Privacy notice

This notice says what HowdySEO, operated by NAGAPPAN ARUN KARTHIK, trading as DesignQube, Justice Ramaswamy Street, No.51/1, Kamaraj Avenue Second Street, Adyar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 600020, India, collects, why, who receives it, how long it is kept, and what you can ask of us. It covers visitors to howdyseo.com, the people who use HowdySEO for a business, and the customers and callers of the businesses we work for. Our Terms set out the service. For a dental or medical practice, our Business associate agreement governs patient information.

What we collect

• From the people who use HowdySEO: the name and email address of the Google account you sign in with; your role on the business; and, if you turn texts on, your mobile number and your consent to those texts.
• About the business: its name, trade, locations, addresses or service areas, phone numbers, hours, services, time zone and language; the facts you confirm to us; your billing contact's email address; and your plan and billing history. Card payments are taken by Stripe; we never hold a card number.
• From the business's own accounts, through the roles you grant us: Business Profile, website, Search Console, Analytics, store, Merchant Center, ad and carrier accounts. This includes reviews and reviewers' names, calls with their source, time and duration, orders and revenue for a store, and any call recordings.
• The business's customers, for review requests: the names, phone numbers and email addresses the business types in, uploads, or syncs from its job or booking software, and each customer's opt-out.
• Use of HowdySEO: events about how people use the product.
• Logs: identifiers and outcomes. Logs never hold a review's text, a reviewer's or caller's name or number, a recording, or a patient detail.

Why we use it

• To do the business's work, report on it, and reach the people at the business by email, by text where they turned texts on, and through the helpdesk.
• To send review requests on the business's behalf, from its own registered number or in its name, only to customers it confirms have agreed to be contacted.
• To charge for the service and send receipts.
• To run the product, from product-use events, which never include the business's content or its customers' data.

We never use one business's material to produce another's work.

Who receives it

• Our providers receive only what their task needs, under contracts that bar their own use of it. They are: card payments (Stripe); hosting, storage and backups (Amazon Web Services); AI models that produce the work (OpenRouter, and Amazon Bedrock for a dental or medical practice); search and ranking data (DataForSEO); email (Resend, Amazon SES, and Google Workspace for our staff's messages to other sites and former providers); texting and call tracking (Twilio); the helpdesk (Helpbrook); error reporting (Sentry); and product analytics (PostHog).
• For a law practice, material goes only to AI providers that keep none of it and train on none. Any provider that touches a dental or medical practice's patient information has signed a business associate agreement with us first.
• The platforms the business uses, such as Google, receive what we write into its own accounts.
• A former provider of the business hears from us only when the business's owner tells us to, with the owner copied.
• When a business is sold, its data passes to the buyer.
• An export goes only to the business's owner.

Visitors to our website

When you visit howdyseo.com, two tools load with the page:

• Analytics (PostHog), which counts the pages you view and the buttons you press, so we can improve the site.
• The Google Ads tag, which tells Google that you arrived from one of our ads and records the ad's click identity and the search keyword. Google uses this to measure our ads. We carry the click identity, the keyword and the page you landed on into the HowdySEO account you create, so we know which ad brought you.

Opting out of ad sharing

Under California law, letting the Google Ads tag collect your visit counts as sharing personal information for advertising. You can opt out of that sharing with the "Do not sell or share my personal information" link on every page of howdyseo.com. Once you opt out, the Google Ads tag no longer loads in that browser. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as the same opt-out, and you don't need to use the link. Analytics keeps running after you opt out, because it shares nothing with advertisers.

Opt out on this browser

Texts

Texts of the weekly update and alerts go only to a person who turned them on. Message frequency varies. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to stop, HELP for help.

A customer who replies STOP to a review request, or unsubscribes from one, gets no further requests from any location of that business.

How long we keep it

We keep the business's data while it works with us. 30 days after a business leaves, or after one location leaves, we delete that data from our systems and our providers' and email the owner when it is done. Our own backups cannot be edited, so the data leaves them 14 days after that deletion. Where a provider offers no way to delete, its copy expires on its own schedule: emails we sent, at Resend, up to 30 days after sending plus 7 days in its backups; the keywords, website addresses and locations we sent to DataForSEO, up to 365 days after each request; account identifiers in Sentry's error reports, up to 90 days after each report. An AI model provider that keeps what it is sent keeps it for that provider's own period, which we have not yet confirmed for each one. An email address that bounced may stay on Amazon SES's list of undeliverable addresses for a period Amazon does not publish. We keep billing and payment records 7 years after each charge.

What you can ask

• The owner can download the business's export at any time: every change we made, every report, the call history and the list of accounts and roles.
• A customer of a business can opt out of review requests on any channel at any time.
• Anyone can write to us on the helpdesk to ask about, get a copy of, correct or delete the data we hold. We answer within 45 days.
• For the data of the people who use HowdySEO, we decide how it is used. For the data of a business's customers and callers, we act as the business's service provider, on its instructions; we pass a request about that data to the business and act on its answer.

Changes

We give 30 days' notice of a change to this notice by email to each business's owner and billing contact. If you keep using HowdySEO after that date, you accept the change.