Flockler is a GDPR-compliant solution trusted by thousands of organizations
The EU’s GDPR legislation is an integral part of everything we do. Clients like ALDI, Deutsche Bundesbank, Continental, GoPro, and hundreds of other brands and organisations trust our services.
Here we summarise what type of data we store and process while we help marketing teams curate and display social media feeds on digital services. At the end of this article, you’ll find a full list of legal documents related to the Flockler subscription and data protection.
What data does Flockler store?
Your customers
At Flockler, we don’t store any data regarding visitors of your services. We don’t set any cookies or tracking codes.
Typically, our clients use Flockler’s ready-made embed codes to display social media feeds on websites and other digital services. We use world-class providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudfront to ensure the embed codes are served in a fast, reliable, and secure way. Our AWS databases are located in Germany.
When Flockler’s embed code is displayed on a digital service, the Cloudfront service by AWS receives the incoming traffic, and the visitor’s IP address is stored in their logs for a short period. The IP is stored to make sure Cloudfront can protect Flockler and your services from an unusual volume of traffic and any malicious activity patterns. The IP address is automatically deleted from Cloudfront’s logs, and it is not processed in any way by Flockler.
Your marketing team members using the software
When you sign up for Flockler’s free trial, you’ll be asked to provide your email address and name. After signing up, you can invite colleagues to manage content on the Flockler app. You can add and remove users from your Flockler account at any time.
When creating the Flockler account, you and your colleagues can use a personal or company’s generic email addresses and names. We only store those details regarding you and the rest of the marketing team. We don’t ask you to provide any other information about yourself.
If you decide to sign up for one of our paid plans, we will request you to provide your company name, company registered address, VAT ID (EU-only), and email address for invoicing. If you pay the invoice by credit card, our payment platform provider Stripe gathers and stores your credit card information.
We use a small number of subcontractors to, for example, monitor our services, send notification emails, and provide a live support chat on our website. Here’s the up-to-date list of subcontractors, and their role of providing the best possible service for you.
If your free trial or paid subscription with Flockler expires, all user data will be deleted from Flockler’s database in 90 days.
Social media content you store with Flockler
With Flockler, our clients curate and display social media feeds. Often, the content is published by your organisation, but you might gather content from other social media users, too.
Social media content stored with Flockler does not include personal data related to the GDPR legislation. Most social media services use nicknames, and Flockler doesn’t have access to users’ real names, email addresses, or any other information that would create a database of personal data.
Instead of creating a customer database, you are using an embed code to display content on a digital service. Displaying content on a digital service is considered as media content distribution.
Social media services’ terms and conditions allow anyone to embed and display public social media content on a third-party digital service. The user who has published the content on social media has accepted this distribution mechanism when signing up for a specific service. Embedding the content on a digital service does not transfer intellectual property rights to the content or establish a relationship between you and the social media user. With Flockler, you can display and embed social media content without manual work.
You can delete social media content from your Flockler account at any time. The content is stored in our backups for 60 days before the permanent deletion.
What data do social media channels store?
With Flockler, our clients curate and display social media content from various channels (see the full list of content sources). When Flockler’s embed code is displayed on a digital service, social media channels power images and videos.
According to those channels, they don’t track website visitors and users viewing the content on a third-party service. For example, YouTube has a specific ‘no cookies’ version of the embedded video, which Flockler embed codes use by default.
However, suppose website visitors engage with the content (e.g., click to open an image or play a video). In that case, they are typically directed to the social media channel page, or the video plays on your service. Social media channels typically track the number of plays for a video. For sure, they track visits to their services and ask visitors to accept their cookie policy.
Should I add Flockler to my privacy policy document?
The Flockler app and embed codes don’t store any data regarding your website visitors. However, we recommend our clients add a description of the social media feed displayed on their digital service. For example, you might have the following description:
"We use Flockler, a social media aggregator, to curate and display social media feeds which we believe you’ll find relevant and inspiring. Flockler doesn’t store any information regarding your visit to our service. However, social media services might store information regarding you if you decide to interact with the content (e.g., play a video or visit our social media profile page)."
Each country has its legislation regarding data protection, and Flockler can’t control the behaviour of social media channels. Therefore, the description is meant to be a general guideline, and the data protection officer of your company will be the best person to make sure your organisation follows local requirements.
Where can I find more information?
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via team@flockler.com or live chat on our website.
Here’s a list of documents related to the Flockler subscription: