F‑Secure privacy statement
May 2024
In brief
Our core interest is keeping our customers safe with our services.
To do that, we need to process data on you and on your devices.
We have a culture of respecting your privacy.
Our guiding privacy principles are here.
Our service-specific privacy policies (for services such as F‑Secure Total) are here.
Structure
This privacy statement is given by F‑Secure Corporation, a Finnish publicly listed corporation with Business ID 3269349-7 (“F‑Secure”, “we”, “our”, “us”). All our subsidiaries also apply this policy.
Our data collection can be grouped as follows:
Client relationship data; the data that we need to manage our relationship with our clients and to market and sell our services to you or to the legal entity that you represent.
Service data; the data that we automatically process to provide you with the services that you have requested. This also includes the data that you actively submit to us when subscribing to our services.
Security data; the data that we need to collect to keep you secure.
Analytics data; additional anonymous or pseudonymous data that we collect to learn when and how our services are found and used.
This privacy statement describes F‑Secure’s common practices for processing all of our customers’ personal data. It also complements service-specific privacy policies as well as our license terms and other, shorter notices on case-specific data collection (e.g. support tools). Depending on what F‑Secure services you use and how much you interact with us, some sections of this policy may not apply to you or may apply to you only in part.
If there is no specific policy for a specific interaction, this privacy statement shall apply as such.
Definitions
This is what we mean when we make certain references within this policy.
“Client”, “you”, refers to any data subjects who buy, register for use, or use our services, whose devices and data traffic are protected by our services, or who may have submitted personally identifiable information to us. This information may have been submitted through the use of our services, websites, telephone, email, registration forms, or other similar channels.
“Personal data” refers to any information on private individuals that is identifiable to them or their family or household members. This information may include names, email and mailing addresses, telephone numbers, billing and account information, and other, more technical information that can be linked to you, your device, or the behavior of either, that we process while providing our services.
“Services” refer to any services or products that are manufactured or distributed by F‑Secure, including software, web solutions, tools, and related support services.
“Service provider partner” refers to a third party that sells and distributes F‑Secure products, for example mobile and broadband service providers, banks, and insurance companies. The F‑Secure product may be co-branded with the service provider’s brand.
“Website” refers to the f-secure.com website or any other website that F‑Secure hosts or controls, including subsites and browser-based service portals.
What do we collect?
The service and interaction-specific policies set out the personal data collected per service type and interaction.
What do we do with it?
The interaction and service-specific privacy policies and notices set out the specific purposes for using the personal data collected by each service or processed in such activity.
In addition to such specific purposes, the following general purposes of personal data use apply across all of our services:
Provisioning of services. To deliver our services to you, we process the data for the following purposes:
Customer journey. To identify authorized users, process and track transactions, administer user accounts, as well as for shipping, invoicing, and managing licenses.
Deliver, fix, and enhance. Delivering, maintaining, and developing our services and websites, and to provide help and support for the services.
Analyze. To track that our services are taken into use and how they are used so that we can improve the services, manage your customer relationship, and approach you with relevant messages.
Communicate. To send you information relating to the services, conduct customer surveys, and market our services to you. The actual communication may be handled either by F‑Secure or by our partners.
Regulatory. To prevent fraudulent, illegal, or infringing activities and to comply with legal or regulatory requirements.
Legal grounds
This section gives you a more comprehensive explanation of the legal grounds based on which we process personal data. This complements the exact service-specific legal grounds on which our personal data processing relies for the respective activity.
Client relationship data
By using our services, you are our client. To interact with you and to provide our services to our clients, we must process some data on you. Such processing typically occurs when you communicate with us or our business partners relating to our services, install and use our services, fill out a form or survey, register to use our services, submit information through our web solutions, enter a contest or sweepstakes, register your email address with us, or send us email.
Since we need the data to pursue the above legitimate activities, we have a right to process relevant personal data. This right typically takes place in the form of “contract performance”, “legitimate interest”, or “consent”.
Service data and security data
We need to automatically collect and process relevant data for our services to work, to enhance them, and to provide them to you. The data is processed to:
provide F‑Secure services to secure our customers’ networks and devices as well as the confidentiality and availability of the data therein;
enable F‑Secure to detect emerging threats and security-relevant trends among all of its customers, so that our services can keep on par with evolving threats;
enable F‑Secure to provide a centralized security service framework across multiple continents to a large number of customers and service provider partners.
The data processing by the services is mandatory for the efficient protection of the device/network and a prerequisite for F‑Secure’s capability to provide its contracted services. As such processing is inseparable from the services that we provide to you, this gives us a valid need to process your data and a justification to do so.
For consumer products, this right takes place in the form of “contract performance”. In some cases, processing may take place in the form of “legitimate interest” and we may also have a “legal obligation” to process data for specified purposes.
Analytics data
We also reuse the above service data and security data for data analytics purposes. Data analytics are an integral part of our service delivery, as nearly all F‑Secure services are dependent on our infrastructure to properly operate. Our data analytics enables us to direct that infrastructure to support your use of the services.
Where our services collect data that is only needed for the purpose of gaining more insight on how people use the services, but is not necessary for providing our services, we do so only with your separate consent. You also have the right to withdraw your consent later, should you wish to do so. The legal grounds for data that is solely collected for analytics purposes is thus “consent”.
Secondary uses
In addition to the above primary legal grounds for data collection, we may also need to use and/or continue to store data i) to meet a “legal obligation” to process data for specified purposes, or ii) under the grounds of “legitimate interest”. For an example list of situations where we may resort to such justifications, see the “Other disclosures” section.
General
We consider you a client of F‑Secure, not a client of the individual service. Hence, data collected by different services (e.g. Total) and interactions (e.g. contacting support) are combined to your F‑Secure account. However, we do not aggregate data against our specific privacy principles (for example, we maintain a hands-off approach to your traffic inside our VPN service).
Transfers and disclosures
We do much ourselves, but also have partners to help us provide our services. This also means that we need to exchange data with our partners. When doing so, we take great care in sharing only the necessary personal data.
The most impactful data exchanges with our sales partners are set out primarily in the service-specific privacy policy. The below details expand on this information and also list other data disclosures and data transfers that take place for all — or nearly all — F‑Secure personal data processing activities.
Sales and delivery
We exchange (both disclose and receive) some of your personal data with our distribution partners (service providers, webstores, etc.), who market, distribute, administer, and support our services. We provide these companies access to such personal data that they may need for their agreed activities. The logic of this data sharing is to provide a seamless customer experience. This includes activities such as customer management, service support, incident management and problem resolution, direct marketing, and invoicing.
Our distribution partners are likely to have a pre-existing customer relationship with you. Such partners and corporate customers process your personal data as an independent entity, based on their applicable privacy policies. Regardless, our distribution partners must also comply with the agreements and legislation when handling your personal data. Each such entity is by default independently responsible for its own treatment of personal data, for its own purposes.
Subcontracting
We may transfer or disclose some of your personal data to F‑Secure group companies and our subcontractors who help us create the services.
Where our clients’ personal data needs to be transferred or disclosed to our subcontractors, we require, in our contracts with them, that they use such information solely for providing their agreed services (for example, to solve a support case, to send it to logistics partners for product delivery, or to send marketing mails on our behalf). We require our subcontractors to process data pertaining to you in a manner that is consistent with our statements herein.
International transfers
F‑Secure operates globally. Consequently, some of our affiliates, subcontractors, distributors, and service provider partners are located in multiple countries, including outside the European Economic Area to ensure the global reach and availability of our services. Depending on the scope of your interactions with F‑Secure, your personal information may be stored in or accessed from multiple countries. The locations of F‑Secure affiliates can be viewed from F‑Secure’s public web pages.
When we transfer personal data to other jurisdictions, including outside the European Economic Area, we secure such transfers of personal data according to the requirements of the law. We do this by imposing appropriate technical and contractual safeguards on relevant subcontractors and F‑Secure group companies, for example by using data transfer clauses that are approved by the European Union — the fixed content of such clauses is available here.
Additionally, F‑Secure complies with the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-U.S. DPF) as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce. F‑Secure has certified to the U.S. Department of Commerce that it adheres to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework Principles (EU-U.S. DPF Principles) with regard to the processing of personal data received from the European Union in reliance on the EU-U.S. DPF. If there is any conflict between the terms in this privacy policy and the EU-U.S. DPF Principles, the Principles shall govern. To learn more about the Data Privacy Framework (DPF) program, and to view our certification, please visit the Data Privacy Framework website.
In compliance with the EU-U.S. DPF, F‑Secure commits to refer unresolved complaints concerning our handling of personal data received in reliance on the EU-U.S. DPF to JAMS, an alternative dispute resolution provider based in the United States. If you do not receive timely acknowledgment of your DPF Principles-related complaint from us, or if we have not addressed your DPF Principles-related complaint to your satisfaction, please visit jamsadr.com/submit for more information or to file a complaint. The services of JAMS are provided at no cost to you. If you have a complaint that we have violated the DPF Principles that has not been resolved by other means, you may have the ability to invoke binding arbitration following the procedure explained on the DPF website. F‑Secure is subject to the investigatory and enforcement powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
We only do global or cross-border data transfers for a good reason and after assessing the resulting privacy risk. When we transfer your personal data onward to a third party, we remain liable under the DPF Principles if the data is processed in a manner inconsistent with the DPF Principles.
We store more sensitive customer data within Finland or the European Economic Area and keep it under our own control.
Other uses and disclosures
There are circumstances not covered by this privacy policy where the use or disclosure of personal data may be justified or permitted, or where we may be obligated by applicable laws to disclose information without acquiring your consent or independent of service provisioning.
For example, F‑Secure respects lawful warrants, court orders of the jurisdictions applicable to us, and public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.
Similarly, there may be other circumstances where there is a justifiable legitimate interest to disclose limited sets of information to a third party. Examples of such disclosures include cases where we need to protect ourselves against liability or to prevent fraudulent activity, where we analyze your use of our products to ensure that our products are working the way you would expect them to and that we are able to react to adverse experiences, where it is necessary to solve or contain an ongoing problem, or where we need to meet the legitimate information requirements of our insurers or governmental regulatory agencies. In any such action, we will act according to the applicable laws.
We may also need to transfer your personal data as part of a corporate transaction, such as a sale, merger, spin-off, or other corporate reorganization of F‑Secure, where the information is provided to the new controlling entity in the regular course of business. F‑Secure group discloses and transfers data internally as required by our then current operational model. We do, however, limit the disclosures internally to only those group companies, units, teams, and individuals who have a need to know such information for the intended purposes of processing it.
We weigh each disclosure requirement carefully and take the possibility of such disclosure requests into account when deciding where and how we store your personal data.
Sources
While we collect the majority of the above-mentioned data directly from you or your device, we also receive data from our affiliates, distribution partners (such as operators and retailers), and corporate entities from whom you have purchased the services. Such entities may be our resellers, but also include our external webstore partners. We also acquire some basic personal data (order data on purchases) and aggregate analytical data from app stores in which our services are sold. Such other sources may further include subcontractors who have provided you with support for our services, or advertising partners who have assisted us in conducting our marketing activities.
We do this to create a seamless customer experience and to have the necessary information for solving support cases.
Typical examples of third-party sources are:
information on your purchase made in our external webstore,
we acquire your credentials from previous sign-in data from our operator reseller partner, so that we can provide our service to you directly,
we acquire your contact data from corporate decision-maker registries for marketing purposes, and
when you use your social media account to register to our services, we collect the email address from your account to enable us to authenticate your registration and to contact you.
Third parties
Our services are provided in conjunction with our partners and our services and websites may embed or interoperate with third-party services. This privacy document only applies to personal data as long as that data is within F‑Secure’s realm of influence. Where your personal data is processed by other entities for their independent purposes, such other party is responsible for processing your personal data in a justified manner in accordance to their policies as well as for fulfilling your rights under data protection laws.
The most prevalent such scenarios are the following:
Webstore: Our webstore is partially run by a third-party reseller. While the data you enter in the registration phase is handled under F‑Secure policies, our webstore providers’ policies apply to the actual purchase and related activities.
Device location queries: When you query the location of your device via our services, the map provider needs to process the related geographical data. On publication of this notice, F‑Secure uses Google maps in our device location and search features. Google privacy policies shall apply accordingly to your use of these features.
Retention
This text complements the service-specific retention times. The default rule under the law is that personal data should be deleted or anonymized once it is no longer needed for its purpose.
However, some personal data needs to be nonetheless stored for longer periods of varying lengths due to varying reasons.
Typical reasons why we deviate from the primary retention times include the following examples:
grace periods and backups (e.g. keeping your personal data stored for a designated time after the end of your subscription, so that we can safeguard the data against erroneous deletion);
applicable laws require us to store the data (e.g. to keep track of the purchase and payment of our services);
to pursue available remedies or to limit any damages that we may sustain (e.g. due to an ongoing dispute or investigation);
to solve or contain a recurring problem or to have enough information to respond to future issues (e.g. your support ticket related to a problem that was not permanently corrected during your customership);
to prevent fraudulent activity (e.g. to enforce a ban on our community);
your personal data is incorporated to other data for a secondary purpose (e.g. retaining logs);
other similar circumstances, where there continues to be a legitimate need for the ongoing storage of personal data.
The final removal of your account may be delayed to avoid disturbing the other interactions you have with us. This is the case when you have an F‑Secure account (e.g. you have subscribed to our consumer services with your email address) and also i) have an F‑Secure Community account or ii) you continue to subscribe to our marketing messages. The F‑Secure Community account deletion policy is set out in its terms of service. You can opt out from our marketing messages at any time.
If you have purchased our service via one of our service provider partners (such as an operator, insurance vendor, or bank), account deletion is controlled by said operator partner. Upon the partner notifying us that your subscription has been terminated, F‑Secure subsequently removes the account. This removal leads to the deletion or anonymization of any personal data related to the account.
If we have received your information when providing you with technical support, the information is stored as long as the respective support case remains unsolved. Once solved, the information is gradually deleted or anonymized within two years from closing the case.
Analytics data collected with the user’s consent is retained for statistical purposes and is not deleted on removal of personal data and the user account. After termination of the account, analytics data cannot be linked to any personally identifiable user.
Data that does not contain personal data (e.g. aggregate analytical data) is retained as long as such data continues to be useful for the purpose it was collected.
Security
We apply strict security measures to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your personal data when transferring, storing, or processing it.
We use physical, administrative, and technical security measures to reduce the risk of loss, misuse, or unauthorized access, disclosure, or modification of your personal data.
All personal data is stored on secure servers operated by F‑Secure or our partners with access limited to authorized personnel only.
Your rights
You have the right to the data that we have on you. In particular, you have the following rights to the personal data that we hold on you:
Access and rectification: You have the right to ask us what personal data we have on you and to get a copy of the data that we can identify pertaining to you in this context. Should you find any errors (e.g. obsolete information) in such data, we urge you to contact our customer care to resolve the issue. Some of our service portals allow you to update your customer information. For such, you should update any changes to your personal data, for example change of address or email address. If you cannot update the changes yourself, you may inform us of the necessary changes.
Objection: You are entitled to object to certain processing of personal data, including for example the processing of your personal data for marketing purposes or when we otherwise base our processing of your data on a legitimate interest. In the latter case, you need to establish a legally valid rationale for your objection.
Right to be forgotten: You also have the right to request us to cease storing your personal data and erase it. In this case you need to establish a legally valid rationale for your request.
Portability: You also have the right to ask for personal data that you yourself have provided — pursuant to a contract or your consent. You may request the data in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format and further that the data is transmitted to another controller, where technically feasible.
Withdrawing consent: In cases where the processing is based on your consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time via relevant settings. For identifiable service analytics data, you can find the settings in the service user interface. You also have the right to opt out from our marketing communications via the preference center accessible through the link.
Restriction: If you establish that the data we have on you is incorrect or we have no legal right to use it, you may request that we cease any further processing of your personal data, and merely keep it in store until the issue is resolved.
You can exercise your rights via our customer care function. The links to contact us are in the “Contact information” section.
Note that there may be situations where our confidentiality obligations, our right of professional secrecy, and/or our obligations to provide our services (e.g. to your employer) may prohibit us from disclosing or deleting your personal data or otherwise prevent you from exercising your rights. Your above rights are also dependent on the legal grounds based on which we process your personal data.
If you have any complaints about how we process your personal data, or would like further information, please contact us at any time. If you feel that we are not enabling your statutory rights, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In most cases, this authority is the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuoja.fi).
Additional terms for Californian residents
We protect your rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act and Californian Privacy Rights Act (CCPA and CPRA).
You can read about the categories and sources of personal information as well as the purposes for collecting personal information in the What we collect and why and Legal grounds sections of this privacy notice respectively. Your rights to your personal information are explained in the Your rights section of this privacy notice. We will not discriminate against you for having exercised your rights. We will not sell your personal information, and we have not sold any personal information in the past 12 months.
Analytics
This section outlines our general practices for the collection and processing of data for analytics purposes.
When speaking about F‑Secure data analytics, it comprises both reused service data, reused security data, and the data that is collected for analytics purposes to begin with.
We want to give you a more personal customer experience and provide you with even better services in the future. For that we need to track usage patterns and create customer segments. For example, what features are used most, where the service fails, what needs fixing, and how you found out about our services.
What we collect: The data that we process for the purposes of data analytics include things like device identifier and relations between devices / users / user groups, operation environment, service operation time, license type (trial or paid version), device metrics (such as phone model and operating system, language), partial IP address, service errors, problematic files and URLs, service performance data, how you interact with our services (such as which features are used and how often), the domain name from which you connect to the service, elements clicked, timestamps, regional location, effectiveness of our in-service messaging, service activation (such as tracking that you have received the related messages and that installation was successful), installation and activation paths, service performance, connections, data routing, quota, and other similar data.
On a practical level, when we ask for your consent in our services’ user interface, it controls whether the following data is sent: i) additional data, like which features are used and how often, and service metrics, and ii) the number of attributes sent in a given data set.
The above relates to your use of our cyber security services. Data analytics running on our websites are described in our website privacy policy.
Opting out: We really appreciate your help in improving our services. However, if you want to minimize all data traffic towards F‑Secure, we respect that. Those of our services that employ additional analytics give you the choice on whether to contribute. You can opt out at any time from the subsequent collection of analytical data that is non-essential to our service provisioning.
If you have not opted in to additional analytics data collection, our messaging directed to you will be based only on the service data collection (the data that we collect in any case to provide you with the services) and some of our messaging is likely to be less relevant.
If you oppose all collection of data from your online life (including our websites), the more wholesale method for preventing online advertisers from profiling your mobile device usage is to reset the advertising identifier from time to time and to turn on the do-not-track setting in your device settings, or to use our privacy product.
Analytics data retention: In our data analytics activities, we combine analytics data with the service data. The resulting combined data set then continues to be processed based on a “legitimate interest”. The previously collected analytical data is retained as part of the service statistics, as its retroactive removal would break the statistics. When you cease subscribing to our services (i.e. your account is deleted), the analytical data related to your service use will be reverted to anonymous data, and we are no longer able to associate it with you.
Data exchange: Because of the technical environment (that is, the internet, the app store ecosystem, and social media), we are not able to do all of the collection and activities related to data analytics ourselves. We have to exchange some data (such as “Android marketing identifier” and other like identifiers) with our online analytics and marketing partners to enable our digital analytics and marketing activities. The vast majority of the data that we have on you is not shared with others.
Some of our subcontractors who provide us with analytical capabilities for our products may also create and publish aggregate reports on the data that they have collected. In such cases, the statistics and aggregate reports do not contain any data that could be linked to any individual person.
We do not sacrifice your privacy: Where we differ from most companies doing this is in that we understand how the ecosystem works and go through great pains to select our few partners with care, removing all data that is not absolutely necessary for the above purpose. You can naturally opt out from the collection of analytics data at any time via the service settings.
When we process the data for analytical or statistical purposes, we pseudonymize the data. In other words, our data analysts do not know the individual to which a specific data set refers to. The pseudonymization is only reversed in specified use cases. For example, when we communicate with you, we connect the results — not the full data — of our data analytics to your email address. Another example is that we may use the data to resolve issues you may have with our product, when providing you with technical support services.
We also limit such added analytics only to the surface of our services and keep them at arm’s length from the core privacy areas of our services. For example, we do not have any external analytics in our Security Cloud or in the traffic inside our VPN service.
Changes
This version of the policy clarifies, updates, and replaces the previous version. To continue keeping this document up to date, we will make changes and additions to this from time to time also in the future.
We will publish the changed policy document on our website or at another interaction point where it has previously been made available. If the changes are significant, we may also notify you by other means. Any changes will apply starting from the date that we publish the revised policy document.
Contact information
If you have any questions or concerns about the matters discussed in our privacy policies, please contact:
F‑Secure Corporation
Tammasaarenkatu 7
PL 24
00180 Helsinki
Finland
How to contact us:
Please contact us via the support channels available on our website.
In privacy matters, you can also contact F‑Secure by sending a message to privacy@f-secure.com. Note that this email address is not monitored for data subject requests. If you wish to exercise your rights as a data subject, please use the above support channels instead.