Endorse Blog

Good morning Endorsies-

We wanted to give you some information on the brief network outage that made the Endorse app inaccessible this morning.

Since launching the service in August, this was our first major network outage.  Our service provider, which hosts our servers that run Endorse, had a major systems failure.  The Endorse app and website were down for approximately 1 hour beginning at 6am PT and resuming functionality at 7am PT.

Endorse is back up and running as normal.  All submitted and pending receipts are saved, your cash back and points balances are unaffected, and all rewards are going through as usual.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

The Endorse Team

Hi Everyone-

We spend a lot of our time improving the Endorse service to make it easier to use.  Now we’re applying that same thinking to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Today we rolled out some updates to our policies with an eye toward more clarity and transparency, and to better reflect product improvements we’ve made to the Endorse app.  These updates to our policies are not related to any change in our data practices and are only intended to improve their clarity.

Before we get to what we’ve updated, we first want to emphasize something that has not changed:

We do not share your personally identifiable information with our brand partners.

Here is a brief overview of the key updates.

Privacy Policy

• We clarified that although we share aggregated data (such as Receipt Data) with our brand and other partners, we do not share information that personally identifies you. For example, a brand may see that a certain number of Endorse users purchased a certain product, but they do not see that “Jane Smith” purchased it.
• We added more detail about the information we collect from social networks- like Facebook. Like any other service that enables you to login using Facebook or Twitter, you control the information that you allow those services to provide to us.
• We also describe how you can earn additional rewards by sharing offers you endorse on social networking services, and that you choose whether you want to share a particular offer or not.
• We’ve made it clearer that we collect how much you spend on a particular product (not just all your products combined), based on the Receipt Data you provide.
• We explained some of the choices you have, such as not submitting personally identifiable data and opting out of marketing communications.

Terms of Service

• We updated that there are now two ways to receive your cash rewards, either through PayPal or through our banking partner.
• We also made it clear that if you use the Service in a fraudulent way (such as trying to redeem receipts for purchases made by another person), then you will not receive rewards for those receipts. The integrity of our Service is very important to us, so we also made it more explicit that fraudulent activities (like submitting falsified receipts) is a violation of our Terms of Service.
• In the unlikely event that we aren’t able to resolve any problems between us, we added a section requiring that any dispute between us and our users be handled by individual arbitration and not class actions (note that this is a mutual requirement that binds both our users and Endorse). We understand that this is a significant change, so we will permit existing Endorse users who do not agree with this change to opt-out of the arbitration agreement by notifying us via the methods described in our Terms of Service within 30 days after today, [February 6, 2013].

We recommend that you take time to read through the full Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, and we welcome your comments and questions.  Please note that by continuing to use Endorse, you agree to our new Terms of Service which will be effective on March 6, 2013.

The Endorse Team