Our values
Trust is the foundation of the Shopify platform and includes trusting us to do the right thing with your information. Three main values guide us as we develop our products and services. These values should help you better understand how we think about your information and privacy.
Your information belongs to you
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We carefully analyze what types of information we need to provide our services, and we try to limit the information we collect to only what we really need. Where possible, we delete or anonymize this information when we no longer need it. When building and improving our products, our engineers work closely with our privacy and security teams to build with privacy in mind. In all of this work our guiding principle is that your information belongs to you, and we aim to only use your information to your benefit.
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We protect your information from others
If a third party requests your personal information, we will refuse to share it unless you give us permission or we are legally required. When we are legally required to share your personal information, we will tell you in advance, unless we are legally forbidden. -
We help merchants and partners meet their privacy obligations
Many of the merchants and partners using Shopify do not have the benefit of a dedicated privacy team, and it is important to us to help them meet their privacy obligations. To do this, we try to build our products and services so they can easily be used in a privacy-friendly way. We also provide detailed FAQs and documentation covering the most important privacy topics, and respond to privacy-related questions we receive.
Why we process your information
We generally process your information when we need to do so to fulfill a contractual obligation (for example, to process your subscription payments to use the Shopify platform), or where we or someone we work with needs to use your personal information for a reason related to their business (for example, to provide you with a service). Laws in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and in the United Kingdom (“UK”) call these reasons “legitimate interests.” These “legitimate interests” include:
- preventing risk and fraud
- answering questions or providing other types of support
- helping merchants find and use apps through our app store
- providing and improving our products and services
- providing reporting and analytics
- testing out features or additional services
- assisting with marketing, advertising, or other communications
We only process personal information for these “legitimate interests” after considering the potential risks to your privacy and balancing any risks with certain measures—for example, by providing clear transparency into our privacy practices, offering you control over your personal information where appropriate, limiting the information we keep, limiting what we do with your information, who we send your information to, how long we keep your information, or the technical measures we use to protect your information.
We may also process your personal information where you have provided your consent. In particular, where we cannot rely on an alternative legal basis for processing, where you direct us to transfer information to a third party, where we receive your data from a third party is sourced and it already comes with consent or where we are required by law to ask for your consent (including in the context of some of our sales and marketing activities). At any time, you have a right to withdraw your consent by changing your communication choices, opting out from our communications or by contacting us.
Depending on whether you are a merchant, customer, partner, user or visitor, please refer to our supplemental privacy policies, as relevant, to understand our purposes for processing, categories of recipients and legal basis for processing for each type of personal data.
By using our website, you (the visitor) agree to allow third parties to process your IP address, in order to determine your location for the purpose of currency conversion. You also agree to have that currency stored in a session cookie in your browser (a temporary cookie which gets automatically removed when you close your browser). We do this in order for the selected currency to remain selected and consistent when browsing our website so that the prices can convert to your (the visitor) local currency.