Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 14, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Essex Software, LLC ("Essex Software," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, shares, and protects your personal information when you visit our website, purchase or use our products, or otherwise interact with us. Your privacy is important to us. If you have any questions about this policy, please contact us at support@essexsoftware.com.

Information We Collect

Information you provide directly. When you purchase our software, contact our support team, submit a web inquiry, or sign up for an account, you may provide us with information such as your name, email address, phone number, mailing address, and the contents of any messages you send us.

Information from purchase transactions. Purchases are processed by our e-commerce providers, currently FastSpring and Braintree (a subsidiary of PayPal). Any payment information you provide is handled directly by these providers in accordance with their respective privacy policies. We receive transaction details such as your name, email, billing country and postal code, the product purchased, and the amount.

Information from software usage. Our desktop and mobile applications periodically validate license keys with our servers. We record the date and frequency of these validations to combat license abuse and to understand how our products are used.

In-browser tools. Several of our web tools — including our PDF compressor, image squeezer, video compressor, PDF signer, PDF redactor, PDF metadata viewer/remover, and bulk archiver — process your files entirely in your web browser using WebAssembly and modern browser APIs. Your files are not uploaded to our servers. We do collect anonymous usage telemetry about which tools are used and whether operations succeeded, but not the files themselves or their contents.

Information collected automatically on our website. When you visit our website, we and our service providers may automatically collect information such as your IP address, browser type and version, operating system, referring URL, pages viewed, time spent on pages, and identifiers from cookies and similar technologies. See Cookies, Pixels, and Tracking below.

How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

  • Process your purchases, deliver license keys, and provide customer support
  • Send transactional communications such as receipts, license key emails, renewal notices, and service updates
  • Send marketing communications about product updates, new versions, and special offers (you may opt out at any time)
  • Operate, maintain, and improve our products and website
  • Detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, security incidents, and other harmful activity
  • Comply with our legal obligations and enforce our agreements
  • Conduct and manage our advertising as described in Advertising and Custom Audiences below

Email Communications

Essex Software, LLC will send out email announcements of product updates and new versions, as well as special offers and company news. You can unsubscribe from or change preferences for any of our marketing email lists by clicking the unsubscribe link that appears at the end of every marketing message. Unsubscribing from marketing emails does not affect transactional emails (such as receipts, license keys, renewal notices, or service updates), which we continue to send as part of providing the service you have purchased.

Advertising and Custom Audiences

We use your contact information to operate and improve our advertising. To do this, we may share your email address, phone number, and mailing address with advertising platforms — including Google Ads — in cryptographically hashed form. Hashing is a one-way mathematical process (we use SHA-256) that converts your contact information into a fixed-length code; the original information cannot be recovered from the hash. The advertising platform compares our hashes to hashes derived from identifiers its own users have provided to it, and produces an aggregate audience of matches we can use in our advertising campaigns. We do not see who individually matched.

We use this matching process for the following purposes:

  • Showing relevant ads. We may show advertisements for our products and services to people whose information matches identifiers we have on file.
  • Suppressing ads to existing customers. We exclude existing customers from campaigns intended for new customers, so you do not see ads for products you already own.
  • Finding similar customers. We may use the matched audience as a signal to help the advertising platform identify other people who share characteristics with our customers ("lookalike" or "similar" audiences).
  • Measuring advertising performance. We use the matching process to measure whether our advertising is reaching the right people.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not provide your contact information to advertising platforms or other third parties for them to use independently. The hashed identifiers we share with advertising platforms are used solely for the matching purposes described above and are not used to identify you outside that process.

Your choices. You can opt out of our use of your contact information for advertising at any time by emailing us at support@essexsoftware.com. We will remove your contact information from our advertising audiences within a reasonable period. You can also manage your Google advertising preferences directly at https://adssettings.google.com or by visiting your Google Account settings. Opting out of advertising does not affect our ability to send you transactional emails or to honor your existing subscriptions.

Retention. We re-upload our customer audiences to advertising platforms on a regular schedule. If you opt out, we remove you from the next refresh and stop including you in future uploads. Hashed identifiers expire on the advertising platform after a period defined by the platform (currently 540 days from last upload).

Cookies, Pixels, and Tracking

We and our service providers use cookies, pixels, web beacons, and similar technologies to operate our website, remember your preferences, measure website performance, and deliver and measure advertising. The specific technologies we use include:

  • Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4 — to understand how visitors use our website and to measure the effectiveness of our marketing
  • Self-hosted Matomo Analytics — for additional first-party web analytics
  • Microsoft Clarity — to record anonymized session interactions (clicks, scrolls, mouse movement) and produce heatmaps so we can diagnose usability issues. Clarity masks form inputs by default.
  • StatCounter — for visitor counts and basic traffic stats
  • Google Ads conversion tracking, Google Remarketing, and Customer Match — to measure advertising performance and to deliver audiences as described in Advertising and Custom Audiences
  • Microsoft Advertising (Bing UET) — to measure performance of our advertising on Bing and the Microsoft Audience Network
  • LinkedIn Insight Tag and Reddit Pixel — to measure traffic and conversions from advertising on those platforms
  • First-party cookies we set ourselves to preserve session state and attribution data (such as click identifiers and UTM parameters) for measurement purposes

You can control cookies through your browser settings, including blocking or deleting them. Doing so may affect site functionality. For more information about cookies on our site, please see our Cookie Policy.

Sharing Your Information

We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information except as may be required by law. We share information only in the following circumstances:

  • Service providers. We share information with vendors who help us operate our business — including payment processors (FastSpring, Braintree), email delivery providers (Amazon SES), analytics providers (Google, Matomo), advertising platforms (Google Ads), and hosting providers. These providers may only use the information to provide services to us.
  • Legal requirements. We may disclose information if required to do so by law, in response to valid requests by public authorities, or to protect our rights, property, or safety, or that of our users or others.
  • Business transfers. If Essex Software is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any such transfer and any changes in privacy practices.

Data Security

We use commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect your information. No method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is 100% secure, however, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a data breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and applicable regulators as required by law.

Your Rights — European Economic Area and United Kingdom

If you are located in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the UK GDPR give you the following rights with respect to your personal data:

  • The right to access the personal data we hold about you
  • The right to have inaccurate data corrected
  • The right to have your data deleted ("right to be forgotten"), subject to certain exceptions
  • The right to restrict or object to our processing of your data, including for direct marketing
  • The right to receive your data in a structured, commonly used format ("data portability")
  • The right to withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent
  • The right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority

Our legal basis for processing personal data for direct marketing to existing customers, and for measuring and improving our website and advertising, is our legitimate interest in promoting our products. You can object to processing based on legitimate interests at any time by contacting us, by adjusting your browser cookie settings, or by using the platform-specific opt-out controls listed in our Cookie Policy. When we transfer personal data from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland to the United States, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission and the UK Information Commissioner's Office.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at support@essexsoftware.com. We will respond within the time period required by applicable law.

Your Rights — California Residents

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA") and the California Privacy Rights Act ("CPRA") give you the following rights with respect to your personal information:

  • The right to know what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and share about you, and to receive a copy of that information
  • The right to request that we delete personal information we have collected from you, subject to certain exceptions
  • The right to correct inaccurate personal information
  • The right to opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising
  • The right to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information
  • The right not to be discriminated against for exercising your privacy rights

We do not sell personal information for monetary consideration. We do "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising as defined by the CPRA when we provide hashed identifiers to advertising platforms for the matching and audience purposes described in Advertising and Custom Audiences. You can opt out of this sharing at any time by emailing support@essexsoftware.com. We also honor Global Privacy Control signals where technically feasible.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at support@essexsoftware.com. We will respond within the time period required by applicable law.

Children's Privacy

Our website and products are not directed to children under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16. If you believe we have collected information from a child under 16, please contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will revise the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, provide additional notice (such as a notice on our website or by email). We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

Contact

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at:

Essex Software, LLC
9935D Rea Road, Suite 131
Charlotte, NC 28277
Email: support@essexsoftware.com

To verify our merchant status with our e-commerce provider, please visit our Braintree merchant verification page.