Legal

When you purchase or try our software, we will use your personal information to complete your purchase. The details we collect from you will include your email address, name, address, payment and other contact details.

If you purchase our software, we share your personal information with our subcontractors who are involved in the purchase process, such as payment providers, as well as credit reference agencies who we use to assess fraud, credit and/or security risks.

We need to process your personal information in this way to enter into and perform the contract for your use of our software.

We also carry out checks on our customers to ensure they aren’t subject to international sanctions, and to comply with laws applying to the export of our software. If we run these checks and you are flagged as someone who may be subject to a sanction, to continue with your order we may contact you to request additional information to confirm whether we are legally able to onboard you as a customer. The additional data we ask you for will usually be your gender, date and place of birth, and your citizenship. We do this to comply with our legal obligations, and our legitimate interest to run our business in line with best practice principles.

When you have a RealVNC® account with us, e.g. because you have purchased or tried our software, have signed up to our developer sandbox, or are using certain account-dependent functionality in our software, we collect your name, email address, phone number, country and whether you are using our software for business or personal purposes.

We need to collect and handle your personal information in this way to perform the contract for the use of our software.

Your information is only collected or handled if you have signed in to VNC® Viewer with your RealVNC® account, or if you have allowed the collection of usage data.

When you use your RealVNC® account to sign in to VNC® Viewer, we collect and handle information about your sign-in so you can identify exactly where you’ve signed in from. The details we collect include application name and version, local user name, computer description, machine name, device name, device type, and OS name and version. This information is cleared if you sign out of VNC® Viewer.

When signed in to a VNC® Viewer with your RealVNC® account, we also collect information about computers in your VNC® Viewer Address Book. The details include any name you have assigned to a computer in your address book, the address to use when connecting to it (e.g. a hostname, IP address, port/display details, or other identifier), the public key to expect when connecting to that computer, the default user name to use for authentication, the time of last connection, any configured labels for the address book entry, and an optional screenshot taken during the last connection. You can clear this information at any time by deleting the relevant address book entries from VNC® Viewer.

When you use VNC® Viewer’s Instant Support capability, we collect chat transcripts logging information about activities in the session. Logging information includes the timings and results of activities such as session start/end, file transfer, elevation requests and reboot attempts. This information allows us to provide you with historic details of instant support sessions you have been involved in. All chat transcripts are encrypted at-rest on our servers.

We need to collect and handle your personal information in these ways to perform the contract for your use of our software.

When you use the Instant Support Application, or when you receive support from someone using VNC® Connect’s Instant Support capability, you download and run the Instant Support Application. During the support session, we collect chat transcripts logging information about activities in the session. Logging information includes your IP address and the timings and results of activities such as session start/end, file transfer, elevation requests and reboot attempts. 

We need to collect and handle your personal information in these ways to perform our contract for the use of this software.

When you use our VNC® Server and VNC® Viewer applications, if the ‘send usage data’ option is enabled, we will use our own systems as well as selected third-party analytics providers to collect and process the following information:

• Device/machine information, such as machine name, network name, brand, manufacturer, model, operating system version and IP address.
• Version, mode and subscription information.
• Information about paths through the software.
• Frequency that features are used, and how they are used.
• Summary information about remote control sessions established, including (but not limited to) encryption type, protocol version, preferences set, duration and locale.

For the avoidance of doubt, we explicitly do not log or collect passwords, mouse clicks or keystrokes. These are encrypted end-to-end and are never available either to RealVNC® or to third parties.

This data may be used for product improvement, to tune the system, support technical decision-making, inform choices for a better user experience, and to validate and improve our model of user behaviour.

The collection of this data can be prevented by disabling the ‘send usage data’ option in the VNC® Server and VNC® Viewer applications.

Your information is collected to perform a licence check, to provide service, or if you have allowed the collection of anonymous usage data for analytics purposes.

If you have enabled cloud connectivity for VNC® Server, we will collect and process information to allow you to license the application correctly, identify the computer and remotely connect to it. The details collected include application name and version, machine/device name and form factor, OS name and version, and MAC addresses.

If you are licencing VNC® Server with a licence key directly, we will perform an online audit to evaluate whether provisioning complies with the EULA.

We need to collect and handle your personal information in these ways to perform the contract for your use of our software.

When you phone, email or message us using our website portal or online chat service, we may also handle your personal information (your name, contact details and the other details you provide to us) in order to provide the customer services you have asked us to. This could be when you ask us to confirm whether a particular product is available, or explain how our delivery or returns process works. Please be aware that we may record calls for training and monitoring reasons.

We rely on our legitimate interest to respond to your query to handle your personal information in this way, except when we are providing a service you have asked us to as part of the contract between us. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide us with the personal information we request from you for customer services purposes, we may not be able to fully answer your queries.

If you have opted in to receive marketing communications from us, we will use your name and email address to provide you with marketing communications in line with any preferences you have told us about.

If you have signed up to our UX list, we may invite you to take part in UX testing, invite you to let us know your thoughts on our products and to complete our UX and product surveys. During this process we may also ask you to provide details about your employer, your role and where you work, to help us better interpret the results of your feedback.

When we send you marketing emails, we rely on your consent to contact you for marketing purposes. Every email we send to you for marketing purposes will also contain instructions on how to unsubscribe from receiving them.

You are not under any obligation to provide us with your personal data for marketing purposes.

You can tell us that you do not want your personal information to be processed in this way at any time by contacting us at [email protected] or, where relevant, by following the unsubscribe link shown in every marketing communication you receive from us.

Call Recording

We record some calls for improving productivity and for training and quality purposes, such as to help us evaluate our performance and better understand the needs of our customers. We’ll let you know we’re recording the call at the start and will offer you an opt-out if you chose to do so. We rely on our legitimate interests to use your data in this way.

When you speak to us at an event, we will collect the following information from you: name, address, email address and phone number. 

We collect this information based on our legitimate interests so that we can keep you up to date with our services and pursue business opportunities with you.

We sometimes obtain your personal information from a third party provider where  they have a lawful ground to pass on your details to us, and we believe our software or services are relevant to you, for example we purchase marketing lists from ZoomInfo Technologies LLC (“ZoomInfo“) for this purpose. We collect your information in this way because we have a legitimate interest to promote the success of the business.

We also use ZoomInfo to match existing customers and prospective customers acquired by us through various channels with data held by ZoomInfo on those customers and prospective customers, such as contact details, industry sector information and geographic locations. Generally, this information is already publicly available. We do this based on our legitimate interest of building accurate profiles of customers and prospective customers so we can market software or services which are relevant. If you would like to opt out of us collecting your data in this way, then please contact us at [email protected]. Likewise, if you would like us to erase any information we have collected about you through ZoomInfo Technologies LLC please contact us at [email protected].

We use your personal information and also share your aggregated, anonymous data with third party analytics and search engine providers for the purposes of improving and optimising our services.

We process your data for this reason because we have a legitimate interest to provide you with the best experience we can.

We will transfer your personal information to a third party:

• If we sell or buy any business or assets, we will provide your personal information to the seller or buyer (but only to the extent we need to, and always in accordance with data protection legislation); or
• If RealVNC® or the majority of its assets are acquired by somebody else, in which case the personal information held by RealVNC® will be transferred to the buyer.

We process your personal information for this purpose because we have a legitimate interest to ensure our business can be continued by the buyer. If you object to our use of your personal information in this way, the relevant seller or buyer of our business may not be able to provide services to you.

In some circumstances we may also need to share your personal information if we are under a duty to disclose or share it to comply with a legal obligation.

We will collect and handle the data you provide to us on your application and/or CV on the basis of taking steps to perform a contract with you. This information may include sensitive or special categories of personal data, such as your race, ethnic origin or information about your health.

Where you have provided employment references to us as part of your application, we will contact those referees and ask them to provide a reference about you. As part of this process, we will disclose your name and the fact that you have applied to work with us to your referees. We also use the information you have provided to us when applying for jobs to record who is applying for jobs with us and to make sure we are attracting a diverse range of applicants.

Please also see our recruitment-specific privacy notice.

We may analyse your usage data together with your account data and our history with you to decide when and how to get in touch.

An example may be if a new version of the software is coming out and we think it’s relevant to you or if we would like to ask for your feedback on a specific feature.

We process your data for this reason because we have a legitimate interest to provide you with the best experience we can. You may opt out of receiving such communications by contacting [email protected].