If you are showing ads, how you can protect my privacy?
To get things going financially, we have to show ads on our search engine much like any other engine. But instead of earning for us, we earn for nature as income from ads goes to different good causes which either help nature, animals or humans in need. Only when users click these ads, we earn income.
While we do display ads via partnerships with something like Bing Ads, the ads which are based on your search query, are displayed in a privacy-friendly way. During the time, in which the ads are displayed, your information is not shared with the advertiser.
How good Givanza fares with other search engines?
As mentioned before, we are a ‘public' and ‘privacy' friendly search engine bent on helping good causes. We take your privacy very seriously. By using Gavanza, you do not just help with good causes but also reduce the amount of data that is collected on you by search engines such as Google.
At Givanza, we just anonymize your data in just under one week, which is unlike search engines like Google, who make a personal profile on you by collecting data from the services you use that were created by them. This is how they can combine data in you and then show you personalized advertisements and search results.
Most of the search engines who aren't related to big corporations like Google have to cooperate and share data with large search engines like Google, Baidu and Bing. It has to be like this because they have their web indexes while smaller engines like us do not. This is why we need to share with Bing but we are very transparent about what we are sharing with them.
Additionally, we assure you that your data will never be properly protected by a search engine even though it was effectively trying to. It is because your browser or network provider could always be able to access your data and therefore capable of sharing with other parties. If you need more security, we recommend you use tools like VPN or services like TOR.
