Privacy policy

Who we are

AppBrain is run by AppTornado GmbH, Uitikon Waldegg, Switzerland (commercial register number CH-020.4.041.130-8). AppTornado GmbH is the controller of the personal data described on this page. You can reach us about privacy through our support team.

Summary

• What we collect on the website: your IP address, the technical details your browser sends, cookies, and, if you sign up, your email address and profile.
• Why: to run the website, to keep fraud and bots out, to count visitors and to show ads.
• Advertising: we show ads from Google AdSense and Adsterra. They use cookies and may personalize ads. See Ads for how to opt out.
• How long we keep it: IP addresses and browser details 30 days, account data until you delete your account. See Data retention.
• Your choices: you can opt out of personalized ads, block cookies, and access, correct or delete your data. See Your rights and choices.

GDPR compliance

AppBrain is fully GDPR compliant since May 25th, 2018. Please refer to the following documents for information about specific products:

• Privacy and GDPR compliance of the AppBrain SDK
• Privacy and GDPR compliance of the AppBrain website

Principles

Your privacy is critically important to us. At AppBrain we have a few fundamental principles:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it.
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services.
• In our products, we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, and permanently deleted.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals.

Website visitors

When you visit AppBrain, your browser sends our servers the usual details: your IP address, browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each request. We use these to run the website, to determine your country, and to detect fraud and abuse. From time to time, AppBrain may publish aggregate statistics, e.g. a report on trends in the usage of its website. We count visits with our own installation of Plausible Analytics, which runs on our servers. Plausible doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t store IP addresses, it only keeps aggregate counts.

Our pages also report some technical details of the browser to our own servers, such as screen size and time zone. For a sample of visitors they report more: graphics hardware, which browser features are present, and counts of interactions such as clicks and scrolls, never what you type. We use this only to tell people apart from automated traffic, so bots don’t end up in our visitor statistics and can’t abuse our servers. We don’t use it to identify you, to follow you across other websites or for advertising, and we don’t share it.

We don’t collect your precise location on the website. We derive your country from your IP address.

Gathering of personally-identifying information

Certain visitors to AppBrain’s websites choose to interact with AppBrain in ways that require AppBrain to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that AppBrain gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up for an AppBrain account to provide a username and email address. In each case, AppBrain collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with AppBrain. AppBrain does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Protection of certain personally-identifying information

AppBrain discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on AppBrain’s behalf or to provide services available at AppBrain’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using AppBrain’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. AppBrain will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, AppBrain discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when AppBrain believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of AppBrain, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an AppBrain website and have supplied your email address, AppBrain may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with AppBrain and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. AppBrain takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website stores in your browser. AppBrain uses cookies and similar browser storage (such as local storage) to:

• remember your settings on the website,
• keep you logged in, if you have an account,
• recognize returning visitors, so we can keep fraud and automated traffic out.

Our advertising partners set their own cookies, see Ads.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Some features of AppBrain’s websites may not work properly without them.

Ads

We show ads on our websites to pay for them. The ads come from third-party advertising networks:

• Google AdSense. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to our website or other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to our sites and/or other sites on the Internet. Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
• Adsterra. Adsterra may use cookies and collect your IP address and device information to deliver ads, measure them and prevent ad fraud. See the Adsterra privacy policy.

These networks process this data under their own privacy policies, not this one.

Google asks visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland for consent before it personalizes ads. You can change your choice at any time through the privacy and cookie settings link on the page.

You can opt out of personalized advertising:

• from Google, at Google Ads Settings,
• from participating ad networks, at aboutads.info/choices or, in Europe, youronlinechoices.eu.

After opting out you still see ads, but they are no longer based on your browsing.

Your rights and choices

You have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you and get a copy of it, in a common format you can take elsewhere,
• correct data that is wrong,
• delete your data, see Account and data deletion,
• object to or restrict how we process it,
• withdraw consent you gave earlier, without affecting processing that happened before,
• complain to a data protection authority. In Switzerland that’s the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC). In the EU it’s the authority in your country.

To use any of these rights, contact our support team. We answer within 30 days.

If you have an AppBrain account, we can find everything linked to it. If you don’t, we only have data tied to an IP address or a cookie for at most 30 days. We can’t tell from that who you are: IP addresses are shared and change. We also don’t collect extra data just to identify you. So for visitors without an account we usually can’t answer these requests, and the data is deleted automatically. For the AppBrain SDK you can reset your advertising ID in your phone’s settings.

Data retention

We keep personal data only as long as we need it:

• IP addresses and browser details of website visitors: 30 days.
• Our visitor cookie: expires after 2 years in your browser. You can delete it any time.
• Account data (email address, profile, IP address): until you delete your account.
• AppBrain SDK data (IP address, device ID): anonymized within 30 days. See SDK privacy.
• Visitor statistics: Plausible keeps only aggregate counts, nothing that identifies you.

The website GDPR page lists each piece of data with its purpose and retention.

Business transfers

If AppBrain, or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that AppBrain goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of AppBrain may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

AppBrain Android app

The AppBrain android app collects all so-called “package names” of installed applications on an Android phone and stores it on AppBrain servers. For each app, apart from the package name, also the version, the first time the AppBrain app saw this app present on the phone, and a coarse number indicative of usage is sent. On the AppBrain server, this list of apps is stored together with a phone identifier, and the IP address of the user. Apps that don’t match any package name we know about from the market data are discarded from further processing.

App recommendations in the AppBrain app

We use the lists of installed apps to recommend apps, by linking app preferences between users. These links are made in aggregate, so nobody can find out from them whether a particular user has or uses an app. We may report aggregate statistics on this data, in such a way that the apps of an individual user can’t be deduced. Any information not directly related to the apps itself (such as the country derived from the IP address, age, and gender) is solely used to better understand which other users might provide valuable signals to provide better application recommendations.

APK data

AppBrain app discovery apps (AppBrain App Market, Hot Apps, Awesome Games, Ad Detector, Price Drops) share information about APK files installed on the users device with AppBrain. This includes information about file names, class names, manifest information from the installed APK file. No personally-identifying or private data is shared in this process.

App discovery apps

AppTornado publishes App Discovery apps: “Find Awesome Games”, “Hot Apps” and “Price Drops”. These apps prominently show an opt-in dialog at the beginning stating that they collect information about the apps a users installs and uninstalls. The packagenames of installed and uninstalled apps on that device are sent to AppTornado servers over a secure connection. This data is deleted after at most 30 days. It’s processed only for the purpose of creating popularity lists for showing in those same apps, creating aggregated reports for popularity of apps and analyzing user behavior to improve our products.

Swiss Codemonkeys, AppTornado and AppTornado Games

AppTornado publishes other Android apps under the brands “Swiss Codemonkeys”, “AppTornado” and “AppTornado Games”. These apps try to collect as minimal data as possible for the proper functioning of our apps and ads. Our apps contain our own AppBrain SDK and Google AdMob ads. We use analytics to track actions (aggregated over many users) in our apps to improve our apps over time.

Account and data deletion

AppBrain accounts and all data belonging to the account can be easily deleted on the account deletion page. On this page is a “Ok. Delete my account” button, by clicking the button the account of the currently logged in user and data belonging to the account will be permanently deleted. If you have forgotten your account or can’t log in, you can also request account deletion by contacting our support team.

Privacy policy changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, AppBrain may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in AppBrain’s sole discretion. AppBrain encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Further questions

If you have questions about privacy or your personal data please contact our support team.