Medium Privacy Policy
Effective Date: March 7, 2016
Privacy is important. We respect yours. Our goal is to do more than we have to by law — we want to earn your trust that we are careful with your data.
General information
This policy sets out our privacy practices and explains how we handle the information we collect when you visit and use our sites, services, mobile applications, products, and content (“Services”).
What we may collect
We collect information about what Medium pages you access, information about your mobile device (such as device or browser type), information you send us (such as an email address used to register or communicate with us), and referral information.
When you use Medium Services, we may collect and store your Internet Protocol address. We may use this information to fight spam and other abuse; to personalize Medium Services; or to generate aggregate, non-identifying information about how people use Medium Services.
When you create your Medium account, and authenticate via a third-party service like Twitter or Facebook, we may collect, store, and periodically update the contact lists associated with that third-party account, so you can connect with existing contacts from that service who are on Medium.
Email from Medium
Sometimes we’ll send administrative emails about account or service changes, or new policies. You can’t opt out of them. You can always opt out of non-administrative emails such as daily digests.
We won’t email you to ask for your password or other account information. If you receive such an email, send it to us so we can investigate.
Disclosure of your information
As a rule, we don’t share your personal information outside the company.
We won’t sell your personal information.
We may share your personal information with third parties in limited circumstances, including: (1) with your consent; (2) to a vendor or partner who meets our data protection standards; or (3) when we have a good faith belief it is required by law, such as pursuant to a subpoena or other legal process.
If we’re going to share your information in response to legal process, we’ll give you advance notice so you can challenge it (for example by seeking court intervention), unless we’re prohibited from doing so by law or court order. We will object to requests for information about users of our site that we believe to be improper.
If we merge with another company such that your information will become subject to a different privacy policy, we’ll notify you before the transfer. You can opt out of the new policy by deleting your account during the notice period.
Cookies
We use cookies and similar technologies such as pixels and local storage to recognize you when you return to our Services. We use them in various ways, for example to log you in, remember your preferences (such as default language), evaluate email effectiveness, show relevant ads, and personalize information.
We respect Do Not Track (“DNT”) settings in browsers. If you’re logged out of our Services and have DNT enabled, we will not set cookies. By logging in you are opting to allow Medium to ignore the DNT setting and to use cookies in order to provide you a personalized experience.
Some third-party services that we use, such as embedly or Google Analytics, may place their own cookies in your browser. This Privacy Policy covers use of cookies by Medium only and not the use of cookies by third parties.
Data Storage
Medium uses third-party vendors and hosting partners, such as Amazon, for hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology we need to run Medium. We maintain two types of logs: server logs and event logs.
Modifying your personal information or deleting your account
If you have a Medium account, you can access and modify your personal information, or delete your account here.
To protect information from accidental or malicious destruction, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems.
If you delete your account, your account and content may be unrecoverable.
Data security
We use encryption (HTTPS/TLS) to protect data transmitted to and from our site. However, no data transmission over the Internet is 100% secure, so we can’t guarantee security. You use the Service at your own risk, and you’re responsible for taking reasonable measures to secure your account (like using a strong password).
Changes to this Policy
Medium may periodically update this Policy. We’ll notify you about significant changes to it. The most current version of the policy will always be here and we will archive former versions of the policy here.
Questions
We welcome questions, concerns, and feedback about this policy at legal@medium.com.