California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

Modified on Sun, 30 Apr, 2023 at 2:42 PM

How does the CCPA affect Howuku?

If you are a Howuku customer, under the CCPA you’re considered the ‘business’ and Howuku is the ‘service provider’. As such, we as Howuku are responsible for processing the data our service captures on your site and is stored on our servers. As noted in our Privacy Policy, we will NEVER sell personal data to third parties.

What is Howuku doing to prepare for the CCPA?

Because of the many product and process enhancements we made in preparation for the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), when the CCPA was signed we were already well-positioned to support customers needing to comply.

As a Howuku customer, do I meet the basic requirements of the CCPA?

The CCPA is a large piece of legislation and covers many topics that have no direct impact or tie with your use of Howuku. However, there are areas of the CCPA where your customers might have rights that relate to your use of Howuku. We’ve included a brief explanation of their rights and how Howuku can be used in a manner that supports you in servicing them below.

1. Privacy notice

Under the CCPA, businesses must update privacy notices to specifically state what data is collected, categorize the data collected, explain the purpose for the data’s use, identify third parties with which that data is shared, and communicate the rights available to an individual.

The lawful disclosure and consent have always been part of Howuku’s Privacy Policy.

We recommend that you perform a full review of your company’s terms of service and privacy policy to ensure you meet the CCPA’s requirements and, if necessary, disclose the use of Howuku.

2. Personal information requests (right of access and deletion)

Under the CCPA, California consumers may have the right to request and receive a list of personal information and additional details a business collects (or has collected), as well as the intended business use for collecting this data.

The consumer may also be able to request that any specific personal information be deleted. With the exception of specific types of data (e.g. billing or other regulatory required information), these deletion requests must be fulfilled by you, the business.

3. IP addresses

Under CCPA, an IP address may be considered personal data if it can identify a household.

Howuku’s default behavior is that IP addresses of visitors are always suppressed before being stored to disk on our servers using Howuku's core feature set. We set the last octet of IPv4 addresses (all connections to Howuku are made via IPv4) to 0 to ensure the full IP address is never written to disk. For example, if a visitor's IP address is 1.2.3.4, it will be stored as 1.2.3.0. The first three octets of the IP address are only used to determine the geographic location of the visitor.

As always, your privacy and that of your users are a high priority for our team. We've built tools to make it easy for you to address requirements with the ever-evolving privacy laws—but if you have any questions with regards to these tools, please contact us at support@howuku.com.