This is particularly important for our customers who use our Google Spreadsheet and Google Sites integration, and for any Google Apps user looking to replace Google Forms with a more powerful web form solution.

This certification ensures that our Google Apps Marketplace listing clearly and accurately describe our access and usage of customer data on Google Apps. A dedicated privacy policy is also available and accessible from our listing. (Click the green TRUSTe certified privacy logo to access the certification summary and the privacy policy.)

The certification program also provides a venue for customers to resolve privacy issues using TRUSTe as an impartial arbitrator.

FormAssembly.com has been selected as one of the launch partners for this new data privacy certification program. To learn more about this certification, check out Google’s announcement and TRUSTe’s announcement

This is FormAssembly’s third certification awarded by TRUSTe, and joins our previously awarded Web Privacy and Safe Harbor certifications.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions regarding this or other privacy/security matters. Please leave a comment below, send us an email, leave a suggestion on our UserVoice forum, or follow us on Twitter.

Thank you.

What is Safe Harbor Certification?

In 1998, the European Commission enacted a directive to prevent the transfer of personal data to non-EU nations that did not meet a European “adequacy” standard in terms of privacy protection. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission created the Safe Harbor framework to help American organizations comply with the Directive and therefore enable European customers to use American services.

The Safe Harbor framework consists of seven parts:

• Notice

FormAssembly will notify individuals about why we collect and how we use personal information (including disclosure to third parties) and provide information about how you can contact the organization with any inquiries or complaints. Our privacy policy describes the information we collect and how we use it.

• Choice

Individuals must have the opportunity to opt out of having their personal information disclosed to a third party. For sensitive information, users must opt-in if the information is to be disclosed to a third party. FormAssembly does not share information with third parties, per our privacy policy.

• Transfer to Third Parties

Information may only be transferred to a third party if the third party is Safe Harbor certified or subject to another adequacy policy. Again, FormAssembly does not share information with third parties, per our privacy policy.

• Access

Individuals must have access to personal information about them that an organization holds and be able to correct, amend, or delete that information where it is inaccurate. You have several options for accessing and changing your information.

• Security

FormAssembly will take reasonable precautions to protect personal information from loss, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. For information on our security procedures, please see our status page.

• Data Integrity

Personal information must be relevant for the purposes for which it is to be used. FormAssembly should take reasonable steps to ensure that data is reliable for its intended use, accurate, complete, and current. For information on our security procedures, please see our status page.

• Enforcement

An independent recourse mechanism must exist so that individuals’ complaints can be investigated and resolved, and penalties enforced as necessary. TRUSTe acts as this mechanism for FormAssembly.

Visit the Safe Harbor page for more information about the framework. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions, as well as any questions you may have regarding this or other privacy/security matters. Feel free to leave a comment below, send us an email, leave a suggestion on our UserVoice forum, or follow us on Twitter.

The privacy policy lays out in detail the ways we protect your information, but in brief, we keep your data secure and do not share it. You have the right to delete your account at anytime.

In addition to helping draft the revised privacy policy, TRUSTe conducted a complete review of the FormAssembly site and has awarded us the TRUSTe web privacy seal. You’ll see this seal displayed on many FormAssembly pages, indicating that the site meets the privacy requirements and standards set out by TRUSTe.

While the TRUSTe seal indicates that we take your privacy and information very seriously, it also means that TRUSTe can serve as a third-party mediator in any privacy dispute. Of course, in the event of a privacy dispute we would ask that you contact FormAssembly directly first, but if we were unable to reach a suitable outcome TRUSTe would be able to provide further services to resolve the issue.

We hope these changes increase your confidence in FormAssembly and in the security of any information you share with us. As always, we appreciate your business and your comments. You can leave comments below, send us an email, follow us on Twitter, or leave a suggestion in our UserVoice forum.

What is Form Moderation?

Form moderation is a way for us to protect our service and our customers by temporarily disabling a form or account until we can properly review its purpose and ensure that it is in compliance with our terms of service.

Unfortunately, without form moderation, malicious users would easily abuse our service to run scams (phishing) and commit fraud. Beside the fact that we have no desire to help these people, their actions can also hurt our customers by getting our site blacklisted.

You can read more about our moderation policy here.

What we are changing

We’ve done a good job so far in identifying and blocking abuses before any harm can be done. Despite blocking the literally hundreds of scam forms that are created each year, a few still manage to get through pushing us to become even more vigilant and more proactive.

We are now adding more filters and experimenting with more moderation tools. We are of course very mindful of not affecting legitimate users, but as we evolve our tools, there’s always a chance that an over-zealous filter may trigger a false-positive.

No form can get automatically disabled unless a change is made in the Form Builder, so you don’t have to worry about your existing forms. If you make a change or create a new form and it gets moderated, please be patient and help us re-enable your form quickly by initiating the moderation review. We’ll keep tweaking our moderation tools to limit false-positive and better protect our service.

Thanks for your understanding as we make these changes.

To protect yourself while browsing responses or creating forms in FormAssembly, you can turn on secure browsing. To do this, login to your account then open the “My Account” tab. The panel that loads there, “Preferences,” contains a checkbox next to the option “Keep the connection encrypted while I’m logged in.” Checking this box will cause all your activity within FormAssembly to be sent over a secure, encrypted connection.

This will protect you from the type of session hijacking attacks facilitated by the Firesheep software.

Notes:
1. “Secure Browsing” is not available to users on the free (Starter) plan.
2. Customers using our Salesforce AppExchange application are protected by default, and cannot disable the ’secure browsing’ option.

More on Firesheep and session-hijacking:

• http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/firesheep-in-wolves-clothing-app-lets-you-hack-into-twitter-facebook-accounts-easily/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/25/firesheep_cookie_capture_peril/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_hijacking

Communication Preferences

You have several options for receiving communication from FormAssembly. If you check the first checkbox, you’ll receive occasional emails about surveys to tell us how you use FormAssembly, what you like (and don’t like) about it, and what changes you’d like to see.

If you mark the second checkbox , you’ll receive very occasional newsletters as well as announcements about FormAssembly (including notification of any downtime and subsequent notification when we’re up and running again).

You can mark as many of these options as you like and you’ll automatically be subscribed or unsubscribed. We value your privacy and your time, so we’ll never share or sell your contact information with a third party. (See our privacy policy.)

Secure Browsing

The other option on this tab lets you choose to browse FormAssembly over a secured, encrypted connection. If your forms collect sensitive information that you intend to review while on FormAssembly, you may want to consider checking this box. Browsing with an encrypted connection will significantly lower the chances that someone else might be able see your information. However, browsing with an encrypted connection is considerably slower, so if you are not dealing with sensitive information, we recommend you do not check the box.

We hope you’ll take advantage of these new options and that they enhance your time on FormAssembly! As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts about these changes or anything else you’d like to see.

Responses collected are yours. We do not claim ownership, we do not resell or data-mine them, and we don’t disclose them to any-third party without your express consent. *

Acute readers of our terms of service noticed that our previous terms were rather vague and open to interpretation on this question. This update includes the following corrections:

• Better definition of subscribers and user data (first paragraph) .
• User data explicitly left out of our copyright claim (section 2).
• New “Privacy and Confidentiality of Information” section (section 6).
• Rewritten “How Do We Use the Information That You Provide to Us?“  section in our privacy policy.

This notice is posted here and linked from the application. Your continued use of our service constitutes acceptance of those changes.

Please don’t hesitate to ask us if you have any questions regarding this update. Thank you!

(*) Unless of course if required by law.