Data Retention Policy

1. How this policy works

Each kind of data has a period. A job runs every night and deletes, or reduces to an anonymous count, whatever is past its period. Staff with the compliance permission can shorten some periods (and lengthen a few, within limits the law and our providers allow); this page always shows the period in force.

Before something you can see in SEOmise is deleted automatically, the app shows a bar at the top of every page that counts down to it (by default 14 days before, 7 days before and on the day), with the list of what goes, a way to export it first and, where the rules allow, a way to keep it a little longer. The help article "What gets deleted and when" explains it for every kind of data.

"Deleted" means removed from our live systems. "Anonymised" means only counts or figures remain, with nothing that identifies a person or a business.

2. Your account and workspace

Scan history per plan:

• Free: 30 days
• Personal: 1 year
• Business: 2 years
• Agency: 3 years
• Workspaces without a plan keep scan history for 10 years

3. Google Business Profile data

Copies of what we read from Google Business Profile are short-lived and refreshed from Google while you stay connected. A copy past its period is hidden at once and deleted the same night. Disconnecting Google, or detaching a location, deletes its copies straight away. What you wrote in SEOmise (replies, posts, photos you uploaded, approvals) is your own record and stays.

4. The Data Vault

The Data Vault is our encrypted record of outside calls, answers, AskMise conversations, crawls and audits (see the Data Use Policy). Each record is kept for its channel's period, at most 1 year, and shorter where its source requires:

Records also go when the row they point to is deleted, when their workspace is erased, when a person is erased (the records they made) and when we delete a provider's stored data.

5. AskMise, pop-ups, leads and marketing

6. Intelligence and monitoring

7. Third-party data

Data we license from search, keyword and backlink providers is kept only as each provider's licence allows, with a period per source. Staff can also delete every stored copy of a provider's data at once ("Delete stored third-party data"), which removes it from the Data Vault too.

8. Backups

We keep encrypted backups: the latest 7 daily, 4 weekly and 6 monthly copies. Data deleted from the live system stays in older backups until they are replaced, so it is gone from every backup within about 6 months. Backups are encrypted and used only to recover from a failure.

9. When you cancel or close your account

• Cancelling a plan stops the renewal. Your data stays while the workspace exists; workspaces without a plan keep scan history as shown above.
• Closing the account (by an owner): nobody can sign in, the connectors show "Disconnected" and the subscription stops renewing. You can bring it back for free for 14 days. After that it is marked for deletion, and after 30 days it is erased for good, with its Data Vault records. Before closing, an owner can download the workspace's data.
• Erasing your own account (Account → Privacy) runs after 14 days, which you can cancel. Your name, e-mail and sign-in details are removed; work you did stays with the workspace without your name.
• Records the law requires us to keep (such as invoices) are kept for the legal period.