We tailor our plugins to meet our own high standards and needs. Likewise, we apply equally high standards in managing your information.

We have used large parts of the Privacy Policy made available by Automattic under a Creative Commons Sharealike license (which makes this page available under Creative Commons Sharealike, too). We are very grateful to them for making our work (and so much more) possible.

Your privacy is critically important to us. At The SEO Framework, we have a few fundamental principles:

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
• We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
• We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

The Privacy Policy includes examples and actions we aim to use in the future, like collecting draft content for Natural Language Processing services. So, although we may not collect as much information as stated below, we do uphold and enforce the policy to its fullest extent.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

We are The SEO Framework, a subsidiary/trademark of CyberWire B.V., founded and directed by Sybre Waaijer. Via CyberWire B.V., we deliver hosting for small business owners, and in doing so, we created many plugins. One of these plugins is named The SEO Framework, and we built an identically titled company on it.

We believe in a fair and open world, and our mission is to achieve that for everyone. Let’s start small–by targetting just 30% of the internet.

Unlike other SEO plugin makers, we don’t put our monetary needs above your technical needs. So, you get clean plugins that work from us, without ads.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our websites (including theseoframework.com, tsf.fyi, tsfcloud.com, tsfcloud.net, and their subdomains);
• Our API services on our users’ websites (including connections we set up via the Extension Manager plugin);
• Our persistent opt-in crawlers (including our Monitor extension services);

Throughout this Privacy Policy, we’ll refer to our websites, plugins, and other products and services collectively as “Services.” And if you’d like to learn more about which the CyberWire B.V. company is the controller of information about you, take a look at the section below on Controllers and Responsible Companies.

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy.

Below, we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with your choices concerning that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, communicate with you, or make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depend on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

• Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a theseofrmaework.com account to provide a username and email address–and that’s it. You may provide us with more information–like your name–but we don’t require that information to create a theseoframework.com account.
• Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a theseoframework.com account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that–public–so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
• Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us — a Premium subscription to our API services, for example — you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the payment transaction, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
• Site Information: If you use our API Services to obtain lexical, geographical, or other information, you will have to create a theseoframework.com account to obtain an API key and provide your site URL. The input fields on your website bound to these Services can provide us with information like focus keywords from drafted and published content, your business address, and other information from your website.
• Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft-and published content (such as for our Natural Language Processing Services). For example, if you write a blog post that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish the post publicly. This might be obvious to you… but it’s not to everyone!
• Communications With Us (How are you?): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, or communicate with us about a support question.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services–for example, when you connect your website to theseoframework.com.
• Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, when you activate a Premium Extension, your website sends us information, and we test if your subscription is valid. We also collect keyword entries in the Focus extension and your website’s language, so we can provide lexical information, like synonyms and inflections.
• Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions or to determine EU VAT requirements.
• Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. The SEO Framework uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services. For example, we use Google Analytics for tracking users on our website (see Google’s Privacy Policy for more information)

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you authorize a purchase through our Services via Stripe or PayPal, the payment gateway used may provide us with the email address you’ve registered with them.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, determine errors on your site, provide lexical information, or charge you for any of our paid Services;
• To further develop and improve our Services–for example, by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their websites more efficiently;
• To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
• To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals purchased a plan after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of CyberWire B.V. and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
• To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by The SEO Framework and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on The SEO Framework and our products; and
• To personalize your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of users, and serve relevant advertisements.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account–for example, to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent–for example, before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

• Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
• Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, geographical services to provide geocoding, and customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you), those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), and companies that make products available on your websites (such as our plugins on WordPress.org), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
• Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request. We’ll try to fight against these requests, but we can’t promise to succeed.
• To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of CyberWire B.V., third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that CyberWire B.V. goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that are transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
• With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties with which you authorize us to do so.
• Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
• Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. We will de-identify the request; unless your consent is given to do otherwise.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on our website, are all available to others.

For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile on WordPress.com, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Gravatar. Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, will display with the comments that you make on our websites while logged in.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of our websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately thirty days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to our websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.

As another example, when we delete your comment from our site–either via your request or our choice–, it stays in our Trash folder for thirty days just in case either of us changes our mind and would like to restore that content. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services–for example, Premium extensions–may not be accessible.
• Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
• Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: You can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using our websites, with the drawback that certain features of our websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Disconnect Your Website: When you disconnect your website from our Services, we will stop collecting information from your sites automatically. Please keep in mind that we need a connection to provide our Premium API Services.
• Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services, you can close your account by contacting us. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above–for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests. Please scroll down to How to Reach Us to find contact information.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

Our services are worldwide. Different CyberWire B.V. companies are the controller (or co-controller) of personal information, which means that they are the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and the location of the individual using our Services.

Depending on the Services you use, more than one company may be the controller of your personal data. Generally, the “controller” is the CyberWire B.V. company that entered into the contract with you under the Terms of Service for the product or service you use.

The CyberWire B.V. and The SEO Framework companies are registered on this address:
Leidse Schouw 2,
2408 AE Alphen aan den Rijn
The Netherlands

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us.

Plugin Privacy Information

When using third-party plugins, it’s good to know if they add cookies or collect visitor information. We’d like to ease your mind.

This is the glossary we use for the lists below:

1. Us: Our Services and website.
2. Visitors: Anyone who visits your site.
3. Users: Anyone who has an account on your site.
4. Collecting: The act of storing information in your database.
5. Sharing: The act of displaying the information to Visitors.

The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework plugin (TSF) does not share any information with our Services. TSF is 100% ad-free, and it does not create cookies. Unlike other SEO plugins, TSF does not automatically register and send your data to services, like Ryte, without your explicit consent. And, TSF does not hide your information in hyperlinks. To summarize:

• Information TSF sends to Us: Nothing! Zero, zilch, zip, nada, nothing.
• Information TSF Collects from Visitors: Nothing.
• Information TSF Shares from Visitors: Nothing.
• Information TSF Collects from Users: (1) Users that can publish posts on your website, may have their social profile URLs (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) entered and stored on your website via “Authorial info” settings on the dashboard profile page.
• Information TSF Shares from Users: (1) Users that can publish posts on your website, may have their “display name” and social profile URLs (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) shared on your website when they publish a post, to enhance social network discovery via Open Graph and Twitter metadata.

The SEO Framework – Extension Manager (Free)

When using the free version of “The SEO Framework – Extension Manager” (TSFEM) below version 2.0.0, it does not share any information with our Services.
When using the free version of “The SEO Framework – Extension Manager” at version 2.0.0 or greater, it may share some information with our Services.

TSFEM is 100% ad-free and does not create cookies. To summarize:

• Information TSFEM sends to Us: (3) The plugin (at version 2.0.0 or later) may request plugin updates from our servers. While succesfully doing so, it sends us your WordPress version number, the PHP version number, the installed TSFEM plugin version number, your website’s IP address, and your website’s home URL. (4) The plugin (at version 2.4.0 or later) may request translation updates concurrently (in the same request) with “(3)”. While successfully doing so, it sends us your installed WordPress locales, and the Extension Manager’s translation file headers. (5) The plugin (at version 2.5.1 or later) may send us a list of its active extensions. We collect this data for aggregating usage statistics, to provide your site with the latest compatible version (3) and translation files (4), and to help us know which extensions are used (5). The aggregated statistics will always be anonymized.
• Information TSFEM Collects from Visitors: Nothing.
• Information TSFEM Shares from Visitors: Nothing.
• Information TSFEM Collects from Users: Nothing.
• Information TSFEM Shares from Users: (1) Users that can publish posts on your website, may have their “display name” shared on your website when they publish a post, to enhance Structured Data collection via Articles.

When you enter your email address and API key via forms throughout the plugin to upgrade to TSFEM Premium, TSFEM Free may connect to our Services to verify the API subscription.

The SEO Framework – Extension Manager (Premium)

In addition to the Free version, when you enable Essentials, Premium, or Enterprise API Services for TSFEM, our Services may collect more information. Our Premium Services act as a proxy to third parties–this means that our Services strip out your API connection information (like your website address, email address, and API key) before it’s being sent to third parties where we obtain requested information from. TSFEM Premium is 100% ad-free and does not create cookies.

So, in addition to the Free version of TSFEM, we summarize:

• Information TSFEM sends to Us:
  • (6) Your API email address, your API key, your website’s domain name, and an autogenerated secret key, encrypted via HTTPS, are sent to us on every API Service request.
  • (7) Additional extension information, like Local geocoding data, Focus lexical data, or Monitor Service settings, may also be sent to us.
• Information TSFEM Collects from Visitors: Nothing.
• Information TSFEM Shares from Visitors: Nothing.
• Information TSFEM Collects from Users: (6) Your API email address and API key will be stored for future Service connections.
• Information TSFEM Shares from Users: Nothing.

The Monitor extension

The Monitor extension brought with The SEO Framework – Extension Manager (Premium) is a web crawler service that ignores the robots directive. It ignores this directive so it can tell you if this directive, and other data, are set up correctly.

This Service may, on your request, obtain information from your website as a regular, logged out, visitor. The information it collects are the sitemap.xml and sitemap_index.xml files, robots.txt file, and favicon.ico file. It may also collect your web pages’ contents; these pages may contain personal information which you’ve published publicly.

All your information is secured via our proprietary autonomous 182-bit 2FA (two-factor authentication) system, which prevents other Monitor Service users from obtaining your information. The Monitor Service automatically removes all the information mentioned above whenever you request a new crawl, or after 90 days; whichever comes first.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, The SEO Framework may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. We encourage visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to this Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the changelog below. We may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or our Blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it. Thanks for reading!

Changelog:

• November 7th, 2021: Via Extension Manager v2.5.1, we now obtain your site’s activated extensions through its plugin-update requests. We already obtained this information from Premium users to test whether a license is valid for the extensions.
• July 1st, 2021: “CyberWire” is henceforth registered as “CyberWire B.V.”.
• June 2nd, 2020: Via Extension Manager v2.4.0, we now obtain your site’s installed locales and the headers of the installed Extension Manager translation files. These are used to provide the most recent localization files.
• May 9th, 2019: We expanded our network; so, we’ve listed all domains to which this privacy policy applies.
• December 3rd, 2018:
  • We incorrectly stated that the number of monthly API requests was shared from your users to your visitors; it’s only shown to the site administrators.
  • We now state how the Monitor Service treats your information.
• November 5th, 2018: We now tell you what the new Extension Manager plugin sends to us.
• August 22, 2018: We now tell you what we don’t do without your consent, unlike others.
• July 28, 2018: Improved grammar and removed ambiguity. Added plugin privacy glossary.
• May 25, 2018: Added more information on plugin privacy; specifically, what they share with third parties.
• May 24, 2018:
  • We recognize ourself and are publicly registered as “CyberWire” and “The SEO Framework”. We no longer use “TSF Company”, but “us” or “we” instead.
  • Largely revised and reorganized the language in the policy to make it more readable. We now clarify how we process information to reflect the requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
  • Added more information about how our plugins process information subject to your users-and visitors’ privacy.