Wickr Pro Privacy Policy

Last Modified January 5, 2023

Wickr is being sold by AWS. If you purchase or renew Wickr services from an AWS Contracting Party (excluding Wickr LLC), even if you originally purchased through Wickr Inc./LLC, the AWS Customer Agreement and Privacy Notice now apply to your use of such services instead of the terms and privacy policies published on the Wickr website. The AWS Privacy Notice governs AWS’s collection and use of the information you provide to us in connection with the creation or administration of your customer account. The Customer Agreement and any supplemental terms between you and AWS relating to the Wickr service apply to the data transferred to the AWS services for processing, storage, or hosting in connection with your use of the Wickr services. If you did not purchase Wickr services from an AWS Contracting Party, the following applies:

Thank you for using Wickr Pro! Wickr Pro is a vetted, simple-to-use end-to-end encryption platform built by an expert security team and designed to facilitate calls and video conferences and protect the transfer of high-value sensitive communications including messages and files. Wickr administers Wickr Pro through its messaging network and the application downloaded by the user (collectively, the “Service” or “Services”).

This document, the Wickr Pro Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy”), governs how Wickr (“we”, “us”, “Wickr”) handle users’ data both in the Service itself and on our servers. For more information about our data handling practices for Wickr’s consumer product, please click here. There are a few core differences in these two products, so please read their respective privacy policies carefully.

This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and is subject to the Wickr Pro Terms of Service (“Terms of Service”) and Terms of Use (“Terms of Use”), so please read these documents carefully. Your use of the Services indicates your consent to this Privacy Policy, the Terms of Service and the Terms of Use. If you do not want to be bound by these agreements, you may not use our Services.

We work very hard to preserve your privacy and security, and we do our best to be as transparent as possible in explaining how we use your data in providing our Services. Not only is Wickr’s security architecture and proprietary encryption methodology designed to ensure that only users can gain access to their message content, we promise to never monetize you or your communications. Ever. Please contact us if you have any questions at privacy@wickr.com.

Our Privacy Practices in Brief

Wickr has to collect some information about you in order to provide our Services to you, but we work to do so in a limited and secure way, as follows:

• Information about you such as your email address or business affiliation is provided to us by you or the organization that you are affiliated with for the purpose of creating your account. This information may also be available to other users of the service in the form of a public profile. For information about how the entity or organization that you are affiliated with uses this information, please consult directly with that entity or organization.
• Neither Wickr nor the organization with which you are affiliated have access to the messages you transmit using the Service, the rooms you create or your contacts. Your messages are protected with multiple layers of encryption before they are transmitted to our servers, which is intended to make the messages only accessible to the intended recipient(s). If additional users are added to a room by you or by another user, then those users will be able to see the messages shared within that room from the moment they joined the conversation.
• You control how long your messages are viewable on recipient devices and how long rooms are active before they are deleted. The maximum message lifespan may be determined by the organization with which you are affiliated.
• We do not track, log or store users’ unique device information, IP or geo-location data or similar metadata associated with your use of the Wickr Pro App.
• When you block someone from being able to contact you on Wickr Pro, they are automatically added to the block list in your settings. To protect your privacy, they won’t know that you are blocking them when they send you a message.
• We do not sell customer data to any third party for any purposes. We will only share customer data as necessary in the circumstances described below.

Please review the rest of this Privacy Policy, below, for additional detail about the summary above.

What Information Does Wickr Collect?

We are committed to limiting our collection of your information to only what is necessary to provide you with the Services in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws. An administrator for the entity or organization with which you are affiliated (“Administrator”) may provide us with personally identifiable information about you, such as your e-mail address, for purposes such as sending you an e-mail with a link to download the Service. The entity or organization with which you are affiliated with may retain this information for as long as you are affiliated with that organization or entity or as long it uses the Service. We also collect information from users as described in greater detail below:

Mandatory User-Provided Information: You are required to provide limited information during the registration process to create a Wickr Pro account and to begin using the Service.

• Your ID: Your Wickr Pro ID is your e-mail address. Other users of the Service within your network or in other federated networks will be able to look you up and contact you using your Wickr Pro ID.
• Your Password: We require you to have a password to use the Service, but we never store your password on our servers and don’t store it in plain text on your device. You will be able to change your password at any time. In case you forget your password, you will be able to restore your access by resetting your account with a new password. You will be asked to verify either your email or phone number, depending on the settings set by the entity or organization with which you are affiliated. Please note that resetting your password will result in losing your existing conversations. For your security, we recommend that you use a long, unique password consisting of a mix of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.

Optional User-Provided Information: We provide a few optional features for your convenience, and for the convenience of the entity or organization that you are affiliated with. Some of these features permit you to provide additional personal information at your or your organization’s election.

• Profile Information: The Service may allow you or your organization to set up your profile, which may include your Wickr Pro ID, name, or other information entered by you or your Administrator such as your avatar image. If you set an avatar, it will become visible to others on Wickr, so please do not add an avatar if you do not intend it to be viewed by other users.
• Phone Number: If two-factor authentication is enabled by the Administrator, the organization you are affiliated with shared your phone number with us for the purpose of verifying your identity. To verify you, we use a third party service to deliver a confirmation SMS to you, but they will not receive any information about you other than your phone number, and the SMS message itself will contain no information except a confirmation code.

If you add your phone number to your account to facilitate contact searching, we utilize the same third party service to deliver a confirmation SMS to you, but we then store a cryptographically hashed (I.e., disguised) representation of your phone number on our servers in lieu of the actual phone number. Our contact search feature operates entirely on hashed representations of phone numbers and rate limited search functions.

• Push Notifications: When setting up your Wickr Pro account, we will ask if you want to receive notifications of new messages, software updates, and other administrative and technological developments. Push notifications are functions of your device’s operating system, so if you enable this feature, your device operating system’s provider will know that you are using the Service, but will not be able to see the content of the messages you transmit using the Service.
• File Sharing: The Service will allow you to share files you have on your device. The Service will make encrypted copies of such files when sending them as Wickr messages, which will expire depending on the message expiration settings you select. Files you send may be downloaded locally on user devices, after which message expiration settings do not apply.
• Contacts: As you join the network with which you are affiliated, you will see all contacts within your network populate your Wickr Pro contact list. Depending on the Wickr service you use and the settings selected by the entity with which you are affiliated, you may be able to add contacts from outside your network to your Wickr Pro account. If you allow the Service to access your device’s contacts to see who among them is on Wickr Pro, the Service will send hashed representations of your contacts’ phone numbers to our servers to ensure that our server never accesses your actual contact list. We never store your device contacts in any form on our servers.
• Customer Service: Any information provided to us by a user voluntarily when they request customer support or provide feedback (e.g., an email address, the contents of their request) will be used to respond to that individual request, and may be may be logged as part of our effort to improve our customer service, solve any product-related issues or improve our Service.

Automatically-Collected Information: Wickr collects the following information automatically during your setup and use of the Service:

• Device Information: The Service may collect hashed representations of your mobile device’s hardware ID and/or other platform-related information during registration. This information is used by the Service to associate your account with your device.
• Aggregate Usage Data: During the operation of the Service, we also collect basic usage statistics, such as the number of messages sent by Wickr users daily, types of messages sent (e.g., voice messages more often than text), and other key performance indicators. We never attempt to, and cannot, identify users associated with any of this information.
• Crash Logs: For purposes of debugging, error correction, and system continuity, Wickr Apps transmit crash logs to a cloud-based bug reporting platform. The logs do not contain any user personal information and they pertain only to the Wickr Service.

How Is Information Used and Disclosed?

The limited information that we collect, receive, or have access to is used to provide the Service, to allow you to send and receive messages and files, to respond to your requests, to enforce our Terms of Service (e.g., terminating an account for promoting child sexual exploitation or abuse) or as otherwise required by law (also see “Legal Process” section below), and to improve the Service, in line with the legitimate interest we have in delivering the Services to you. It may also be shared under valid legal process and with third party service providers for the limited purposes described below.

Legal Process

Wickr is committed to transparency and to limiting what we disclose in response to legal process. Please see our full Legal Process Guidelines, but here are the highlights:

When we receive a request for customer data related to the Service, we always attempt to redirect the third party to obtain the requested data from our customer. For valid requests that we are not able to redirect to the customer, we disclose information only when we are legally compelled to do so, and we always make sure that we provide only the data specified in the legal order. We will always notify our customers of any third party requests for their information unless we are legally prohibited from doing so. As soon as legally permissible, we will notify our users of requests for their information. We require a warrant before handing over the contents of communications; however, because of the nature of our technology, the contents of communications will be encrypted and undecipherable if obtained.

Third Party Service Providers

To improve the Service, we engage with various service providers (“Partners”) that may require access to some user information described in this Privacy Policy. Wickr takes all reasonable steps to minimize the information to which our Partners have access. We carefully select each of our Partners based on Wickr’s commitment to user privacy and security. Our security team meticulously vets each prospective partner to ensure its policies and practices are on par with Wickr’s standards.

Here are the Partners with whom we work to provide the Service:

• To assist Wickr with improving our web content and advertising activities, as well as to optimize user experience during the onboarding process, we partner with Hubspot, a B2B Marketing Automation Platform, and Salesforce.
• To accelerate resolution of the most frequent customer inquiries, Wickr’s support is automated in collaboration with Zendesk, a customer support platform.
• To deliver a confirmation SMS as part of Wickr’s two-factor authentication process, we use Twilio, a cloud communications service.
• To deliver email invitations, we use an email server hosted by Mailgun, an email service provider.
• To ensure secure, reliable subscription management and payment processing, Wickr partners with Recurly and Braintree.
• To enable app distribution, we use the official App Stores or private app distribution methods preferred by the organization with which you are affiliated.
• To manage bug reports, we use Bugsnag and Backtrace, which are cloud-based bug reporting platforms.
• To enable Wickr chat in ATAK, we provide an end-user option to integrate with TAK apps provided by the U.S. Army.

Each of these providers has its own policies for handling user data. Please review the respective privacy policies for Zendesk, Twilio, Mailgun, Recurly, Braintree, Bugsnag, Backtrace, Hubspot, TAK and Salesforce for additional detail on their specific practices.

Cookie Policy

We tirelessly work on improving our services and raising awareness about our products, which are designed to ensure our users’ security and privacy. To accomplish these goals, we use cookies on the Wickr website that enable us to learn how visitors navigate our content and interact with our marketing materials so we can be more effective at informing our users about product developments.

A cookie is a small text file that is placed in visitors’ browsers to help us learn when users arrive at our site, how they use the site, when they leave, and when they come back. These cookies can never be used to identify user accounts within the Wickr App.

Here is an example of how we may use information collected via cookies: we may think that one of our new features would be very useful to the Wickr community, but cookies may tell us that very few users fully read that feature’s description on our site. That insight would help us to rethink the way we explain that product on our site or present it in an advertisement so that we can better communicate our services to our users.

We make every reasonable effort to minimize the information we collect. For example, we enforce IP masking for the website analytics purposes to conceal the last 4 digits of IP addresses which ensures that visitor’s full IPs are not collected via Google Analytics service.

We provide the utmost transparency on and up-to-date overview of cookies used on our website including the ability for website visitors to check, withdraw or modify consent for non-necessary cookies at any time.

More information on our Cookie Policy can be found here.

Data Retention

Data Retention on Wickrʼs Servers
Depending on which Wickr-hosted business product you are using, our servers store the encrypted messages that you send and receive for up to 30 days to ensure their reliable delivery to each device associated with your account and the accounts to which you transmit messages.

We retain certain account data (i.e., when a user account was provisioned, when a user registered, and account settings changes). User profile information is stored on our servers for as long as you use the Service, or until account deletion by an Administrator.

Data Retention by Your Entity or Organization
The entity or organization with which you are affiliated with may retain information about you and your use of the Service, such as your profile information, for as long as the entity or organization desires. Please consult the entity or organization with which you are affiliated with for additional detail about its specific data retention policies.

Data Retention on Your Device
All messages are stored in encrypted form on user devices. Users select a retention policy for their messages by choosing how long a message is viewable before it is deleted (via the expiration time, burn-on read time). The “expiration” time is a length of time before content is destroyed on all devices from the time it is sent (this is the maximum time-to-live). The “burn-on-read” time is a length of time before content is destroyed across all user devices once it has been read by that user (this will never extend the “expiration” time). Your content may be available to you and the recipient(s) locally, on your device(s) until it expires even after we delete it from our servers; however, you will not be able to download pre-existing content to a new device. Note that our application controls cannot destroy exported or maliciously retained messages, so you should always ensure that you are communicating with people you trust.

In addition, Wickr’s “secure shredder” technology uses forensic deletion techniques to help reduce the risk of deleted messages and temporary data being recovered.

Users for Whom the Service Is Intended

The Service is designed for communication purposes by individuals associated with an entity or organization. The Service is not designed for children under the age of 16. If we learn that we have collected personally identifiable information from a child under 16, we will take appropriate steps to promptly remove such account and delete all information associated with such account.

Users Outside the US

If you use our Services and reside outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to the U.S. and will be processed and stored there under U.S. data protection and privacy regulations which may vary from those of your country of residence. By using the Services, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this policy.

You are responsible for complying with any laws or regulations in your country that govern use of applications and services like Wickr.

We Are Serious About Security

We are concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your information. We provide physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect information we process and maintain. For example, within our organization, we limit access to information about you and your use of the Service to authorized employees who need to know that information in order to operate, develop, or improve the Services. As described herein, we take every reasonable step to ensure that message contents are not retrievable by us or anyone else.

However, we know that no security system can prevent all potential security breaches. Therefore, we have limited the potential implications of such a breach by designing our system so that in the event of a breach, we would have only limited information about you. Please note that all user communications on the Wickr Service are protected between devices and are never stored unencrypted hence are undecipherable to Wickr or other third parties.

Learn more about AWS security policies here.

Revisions to the Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy, which pertains solely to our Wickr Pro Products, from time to time, for any reason. When we do, we will be sure to let you know one way or another by revising the date at the top of the Privacy Policy that’s available on our website and mobile application or we may provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement to our websites’ home pages or providing you with an in-app notification). Your continued use of the Service following the posting or notice of any changed terms will denote your acceptance of such changes.

Contact Us if You Have Questions or Account-Related Requests

If you have additional questions regarding our privacy protection practices while using our Services or otherwise, please contact us via email at wickr-privacy@amazon.com.

If you live in the European Region please note the following:

• Opt-out. You may contact us anytime to opt-out of:
  (i) direct marketing communications or
  (ii) the transfer of your personal data outside the European Region. Please note that your use of some of the Service may become ineffective upon opt-out.
• Access. You may access the data we hold about you at any time within the application or by contacting us directly.
• Amend. You can also contact us to update or correct any inaccuracies in your personal data.
• Erase and forget. In certain situations, for example, when the data we hold about you is no longer relevant or is incorrect, you can request that we erase your data.

You may contact us at wickr-gdpr@amazon.com on any questions you may have about your personal data and our use of such personal data under the GDPR.