Wattpad .com
Agathe Thies
Note that our Terms of Service apply to this Privacy Policy. By creating an account with Wattpad, using the Services, or submitting any Personal Information Information via the Services, you are acknowledging that we will collect, use and disclose your Personal Information as described below in this Privacy Policy. If you do not want your Personal Information to be used in these ways, please stop using the Services.
"Personal Information" is any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual. This may include, but is not limited to, your name, mailing address, telephone number, email address, Internet Protocol ("IP") address, age, and gender. Where applicable, we indicate whether and why you must provide us with your Personal Information, as well as the consequences of failing to do so. If you do not provide Personal Information when requested, you may not be able to benefit from our Services if that information is necessary to provide you with them or if we are legally required to collect it.
In order for you to create an account with Wattpad and use our Services, we need to collect and process some Personal Information. Depending on your use of the Services, the Personal Information we collect about you may include:
Except for your email address, date of birth, chosen username, whether you are a reader, writer, or both and at least one preferred literary genre, which are required to create your Wattpad account, you can always opt not to disclose any Personal Information to us, but then you may be unable to use certain features on the Services. For more information, visit our Account Privacy article .
Children under 13 are not permitted to use Wattpad (under 14 if they are residents of Quebec), and so this Privacy Policy makes no provision for their use of Wattpad Services. We collect date of birth to determine eligibility to use Wattpad.
We use email as an important way to communicate with you. You can manage your email notification preferences, such as messages and follower alerts, by adjusting your preferences in the Notifications section of your account Settings. You may also opt out or unsubscribe from any future email communications from within a link provided in each email we send you. However, please note that in all cases you will continue to receive all system e-mails (e.g., those regarding forgotten user passwords) and legal notices from us.
Our Services are designed to help you share information with the Wattpad community. Any Personal Information that you voluntarily choose to include in a publicly accessible area of the Service will be available to anyone who has access to that content (including other Wattpad users), such as your username, name, the profile description you create, and your location, as well as the messages you post, whether on your profile or to other users, and the lists you create, people you follow, stories you write, links to your Facebook profile or other personal website and many other bits of information that result from your use of the Services.
We may use this information to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, to develop new products and services for the Wattpad community, and to customize the content we show you, including ads.
Google AFP: We may provide your Personal Information to Google in connection with its AdSense for Platforms (AFP) program. The Personal Information that we may provide will include your email address, which will be used to determine eligibility for the AFP program by Google in accordance with its Privacy Policy.
Legal: We may disclose your Personal Information if required to do so by law or in the good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with applicable laws, in response to a court order, judicial or other government subpoena or warrant, or to otherwise cooperate with law enforcement or other governmental agencies. We also reserve the right to disclose your Personal Information that we believe, in good faith, is appropriate or necessary to (i) take precautions against liability, (ii) protect ourselves or others from fraudulent, abusive, or unlawful uses or activity, (iii) investigate and defend ourselves against any third-party claims or allegations, (iv) protect the security or integrity of our Services and any facilities or equipment used to make our Services available, or (v) protect our property or other legal rights, including to enforce our agreements, or the rights, property, or safety of others.
Merger: We may disclose your Personal Information if Wattpad is involved in a merger, acquisition, debt financing, asset sale, or similar transaction, as well as in the event of an insolvency, bankruptcy, or receivership in which information is transferred to one or more third parties as one of our business assets. We may also disclose your Personal Information to our affiliated/related/parent companies. In such cases, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any Personal Information and give affected users notice before Personal Information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
Wattpad does not access any of your Personal Information from YouTube's API, nor do we record your interactions with it. YouTube's API Services are used for the sole purpose of allowing writers to search for videos to embed into their stories.
Our Services are mainly provided from our offices in Canada. However, Personal Information that you submit through the Services may be transferred to countries other than where you reside (for example, to our servers in the United States) for processing and storage. In addition, our third-party service providers also may process or store your Personal Information on servers outside your country, including in Canada or the US.
By using any of the Services, or submitting any Personal Information via the Services, you authorize Wattpad and its authorized service providers to use and process your Personal Information in these countries. Please be aware that the privacy protections and the rights of authorities and Government agencies to access your Personal Information in some of these countries may not be equivalent to those in your country.
We comply with applicable legal requirements when transferring Personal Information to countries other than the country where you are located. If you are in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the UK, we rely on the following mechanisms to transfer your Personal Information internationally: (i) an EU Commission adequacy decision, Swiss government adequacy decision or UK adequacy regulation (as appropriate), (ii) contractual protections for the transfer of your Personal Information, (iii) another valid data transfer mechanism. For more information about how we transfer Personal Information outside of Europe, or to obtain a copy of the contractual safeguards we use for such transfers, please contact us as specified below.
If you wish to access any Personal Information that we hold about you, or request that we correct or delete the Personal Information that we hold about you, you may contact us via email at pri...@wattpad.com. We will comply with such requests to the extent required by law or our policies, and subject to any limitations in our systems. To access, modify or delete the Personal Information you have provided to us, please log in and update your profile.
Access and Portability. You may ask us to provide you with a copy of the Personal Information we maintain about you, including a machine-readable copy of the Personal Information that you have directly provided to us, and request information about its processing.
Rectification and Deletion. You may ask us to update and correct inaccuracies in your Personal Information, or to have the information anonymized or deleted, as appropriate. You may also access, modify or delete the Personal Information you have provided to use by logging in and updating your profile.
Consent Withdrawal. You may withdraw any consent you previously provided to us regarding the processing of your Personal Information, at any time and free of charge. We will apply your preferences going forward and this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before you withdrew your consent.
We do not make decisions that may have legal effects or similarly significantly affect you based solely on automated processing of your Personal Information. All decision-making processes related to the processing purposes described above are carried out with human intervention.
We are continuously implementing and updating physical, organizational, contractual and technological security measures to protect your Personal Information from loss, theft, unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. The only employees who are granted access to your Personal Information are those with a business "need-to-know" or whose duties reasonably require such information. On all Wattpad platforms, we support encryption on all transmissions to protect Personal Information submitted on our Site.
We take measures to delete your Personal Information or keep it in a form that does not permit identifying you when this information is no longer necessary for the purposes for which we process it, unless we are required by law to keep this information for a longer period. When determining the retention period, we take into account various criteria, such as the type of products and services requested by or provided to you, the nature and length of our relationship with you, the impact on the services we provide to you if we delete some information from or about you, mandatory retention periods provided by law and the statute of limitations.
If you create an account with Wattpad, we will retain your Personal Information for as long as your account remains active. If you close your account, it will first be deactivated for a period of six months. When your account is deactivated, while it is not viewable on Wattpad, all of your public contributions and comments to the Wattpad community will remain (except that they will be anonymized).
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