Scope
This policy applies to pricecannon.com and every subdomain operated by us. It explains what personal data we process when you browse the spotlight board, submit a product or pay for a boost.
Who is responsible
The controller within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation is:
- Jetlic UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
- Werinherstraße 3, 81541 München, Germany
- Managing Director: Alexander Otten
- [email protected]
SSL or TLS encryption
This site uses SSL or TLS encryption for every request. You can tell it is active because the address bar shows https:// and a closed padlock. While encryption is active, the data you send us cannot be read by third parties.
Handling of personal data
We collect personal data only where you give it to us or where processing it is necessary to run the service. We do not sell personal data, and we pass it to third parties only where this policy says so or where we are legally obliged to.
Collection of general data and information
Each time a page is requested, our servers record technical information: the browser type and version, the operating system, the referring page, the pages visited, the date and time of the request, an abbreviated IP address and the internet service provider.
We use this data to deliver the site correctly, to keep it secure and to investigate abuse. It is never combined with the data you submit with a listing. The legal basis is our legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) GDPR.
Data we process when you advertise
Pasting a URL and previewing a listing stores the URL and nothing about you. Creating a campaign means creating a business account, and from that point we process the business email, trading name, country, store URL and VAT ID where you give one.
The listing itself is public by design: the product, the advertiser name and the Cannon Power it holds all appear on the board, because EU advertising rules require a sponsored placement to say who paid for it.
The legal basis for all of this is Article 6(1)(b) GDPR, since it is necessary to provide the advertising service you bought.
The campaign record
Alongside the campaign we keep a record of what was bought and what ran: login timestamps and the IP each session came from, the terms version accepted, the submitted URLs and a preview of the product, the Stripe payment ID and authentication result, invoices, campaign start and end, boosts, positions held, impressions, outbound clicks and the emails we sent.
We keep it to show that an advertising service was delivered, to answer payment disputes and to investigate abuse. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(b) and Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, and the advertiser can see the record for their own campaigns at any time.
Payments
Payments are processed by Stripe. Card numbers and bank details are entered on Stripe’s systems and never reach our servers. We receive the payment status, the amount, the currency, the billing country and a transaction reference, and we keep them for as long as tax law requires.
Product data fetched from the URL you submit
When you submit a product URL, our servers request that page once to read its title, description and preview image, and keep a copy of how the page looked at that moment. We store only what is needed to render and evidence the listing. If the page blocks automated requests, we fall back to the details you typed in yourself.
PriceCannon Chrome extension
The extension does nothing until you open it and press Continue to PriceCannon. It reads the tab you are on, and only that tab.
We never receive the page. No HTML and no complete block of the page’s own product data ever leaves your browser. These are the details we receive, and there are no others:
- the product title
- the address of the product page, with tracking parameters stripped off it
- the brand, the model, the manufacturer part number and the shop’s own SKU
- the barcode, where the page publishes a valid one
- the condition: new, used or refurbished
- the variant you are looking at, such as the colour or the size
- the price and the currency the shop is showing
- where on the page each of those was found, and which of them the extension was unsure about
These it never reads at all:
- any other tab, and anything at all about your browsing
- your cookies and your browser history
- your account, what is in your basket, and anything typed into a payment field
- the rest of the words on the page
The details land in the PriceCannon page in front of you, where you can correct anything the extension got wrong. Importing them starts no search.
When you press Search, the details as you have left them and the country you want delivery to go to our servers, which ask the Shopify Global Catalog what is on sale. Shopify is told what to look for and where you want it sent, and nothing else. We do not keep the draft in your browser or add it to a catalogue of ours, and what Shopify answers is held only for the comparison in front of you. What the search itself records is kept for as long as a submitted URL is, below.
The extension carries no analytics of its own. If you have accepted the cookie notice, the website counts that an import happened, and records nothing but the version of the format, where on the page the details were found, and whether it worked. No title, address, barcode, price, the details themselves, or anything you typed into the form goes with it.
Click tracking and outbound links
Following an offer takes you through an address on this site before you reach the shop. That hop is what lets us check the offer is still one we are willing to send you to, and it is where the click is counted.
What is counted is a number. We raise a counter against the day in UTC, the offer, the merchant and the country edition you were reading. That table holds nothing else: no identifier, no address, no referrer and no browser string. We read your browser string to tell a crawler and a page-preloading browser from a person, and then throw it away without storing it. We call the figure outbound clicks, because that is all it is: a second click by the same person is in it, and so is a bot we did not recognise. It does not say you reached the shop and it does not say you bought anything.
Some shops are reached through an affiliate network, currently Awin. Where they are, the link we send you to is the network’s, and the network sets its own cookies once you are on it. We load none of their scripts and set none of their cookies on this site. What we do send them, on the link itself, is whether you agreed to affiliate tracking: yes if you accepted it, and no in every other case, including when you have not answered or your answer has expired. Their handling of the click from that point on is covered by their own privacy notice.
Outbound links carry rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", the redirect is never cached and never indexed, and it can only ever resolve an offer we hold. There is no parameter on it that names a destination.
Cookies
We use a session cookie that is required for the site to work and is deleted when you close your browser, and two that do nothing but remember a choice you made yourself: the country you switched to, and whether you asked a comparison to show only the shops selling from it. Both are written only when you work the control, and neither is used to recognise you anywhere else. Where we set anything beyond that, we ask for your consent first and you can withdraw it at any time.
Your answer to that question is itself kept in a cookie named pc_consent, so that our own servers can read it. It has to be readable by us rather than only by your browser, because whether we tell an affiliate network that you agreed to be tracked is decided on our side at the moment you follow an offer. It holds the version of the notice you answered, when you answered it, and a yes or no for each of the two purposes, and nothing that identifies you. It lasts six months, after which we ask again. A missing, expired or unreadable answer counts as no to everything.
The Cookie Policy explains every cookie in detail.
Contacting us
If you write to us by email, we store your message and your address so that we can answer and follow up. We delete this correspondence once it is no longer needed and no retention obligation applies.
Third-party links
Every listing links to a site we do not control. Once you follow such a link, this policy stops applying and the privacy policy of the site you land on takes over. We are not responsible for the content or the data practices of linked sites.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
- ask what personal data we hold about you and receive a copy of it
- have inaccurate data corrected
- have your data deleted where no retention obligation stands in the way
- have processing restricted
- receive your data in a portable format
- object to processing based on our legitimate interest
- withdraw a consent you gave us, with effect for the future
- complain to a supervisory authority
Write to [email protected] to exercise any of these rights. Note that a campaign you paid for stays public for its whole run, including the advertiser name on it, because that is what the payment bought and what advertising law requires us to show.
Who else processes your data
We keep the list short, and everyone on it acts on our instructions under a data processing agreement.
- Stripe, for payments, fraud checks and authentication.
- Our hosting provider, whose servers are inside the European Union.
- Our email provider, for verification links, receipts and campaign notices.
- Google, for reCAPTCHA on the “tell me when it opens” form. It receives your IP address and how you interacted with the page, and returns a score telling us whether you are likely a person. We use that score to stop the form being used to send mail automatically, and for nothing else.
- Google, for Google Analytics, which we load through Google Tag Manager to count visits and see which categories are worth expanding. It receives your IP address, the page you are on, the site that sent you and rough details of your browser and device. None of that happens unless you accept the cookie notice: until then no Google Analytics script is fetched and it learns nothing about you. The reCAPTCHA above is a separate service and still loads on the two pages carrying that form whatever you choose. We never grant it advertising or personalisation consent, so it is not used to profile you or to build an advertising audience.
- Shopify, for its Global Catalog. When you press Search it receives what you are looking for and the country you want delivery to, and answers with the prices it has.
- Awin, an affiliate network, for the shops that are reached through it. Nothing about you goes to Awin while you read a page. Only when you follow one of those offers does your browser reach their address, and what it carries is the offer, our publisher account and whether you agreed to affiliate tracking. We separately download those merchants’ product lists from Awin on a schedule; that request carries our own credentials and nothing about any visitor.
We do not sell personal data, and we do not pass one advertiser’s data to another. Where a payment is disputed, the campaign record goes to the card issuer through Stripe, because that is what answering a dispute requires.
How long we keep things
- Server logs: 30 days, then deleted.
- The user-level and event-level records Google Analytics holds: 14 months, then deleted by Google. The aggregate reports built from them, which count visits rather than describe people, Google keeps for longer.
- A submitted URL with no campaign behind it: 30 days, then deleted.
- Campaign records, including impressions and clicks: 3 years from the end of the campaign, which covers the window in which a payment can be disputed.
- Daily outbound-click totals: 2 years. These are counters against a day, an offer, a merchant and a country edition, and there is nothing in them that could be traced to a person.
- Your cookie choice: 6 months from the day you made it, then we ask again. Withdrawing it deletes the record straight away rather than storing a refusal.
- Merchant feed imports, including the rows we refused and why: 30 days. These describe products and prices rather than people.
- Invoices and payment records: 8 years, the retention period German tax law sets for booking vouchers.
- Business correspondence and other commercial records: 6 years.
- Accounts with no live campaign: deleted on request, apart from what the retention periods above hold back.
Where your data is stored
On servers inside the European Union. Stripe processes payment data, and Google processes reCAPTCHA and analytics data, under their own safeguards, which may involve transfers outside the EU on the basis of the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.
Children’s privacy
Spotlight is sold only to businesses, and we do not knowingly process data from anyone under 18. Browsing the public board requires no account and no personal data. If you believe a minor has given us data, contact us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We review this policy regularly and update it when the service changes. The date at the top always shows the current version.