What data does Flockler store from users?

We receive quite a lot of questions regarding GDPR, data protection, and what data Flockler stores from users. This article is seeking to answer some of the most frequently asked questions. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to click the chat icon at the bottom right corner of this page or send us an email to team@flockler.com.

There are three types of users to consider:

• Flockler users: These are admins of the Flockler account for your organisation.

• Visitors of your website or any other digital service: The content stored in Flockler is typically displayed by using one of our display options.

• Social media content and users: Flockler stores and helps you to display social media content from various channels.

Flockler users:

These are the members of your team (on average, 1 to 5 people) that have access to manage the content of your organisation’s Flockler account. At Flockler, we store the username and email address of the individual admin user, and admins can add/remove users at any time via Flockler’s admin panel.

Here are the key documents related to Flockler users, data we store, and how the data is processed:

• Terms and Conditions of Flockler

• Privacy Policy

Please note that all data is stored in cloud services outside Flockler’s premises, and here's the list of our subcontractors.

When you decide to terminate your agreement with us, or your 14-day free trial period expires, all data will be automatically deleted from our servers in 90 days. If you delete a user manually via Flockler's admin panel, the user data will be available in our backups for 60 days, and after that, deleted permanently.

Visitors of your website:

When you embed Flockler to your website or any other digital service by using one of our display styles, we don’t store any cookies or track the visitors of your service. 

On our server hosting providers’ databases (see the list of subcontractors), we store anonymous data regarding the aggregated traffic volumes of all Flockler accounts. For security reasons and to make sure the services are running smoothly for all our customers, we need to maintain a dashboard of aggregated number of visitors viewing the content in real-time. For example, it helps us to detect sudden spikes of traffic or other unusual behaviour on your service that might affect Flockler’s performance. This data is anonymous and automatically deleted every 21 days, and it doesn’t enable us to identify or track the specific user visiting your website.

When you are adding one of the Flockler’s display options to your website, it’s good to take note that social media channels power the content. For example, the images are loaded from social media channels’ database and served to your website visitors. In theory, social media channels can track users through the images between multiple websites and services where social media content is embedded. We’d recommend adding social media channels, along with any other third-party scripts (e.g., Google Analytics), to your privacy policy documents.

Social media content and users:

In general, Flockler helps you to gather public social media content and embed it on your website. Terms and conditions of each social media channel ask the user to approve that their content can be displayed on any website and digital service. 

All the social media channels include an embed code button that allows anyone to show a public post on a website. For example, you can click three dots on my Instagram post and embed the image to your website.  With Flockler, you can gather public content from various channels in one place without having to embed each piece of content manually.

With Flockler's embed code gathering content from various social media channels, you are displaying publicly available content on your website, and that won’t create any connection between you and the specific social media user. If the content is no longer public or deleted from a social media channel, it won’t show up on your site either. 

Furthermore, social media posts are created by nicknames. As a silly example, you could use the nickname "tonihopponen" instead of me. At Flockler, we don’t store or even have access to any personal information like real name or email address of the social media user. 

At any time, you can delete social media content stored in your organisation’s Flockler account. When manually removing the content, it will disappear from your admin panel and embed code immediately. We maintain backups of all content for 60 days, and after that, the content will be permanently deleted from Flockler’s database.

In addition to social media content, some of our customers have an upload form gathering content from their website visitors. These customers will have a separate agreement and a DPA signed with Flockler, and this feature isn’t currently available for a free trial without contacting our team.

If you have any questions regarding the data Flockler stores and the data protection, please don’t hesitate to hit the chat button at the bottom right corner of the page or send us an email to team@flockler.com.