Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Atom Software is an online retailer of genuine, one-time-purchase Microsoft software licenses, operating at atomsoftwares.com. In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Atom Software LLC, the company that operates this website and decides how your personal information is used.

We are based in the United States and sell principally to customers in the United States. If you have any question about this policy, or want to exercise any of the rights described below, write to us at contact@atomsoftwares.com.

2. Information we collect

Information you give us

• When you place an order: your name, email address, phone number, billing address, and the products you bought. Your order history is linked to your email address.
• When you create an account: your name, email address and a password. Passwords are stored in encrypted form and we cannot read them.
• When you contact us: by email, phone, our contact form or live chat — whatever you choose to tell us, including the content of the message.
• When you leave a review: reviews are collected and published by Trustpilot under their own privacy policy, not ours.

Information collected automatically

• Device and connection data: IP address, browser type, operating system, device type, and the pages you visit on our site.
• Usage data: which pages you viewed, how long you spent, what you clicked, what you added to your cart, and whether you completed a purchase.
• Referral data: the website, search or advertisement that brought you here.
• Security data: our security software logs IP addresses and request patterns in order to detect and block attacks on the site.

3. How we use your information

• To fulfill your order — to process payment, deliver your license key and installation instructions, and send order confirmations. These emails are sent from our website; we do not use an outside newsletter platform.
• To support you — to answer questions, resolve activation problems, process refunds, and provide remote assistance when you ask for it.
• To run and improve our website — to understand which pages work, fix problems, and make the site faster and easier to use.
• To advertise — see the next section, which explains this in detail.
• To protect the business — to prevent fraud, detect abuse, and keep the site secure.
• To meet legal obligations — to keep tax and transaction records as the law requires.

4. Advertising and analytics

We advertise on Google. To do that, we use the services below, and we want to be direct about what that involves.

Google Analytics and Google Ads

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how people use our website, and Google Ads to advertise and to measure which advertisements lead to purchases. These services use cookies and similar technologies to recognize your browser and record your activity on our site. Google may use this data in accordance with Google's Privacy Policy.

We have enabled Google's advertising features, which means Google may associate your activity on our site with its own information about you in order to show you relevant advertisements. You can control this through Google My Ad Center, or opt out of Google Analytics entirely using Google's browser add-on.

We also list our products through Google Merchant Center, which involves sending product and pricing information to Google. That does not include anything about you.

Remarketing

If you visit our website without buying, we may show you advertisements for our products on other websites and on Google services. This is done using cookies and advertising identifiers. It does not involve sharing your name or email address.

Customer lists uploaded to advertising platforms

This is the part most privacy policies bury, so we will say it plainly.

We upload customer contact information — email addresses, and sometimes phone numbers, names and postal codes — to Google Ads. Before it leaves our systems it is converted into an irreversible scrambled form, called a hash, so that the advertising platform cannot read the original address. The platform compares those hashes against its own records to find accounts that match.

We do this for two reasons:

• To stop advertising to you. If you have already bought from us, we do not want to pay to show you advertisements for something you already own. This is the main reason we do it.
• To show relevant offers to existing customers, such as a newer version of software they already use.

We share this information with Google in accordance with Google's policies. Google does not use it to build its own marketing lists or sell it on.

If you would rather we did not include you, email contact@atomsoftwares.com with the subject line "Do Not Sell or Share". We will remove you from these lists and exclude you from future uploads. You do not have to give a reason, and it will not affect your orders, your license or the support you receive.

Live chat

Our live chat is provided by tawk.to. When you open the chat window, tawk.to receives your IP address, your browser information, and the messages you send. Chat transcripts are stored on tawk.to's systems as well as being visible to us.

5. Who we share information with

We do not sell your personal information for money. We share it with the service providers we need in order to run the business, and only as much as each one needs to do its job.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it — in response to a valid legal request, to enforce our terms, or to protect our rights, our customers or the public. If our business is ever sold or merged, customer information would transfer as part of that sale, and we would tell you before it happened.

6. Cookies

We use cookies for things the site cannot work without — keeping items in your cart, keeping you signed in — and for analytics and advertising as described above.

Our Cookie Policy sets out which cookies we use and how to control them. Most browsers also let you block or delete cookies, though blocking the essential ones will stop the cart and checkout from working.

7. How long we keep information

• Order and transaction records: seven years, because US tax record-keeping requires it.
• License keys and delivery records: kept for as long as you may need support for that license, since a perpetual license does not expire.
• Account details: until you ask us to delete your account.
• Support emails and chat transcripts: two years.
• Website analytics data: fourteen months, in line with our Google Analytics retention setting.

When a retention period ends we delete the information or remove anything that identifies you, unless we are required to keep it for longer.

8. How we protect information

Our website runs over an encrypted HTTPS connection. Payments are handled entirely by Stripe, which is certified to the PCI DSS standard, so card numbers never reach our systems. We use a web application firewall to block malicious traffic, and access to customer data is limited to the people who need it to do their work.

No method of transmitting or storing data is completely secure, and we cannot promise absolute security. If a breach ever affected your personal information, we would notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires.

9. Your privacy rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• See the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct anything that is wrong.
• Delete your information, subject to records we are legally required to keep, such as tax records.
• Stop marketing to you, including removing you from the advertising lists described in section 4.
• Receive a copy of your information in a portable format.

Email contact@atomsoftwares.com and we will respond within 45 days, as California law requires, and sooner where we can. We may need to verify your identity first, usually by confirming details of a past order. We will not charge you for a request, and we will not treat you differently for making one.

You may use an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf. We will ask for proof that you gave them permission.

10. California residents

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act gives you specific rights. In the past twelve months we have collected the categories of personal information described in section 2: identifiers such as name, email, phone and address; commercial information such as what you bought; internet activity such as the pages you viewed; and approximate location inferred from your IP address. We collect these from you directly and from your use of our website, for the purposes set out in section 3.

Selling and sharing

We do not sell your personal information for money.

California law uses the words "sell" and "share" more broadly than everyday speech. Our use of Google advertising cookies, and our upload of hashed customer contact details to Google Ads as described in section 4, are likely to count as "sharing personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising" under that law. We would rather tell you that plainly than argue the point.

You have the right to tell us to stop. Email contact@atomsoftwares.com with the subject line "Do Not Sell or Share", and we will remove you from our advertising lists and exclude you from future uploads. You do not need to be a California resident to use this; we apply it to anyone who asks.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

Sensitive personal information

We do not collect sensitive personal information as California law defines it. We do not ask for government identification numbers, financial account numbers, precise geolocation, racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, health information, or the contents of your private communications.

11. Other US states

Several other states — including Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon and Montana — have comprehensive privacy laws giving residents rights similar to those above: to access, correct, delete, obtain a copy of their information, and to opt out of targeted advertising.

Rather than ask you to work out which law applies to you, we extend the rights in sections 9 and 10 to every customer, in every state. Email us and we will act on it. Some states also give you the right to appeal if we decline a request; if we ever decline one, we will tell you why and how to appeal.

12. Orders from outside the US

We are a United States business and our systems are located in the United States. We sell principally to US customers, but we do occasionally receive orders from elsewhere.

If you order from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those in your own country. If you are in a country with its own data protection law, such as the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Canada, you may make any of the requests described in section 9 and we will honor it in the same way.

13. Children

Our website is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us their information, write to us and we will delete it.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our business or the law changes. When we do, we will change the "last updated" date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will give you clearer notice than that — by email, or a notice on the site.

15. How to contact us