Evernote has grown amazingly fast in recent months. It feels like we’re getting closer and closer to fulfilling our goal of being the permanent, trusted and ubiquitous place for all the world’s memories. Each of those words is very important to us, so I thought this was a good time to clearly spell out our core guiding principles for how we treat your data.
Everything we do at Evernote follows these three basic rules:
- Your Data is Yours
- Your Data is Protected
- Your Data is Portable
1. Your Data is Yours
We do not own your data. Putting notes and other content into Evernote does not change its ownership or copyright status. If the data was yours to begin with, it remains yours after you put it in Evernote.
By putting data in Evernote, you give us permission to do certain things with it for the purpose of running our service. For example, you give us permission to back it up, send it on a network, index it for searching, display it on your phone, etc. Some of these operations may require us to send your data to our normal business partners–such as a network operator–that we have contracted with to provide parts of the Evernote Service.
Other than giving us the permission to perform these limited operations so we can run the Evernote Service, you retain all the rights to your data.
2. Your Data is Protected
Everything you put into Evernote is private by default. We never look at it, analyze it, share it, use it to target ads, data mine it, etc.–unless you specifically ask us to do one of these things. Our business model does not depend on “monetizing” your data in any way. Rather, it depends on building trust and providing a great service that more and more people choose to pay for.
There are features in Evernote which allow you to publish and share some of your notes with others, but these are totally optional and whether or not you use them is up to you. If you choose to connect your Evernote account with one of our many partners, you may be giving the partner access to your data. We will tell you how the partner application will access your account and you can turn off access whenever you want.
In addition, we take many precautions to protect your data from accidental loss and theft. Everything you put into an Evernote synchronized notebook is stored in our secure data center with multiple redundant servers, storage devices and off-site backups. Communication between Evernote clients and our servers is encrypted via industry-standard SSL. We don’t store your password on our servers and no one at Evernote will ever ask you for it.
3. Your Data is Portable
There is no data-lock in Evernote. We are committed to making it easy for you to get all of your data into, and out of, Evernote at any time. Our desktop software lets you export all of your notes and content in human-readable HTML as well as a fully documented machine-readable XML format. We also have a full, free API that lets you access all of your data. Our philosophy is that if you’re confident that you can leave Evernote at any time, then you’ll be confident enough to want to stay.
For more information, please read the Evernote Privacy and Security blog post by our CTO, Dave Engberg and our Terms of Service.
