Here at Watchful we take very seriously the privacy of your personal data. This extends to any data associated with your client websites. And so our goal is to deliver a privacy-first website management suite.

Below are the five ways in which we address this goal and maintain compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

1. We don’t collect your clients personal information.

At Watchful, you will add your client websites into our platform to maintain them using our suite of management tools.

Importantly, we do not collect personally-identifiable information (usernames and emails for example) related to the websites added to your Watchful account.

Thus, your clients personal information remains safe on their websites and not available to Watchful.

2. We store anonymous information in the EU and never transfer it.

We do collect anonymous information about each site you add to Watchful such as the IP address, the plugins used, the updates performed and backups completed, to name a few.

The GDPR does not protect anonymous information. Even so, we store this anonymous information on servers that comply with the GDPR.

We locate all of our servers exclusively in the EU and never transfer the anonymous data to servers in another region. 

3. We provide a data processing agreement.

Data processing agreements are legal contracts that specify how a so-called “data controller” like Watchful can handle your personal information. It also specifies how “sub processors” like our payment processor and email server provider can use your personal information.

To comply with the GDPR, Watchful users can easily sign and submit the Data Processing Agreement available in Watchful’s Account & Subscription area.

4. We use personal information from account holders in compliance with GDPR.

Unlike client sites, Watchful account holders submit personal data like their name, email and (for Premium accounts) billing information.

As noted above, we store most of this data in the EU on servers that comply with the GDPR. 

However, we do use some services outside the EU to process payments and send you emails related to your Watchful account. Importantly, all of our service providers comply with the GDPR including our payment processor Recurly and the email service provider Mailchimp.

5. We provide tools to easily delete personal information from account holders.

The “right to be forgotten” is an important concept in the GDPR. For Watchful, this requires us to provide a process to delete any personal information collected. It further extends to any information shared with our service providers.

To delete this information, simply cancel your Watchful subscription and delete your account using the tools provided in our Account & Subscription area. 

Our commitment to privacy-first website management.

Watchful respects your privacy, and the privacy of your clients. We will continue to develop Watchful with this commitment to privacy at the forefront of our design and engineering decisions.

We encourage you to review our privacy policy. It contains full details on how we collect and use your personally identifiable information.