Meerkat Privacy Policy

We value your privacy and are dedicated to safeguarding it. This policy outlines how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use our platform, including the Meerkat app, website https://www.trymeerkat.ai, and related services. We, Meerkat Inc., are the data controller of your personal information. We recommend that you read through this policy thoroughly to gain a clear understanding of our privacy practices.

This Privacy Policy applies to all of our Services unless specified otherwise.

By using or accessing our Services in any manner, you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined in this Privacy Policy, and you hereby consent that we will collect, use, and disclose your information in the following ways.

Legal basis for collecting and processing your personal information

Our legal basis for obtaining and utilizing your personal information, as this policy outlines, depends on the context in which it is collected.

We may collect your personal data because:

Contract

Why we process personal data

We use information we have (subject to choices you make and applicable law) to operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, research, develop, and test new services and features, and market our Services.

We process personal data for the following purposes:

Our Services: We use information we have to operate and provide our Services, including:

Providing customer support
Enable secure login and account management
Facilitate group chats and provide real-time insights
Enrich contact profiles with third-party data
Generate a relationship graph for 1st and 2nd-degree connections
Reference past conversations to provide context and continuity in discussions
Offer personalized recommendations and actionable insights
Improve platform performance and user experience
Detect and prevent fraudulent or unauthorized activity
Completing purchases (enrolling in a paid subscriber plan)

Safety, Security, And Integrity: Safety, security, and integrity are an integral part of our Services. We use information we have to verify accounts and activity; combat harmful conduct; protect users against bad experiences and spam; and promote safety, security, and integrity on and off our Services, such as by investigating suspicious activity or violations of our Terms and policies.

Communications About Our Services: We use information we have to communicate with you about our Services and let you know about our terms, policies, and other important updates. We may provide you marketing for our Services.

Categories of personal data we collect

Meerkat must receive or collect some information to operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services, including when you install, access, or use our Services.

The types of information we receive and collect depend on how you use our Services. We require certain information to deliver our Services and without this we will not be able to provide our Services to you. For example, you must provide your mobile phone number to create an account to use our Services.

We collect the following categories of personal data on our website:

Information You Provide

Account Information: Name, mobile phone number, email address, and other details (including a profile display name) you provide during registration. If you don’t provide us with this information, you will not be able to create an account to use our Services. You can add other information to your account, such as a profile picture.
Contacts: Information from your phone address book and imported LinkedIn connections, with your consent. With your consent, you can provide us, and if permitted by applicable laws, with the phone numbers in your mobile address book on a regular basis, including those of users of our Services and your other contacts. If any of your contacts aren’t yet using our Services, we’ll manage this information for you in a way that ensures those contacts cannot be identified by us. You can create, join, or get added to group conversations, and such groups get associated with your account information. You give your groups a name. You can provide a group profile picture or description.
Conversations: Content from group chats and interactions with Meerkat’s AI is stored to enable referencing previous points in discussions and improving future insights.
Customer Support And Other Communications. When you contact us for customer support or otherwise communicate with us, you may provide us with information related to your use of our Services, including any information you deem helpful, and how to contact you (e.g., an email address). For example, you may send us an email with information relating to app performance, errors, usability or other issues.

Automatically Collected Information

Device Information: We collect device and connection-specific information when you install, access, or use our Services. This includes information such as hardware model, operating system information, app version, browser information, mobile network, connection information (including phone number, mobile operator or ISP).
Usage and Log Data: We collect information about your activity on our Services, like service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (including how you use our Services), your Services settings, how you interact with others using our Services, and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities and interactions, log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports. This also includes information about when you registered to use our Services; the features you use like our conversations, data imports, groups (including group name, group picture, group description), profile photo, "about" information, when you last used our Services, and when you last updated your "about" information.
Cookies and Tracking Technologies: We use cookies to operate and provide our Services, including to provide our Services that are web-based, improve your experiences, understand how our Services are being used, and customize them. For example, we use cookies to provide our Services for web and desktop and other web-based services. We may also use cookies to understand which of our Help Center articles are most popular and to show you relevant content related to our Services. Additionally, we may use cookies to remember your choices, like your language preferences, to provide a safer experience, and otherwise to customize our Services for you. See our Cookie Policy for more details.

Third-Party Data

Enriched Profiles: We work with third-party data providers to enhance the contact information you have stored in Meerkat. This enriched data includes attributes such as career history, education, inferred income, wealth segmentation.

Third-Party Service Providers: We work with third-party service providers to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services. For example, we work with them to distribute our apps; provide our technical and physical infrastructure, delivery, and other systems; provide engineering support, cybersecurity support, and operational support; help us understand how people use our Services; market our Services; conduct surveys and research for us; ensure safety, security, and integrity; and help with customer service. These companies may provide us with information about you in certain circumstances; for example, app stores may provide us with reports to help us diagnose and fix service issues.

How we collect your personal data

There are two ways in which we collect data:

Data provided by you
Data collected by third party services

We collect data directly from you during your communication with us regarding our services, such as technical support threads. This is the data that you provide to us.

In addition to the data that you provide, we also use third-party tools to facilitate, operate, and manage our website. These tools use cookies and other tracking technologies. However, the third-party tools that we use will only insert cookies and other tracking technologies with your explicit consent. You can provide your consent by clicking 'Accept' on our Privacy Center, and we will keep track of it.

You can manage your permissions by clicking our Settings.

With whom we share the collected personal information

We do not sell your data.

Your information may be shared under the following circumstances:

With Other Users

Contacts on Meerkat: Users with matching phone numbers or LinkedIn connections will appear as Meerkat users.
Group Chats: Only relevant data, such as name, display name, title, and company is shared during discussions. Personal information like phone numbers and email addresses is never shared.

With Third Parties

To help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, enrich data, analyze, and market our Services, we work with third-party service providers ('Data Processors') who may require access to your personal information. We work with these companies to support our Services, such as to provide technical infrastructure, delivery and other systems, market our Services, conduct surveys and research for us, protect the safety, security, and integrity of users and others, and assist with customer service. If required by law or to protect the safety and security of our users and platform we will work with law enforcement agencies. When we share information with third-party service providers in this capacity, we require them to use your information on our behalf in accordance with our instructions and terms.

Please note that these service providers only have access to your personal information to perform the tasks we have assigned to them, and they are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.

Some of these third-party service providers may track your online behavior over time and across different internet websites or online services. However, we do not have control over their data collection practices or the use of your personal information. Therefore, we encourage you to review their privacy policies before consenting to the use of their services on our website.

We share or disclose your personal information with the following third-party service providers:

Twilio
OpenAI

Your Privacy Controls

We provide tools to manage your information:

Contact Exclusions: Exclude specific contacts or categories from the relationship graph.
Blocking: Prevent specific users from seeing your Meerkat presence.
Data Export: Request a copy of your data.
Data Deletion: Delete your account to remove your data, including contacts and conversations from the relationship graph.

Authorized Agents

You may designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by providing the agent with written permission or a power of attorney.

Assignment, Change Of Control, And Transfer

In the event that we are involved in a merger, acquisition, restructuring, bankruptcy, or sale of all or some of our assets, we will share your information with the successor entities or new owners in connection with the transaction in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

Data Retention

The duration for which we retain each specific category of personal data depends on the processing purpose for which it was collected. We will store your personal data only for as long as it is necessary to fulfill the specific processing purpose for that category of data.

Upon account deletion, all data, including conversations and contacts in the relationship graph, will be removed. Following the deletion of your personal information from our database, the related backup data will be deleted, generally within 365 days.

What are your rights as the owner of personal information

You have the following data protection rights:

The right to access your data
The right to update or correct your data
The right to object to the use of your data
The right to restrict the use of your data
The right to transfer your data to another data controller
The right to the erasure of your data
The right to withdraw consent
The right to opt-out
The right to lodge a complaint to the relevant data protection authority

Our response to universal opt-out mechanisms

Where the applicable regulations require us, we honor the opt-out signals you send to us by universal opt-out mechanisms.

Universal opt-out mechanisms are tools designed to give you more control over your online privacy by simplifying the process of opting out of data collection and sharing practices. You can set your preferences through your browser, and once it sends your opt-out preferences to us, we will honor your request.

How can you exercise your rights as the owner of personal information

If you would like to exercise your rights under the state law, you may submit your requests to us through the following channels:

Email: support@trymeerkat.ai
Website: https://www.trymeerkat.ai

Please note that we may ask you to verify your identity before responding to your request to protect the security of your personal information.

You also have the right to file a complaint with a Data Protection Authority regarding our collection and use of your personal information. For more information on this, please contact your local data protection authority.

Location and transfer of your personal information

We utilize several third-party service providers, including:

Twilio
OpenAI

These providers are considered our data processors and are contractually bound to keep your personal information secure and confidential. They may only use your data for the purposes outlined in our agreement with them.

We store your data in the following locations:

United States of America

However, some of these third-party service providers may be located in countries outside these locations. In such cases, we ensure that your data is transferred based on appropriate safeguards, such as adequacy decisions, standard contract clauses, or another transfer tool.

We take all reasonable steps to ensure that your data is treated securely and that no transfer of your personal data will take place to an organization or a country unless adequate controls are in place to safeguard your data and other personal information. We are committed to maintaining the security of your personal information and protecting your privacy rights.

Security of your personal information

We understand how important it is to keep your personal information secure. To protect your data, we implement the following technical measures:

Two-factor authentication
Backups
Firewalls & malware protection
Regular security audits

We also ensure that our sub-contractors are aware of our privacy policy and receive regular updates on our security practices.

We recommend that you use a strong and unique password, keep it confidential, and log out of your account on shared computers to safeguard the security of your personal information. At our company, we take the security and privacy of your data seriously and work hard to keep it safe.

Protecting your child’s privacy

Meerkat is intended for use by adults and is not directed toward children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under this age. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your children have provided us with personal data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from children without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Law, Our Rights, And Protection

We access, preserve, and share your information described in the Categories of personal data we collect section of this Privacy Policy above if we have a good-faith belief that it is necessary to: (a) respond pursuant to applicable law or regulations, legal process, or government requests; (b) enforce our Terms and any other applicable terms and policies, including for investigations of potential violations; (c) detect, investigate, prevent, or address fraud and other illegal activity or security, and technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property, and safety of our users, Meerkat, or others, including to prevent death or imminent bodily harm.

Changes to this privacy policy

From time to time we may update this Privacy Policy. If we do, we will update the “last updated” sections at the top of the Privacy Policy. If we make material changes to this policy, we may notify you on our website, by a blog post, by email, or by any method we determine. Your continued use of this website or our service and/or continued provision of information to us will be subject to the terms of the then-current Privacy Policy.

If you have any questions about our Privacy Practices or this Policy, our Data Protection Officer contact details are:

Email: support@trymeerkat.ai