Privacy Policy

The Media Tribe ("we," "us," or "our") operates PingHQ, a business-to-business outbound sales platform. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, and protect personal data when you use the Service.

This policy covers two groups of people:

• Users - people who create a PingHQ account.
• Prospects - business contacts whose information is uploaded to, imported into, or discovered through PingHQ by our users, and who may receive outreach sent by those users.

If you received an email from a PingHQ user and want to know how your data got here or how to opt out, see Sections 10 and 11.

Account Information

Name, username, email address, company name, and password (hashed with bcrypt, never stored in plain text). When you create an account we also record the date and time you accepted our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and which version you accepted. If you enable two-factor authentication, we store an encrypted TOTP secret and backup codes.

Integration Credentials

OAuth tokens for Gmail and HubSpot; SMTP/IMAP server details and password for a mailbox you connect by SMTP (for example Outlook or Microsoft 365); and your LinkedIn session cookie if you connect LinkedIn, either through our Chrome extension or by pasting it in Settings. Tokens, passwords, and the LinkedIn cookie are encrypted at rest.

Billing Information

Subscription plan, billing name and address you enter on the payment screen, and payment records. Card details are entered into Square's payment form and handled by Square; we store only Square customer and card identifiers, never card numbers.

Usage and Security Data

IP addresses, login attempts, and actions taken within the Service, recorded in audit and error logs for security and troubleshooting.

PingHQ processes business contact data about third parties (prospects) on behalf of our users. This typically includes: name, business email address, phone number, job title, company name and details, location, LinkedIn profile URL, recent public LinkedIn posts, and AI-written research summaries about the person's professional role.

This data enters PingHQ in the following ways:

• Uploaded or manually entered by a user (for example, CSV import)
• Imported from the user's HubSpot CRM via an authorized connection
• Sourced from Apollo.io, a third-party B2B contact data provider
• Discovered or enriched through AI-assisted research of publicly available web sources (performed with Anthropic's Claude models using a web search tool)

Prospect data is business-context data. PingHQ is not intended for consumer marketing lists or sensitive categories of personal data.

• To provide and operate the Service
• To send emails and LinkedIn messages on a user's behalf (only when the user launches campaigns)
• To record whether campaign emails were opened, replied to, bounced, or unsubscribed from
• To research prospects and generate AI-assisted email content: prospect details (such as name, title, company, and email address) and campaign context are sent to Anthropic's Claude API for this purpose
• To verify email address deliverability via a third-party verification service (Reoon)
• To process subscription payments via Square
• To detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and security incidents
• To communicate with users about their account and the Service

We do not sell personal data.

PingHQ runs on managed cloud infrastructure. The following providers process data on our behalf or receive data as part of a feature you use:

• Supabase - Managed PostgreSQL database hosting. All user and prospect data is stored here.
• Fly.io - Hosting for our backend API servers.
• Vercel - Hosting for the web application frontend.
• Upstash - Managed Redis used for rate limiting, short-lived caching, and job locks. Cached entries can include prospect lookup and verification results and AI responses.
• Anthropic (Claude AI) - AI-assisted prospect research, lead discovery, and email personalization. Prospect and campaign details are transmitted to Anthropic's API and processed per Anthropic's usage policies.
• Apollo.io - B2B lead discovery and enrichment. Search criteria and, for enrichment, contact identifiers (such as name, email, company, domain, or LinkedIn URL) are sent to Apollo.
• Google - Gmail sending and mailbox access via OAuth, limited to the permissions the user grants (see Section 9). Google Fonts also serves the fonts on this site; when a page loads, your browser requests font files from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com and Google receives your IP address as part of that request.
• Microsoft - If you connect an Outlook or Microsoft 365 mailbox by SMTP/IMAP, outreach is sent through Microsoft's mail servers (smtp.office365.com) and replies and bounces are read from your mailbox over IMAP (outlook.office365.com) using the credentials you supply.
• LinkedIn - If you connect LinkedIn, PingHQ uses your own LinkedIn session to send connection requests and messages and to check connection status. LinkedIn receives the messages and profile lookups you configure.
• HubSpot - CRM synchronization when a user connects their HubSpot account. PingHQ reads contacts from HubSpot; it does not write prospect data back to HubSpot.
• Square - Payment processing. Square's payment form script is loaded on the billing screen. We do not store card numbers.
• Reoon - Email address verification. Prospect email addresses are sent to Reoon to check deliverability.
• Slack - Internal operational alerting. Alerts can include a user's name, email address, plan, and billing amounts (for example, when a renewal succeeds or fails), system error messages, and domain reputation metrics. Prospect contact lists are not sent to Slack.

Each provider has its own privacy policy governing its processing.

PingHQ data is processed and stored in the United States on the cloud infrastructure listed above. If you are located in the EEA, UK, or another jurisdiction with data transfer rules, your data (and any prospect data you process) will be transferred to and processed in the US. Where required, we rely on our providers' safeguards for such transfers (such as standard contractual clauses or Data Privacy Framework certification, where the provider offers them).

Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we process personal data on the following bases:

• Contract - to provide the Service to users (account, billing, and integration data)
• Legitimate interests - for business-to-business prospect processing carried out by our users, and for securing and improving the Service
• Consent - where a user connects optional third-party integrations
• Legal obligation - where we must retain records or respond to lawful requests

For prospect data, our users determine the purposes of outreach and are responsible for having a lawful basis to contact the people they upload or source.

• All traffic is encrypted in transit via HTTPS (TLS 1.2+)
• Passwords are hashed using bcrypt with a cost factor of 12
• Sensitive tokens and credentials (Gmail, HubSpot, LinkedIn, SMTP, TOTP) are encrypted at rest with AES-256-CBC
• Two-factor authentication (TOTP) is available for all accounts
• Audit logs track login attempts and sensitive operations
• Database backups are managed by our database provider (Supabase)

PingHQ's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

When you connect Gmail, we request the Gmail mail scope (which also covers sending and reading) and your Google email address. We use that access only to:

• Send the campaign emails and conversation replies you create, from your own Gmail address
• Detect replies to your campaigns: we periodically list recent inbox messages not sent by you and read their From, Subject, In-Reply-To, and References headers plus Gmail's short preview snippet, so a reply can be matched to the email it answers and shown in your Conversations view
• Detect bounces: we look for recent unread delivery-failure notices (for example from mailer-daemon), read them to find the address that bounced, and mark those notices as read

We store the resulting reply subject and preview snippet and the bounce status on your contact records. We do not use Gmail data for advertising, do not sell it, and do not transfer it to any third party except as needed to provide these features, to comply with law, or as part of a merger or acquisition with notice to you. Humans do not read your Gmail data unless you ask us to for support, it is needed for security or to comply with law, or the data has been aggregated and anonymized. Your Gmail OAuth tokens are stored encrypted and are deleted when you disconnect Gmail in Settings or delete your account. You can also revoke PingHQ's access at any time from your Google Account permissions page.

PingHQ users send outreach from their own mailboxes. If you received one of those emails:

• Open tracking. Campaign emails include a one-pixel invisible image hosted on our servers. When your email client loads it, we record that the email was opened, when, and how many times, and show that to the sender. Many email clients block remote images or load them through a proxy; in that case opens may not be recorded or may be recorded inaccurately.
• Sender address. Every campaign email carries the sender's physical mailing address, which the sender must enter before a campaign can launch.
• Unsubscribe link. Every campaign email includes an unsubscribe link, and a one-click List-Unsubscribe option in email clients that support it. Clicking the link shows a confirmation button; confirming (or using one-click unsubscribe) records your opt-out immediately with no sign-in required.
• Honored across all of that sender's campaigns. When you unsubscribe, your email address is added to a suppression list for the account that emailed you. That list is checked before every campaign send, so you will not receive further campaign emails from that account even if your details are later re-imported as a new record.

You can also reply to the sender asking to be removed, which the sender handles manually, or contact us at privacy@themediatribe.io and we will review your request and mark you as unsubscribed or delete your data from the relevant records.

Depending on where you live, you may have the following rights over your personal data, whether you are a user or a prospect:

• Access - request a copy of the data held about you, including information about where it was obtained
• Correction - update or correct inaccurate data
• Deletion - request deletion of your data
• Portability - receive your data in a portable format
• Restriction - request that processing of your data be restricted
• Object - object to processing based on legitimate interests, including an absolute right to object to direct marketing at any time (GDPR Article 21). If you object to direct marketing, outreach to you will stop.
• Withdraw consent - disconnect third-party integrations at any time via Settings
• Complain - lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority in your country (GDPR Article 77) or, in the US, with your state attorney general

Data export for users. You can download a copy of your data at any time from Settings. The export is a JSON file containing your account record (profile, company details, mailbox server settings, and billing status, but never your password hash, OAuth tokens, mailbox password, LinkedIn cookie, or two-factor secrets), your contacts, campaigns, sequence steps, email templates, settings, the activity log of emails and LinkedIn messages sent and replies received, and your lead research jobs and research candidates.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@themediatribe.io.

• Account and prospect data is retained while the associated account is active
• Upon account deletion, the account and its associated data (including prospect records, campaigns, settings, and the suppression list) are deleted from our live database at the time of deletion; residual copies may persist in provider-managed database backups until those backups expire under the provider's retention schedule
• Prospect records deleted within the app are flagged as deleted and immediately excluded from campaigns and the interface, but may persist in the database; prospects can request permanent erasure by contacting privacy@themediatribe.io
• Campaign analytics and engagement data is retained for the duration of the subscription
• Audit logs are retained for security purposes
• Unsubscribe status is kept in two places: on the contact record and on the account's email suppression list. The suppression list entry is keyed by email address and survives deletion or re-import of the contact record; it is removed only when the account that holds it is deleted

PingHQ does not set cookies. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or third-party analytics. The web app keeps a small amount of data in your browser's local storage so the app works:

• pinghq_token - Your sign-in token, so you stay signed in between page loads.
• pinghq_refresh_token - A token used to renew your sign-in session without asking for your password again.
• pinghq_theme - Your light or dark theme preference.
• pinghq_redirect - The page you were on when your session expired, so you return there after signing in.
• pinghq_campaign_wizard - An autosaved draft of a campaign you are building, so it is not lost if you leave the page.
• pinghq_ai_content - Text generated with Coach Maddy that you chose to carry into another page.
• pinghq_onboarding_dismissed - Whether you dismissed the Getting Started panel.
• pinghq_dialer_vote - Whether you voted on interest in the Dialer feature, so you are not asked again.

If the campaign builder cannot read an AI response, a copy of that response is kept in session storage (cleared when the tab closes) to help diagnose the problem. Local storage is cleared for sign-in data when you log out and can be cleared at any time from your browser settings.

Two third-party resources load in your browser: fonts from Google Fonts (your browser contacts fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com, which receive your IP address) and Square's payment SDK (web.squarecdn.com), which renders the card form on the billing screen.

For privacy-related inquiries, including prospect opt-out and data-subject requests:

The Media Tribe
Email: privacy@themediatribe.io