Privacy Policy

OwnFold (“OwnFold,” “we,” “us”) provides a business operating system for cooperatives and other shared-ownership organizations. This Privacy Policy explains how we handle information about visitors to our website, people who create or use OwnFold accounts, and the people whose information our customers store in the Service.

Our customers are organizations. When a cooperative uses OwnFold to manage its members, finances, governance, and operations, the cooperative decides what information to store and how it is used, and OwnFold processes that information on the cooperative’s behalf as its service provider (“Customer Data”). If you are a member, employee, or customer of a cooperative that uses OwnFold and have questions about your information, please contact that cooperative first; we will help them respond.

Information you provide

• Account information: your name, email address, organization name, cooperative type, and password (stored only as a salted hash).
• Customer Data: information your organization enters or imports, which can include member names and contact details, member classes and roles, capital account balances, buy-ins, and distributions; governance records such as proposals, votes, proxies, and minutes; documents and agreements; general ledger, invoice, expense, and bank transaction records; customer, vendor, project, timesheet, and inventory records; and identity-verification status recorded by administrators.
• Tax information: where a cooperative records members’ taxpayer identification numbers for patronage reporting (Form 1099-PATR), we store them encrypted and display only the last four digits.
• Communications: messages you send through our contact form, support tickets, and emails, including your name, email address, organization, and what you tell us.
• Public content: information a cooperative chooses to publish, such as a public capital profile or support campaign, and information supporters provide when contributing.

Information collected automatically

• Session cookie: a strictly necessary cookie that keeps you signed in (see Cookies below).
• Audit and security records: the Service records significant actions in your Workspace, such as votes, ledger postings, permission changes, and password resets, together with the user, time, and IP address. We also keep short-lived records of request counts by IP address and email to rate-limit sign-in, sign-up, and contact-form abuse.
• Server logs: our hosting provider records technical request data, such as IP address, browser user agent, requested URL, and timestamps, for operations and security.

Information from third parties

• Stripe tells us whether payments and subscriptions succeeded and the status of a cooperative’s Stripe Connect onboarding. We do not receive or store full card numbers or bank account numbers.
• Plaid provides the bank account and transaction data you authorize when you connect a bank account. We store the resulting access token encrypted.

We use information to:

• provide, maintain, and support the Service, including the features your organization turns on;
• process subscriptions, credit purchases, and payments, and prevent fraud;
• send transactional messages, such as invitations, verification and password-reset emails, billing notices, and replies to your requests;
• run AI Features when you or your Authorized Users request them;
• protect the security and integrity of the Service, including audit logging, rate limiting, and investigating abuse;
• understand how the Service is used so we can fix problems and improve it, and produce aggregated, de-identified statistics, such as the peer averages shown in benchmarks, that do not identify any organization or person; and
• comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not use Customer Data to advertise to anyone.

When you use the AI Advisor or AI document drafting, we send your prompt and the Customer Data relevant to it, such as your organization’s structure or the records your question is about, to Google’s Gemini API, which processes it to generate a response on our behalf. Responses are stored in your Workspace like other Customer Data. AI Features run only when someone in your Workspace uses them. If you prefer not to send particular information to our AI provider, don’t include it in prompts and don’t use AI Features for those records.

We share information only in these circumstances:

• Within your Workspace. Other Authorized Users in your organization can see information according to the roles and permissions your administrators set. For example, administrators can see member records, while other users see only the modules they have been granted.
• Service providers. We use the processors listed below to run the Service. They may use the information only to provide services to us and are bound by contractual confidentiality and security obligations.
• Features you choose to use. If you publish a public profile or campaign, list your cooperative in the Co-op Directory, send a trade inquiry, or request a consultation through the Advisor Marketplace, the relevant information is shared with the audience or recipient that feature describes.
• Support access. To resolve a problem you report, a limited number of authorized OwnFold staff may access your Workspace through a support session. Support sessions are recorded in your Workspace audit log.
• Legal reasons. We may disclose information if we believe in good faith it is required by law, subpoena, or court order, or necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of OwnFold, our customers, or others. Where permitted, we will notify the affected customer first.
• Business transfers. If OwnFold is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this policy.

Our service providers

Our service providers process data in the United States. We will update this list before adding a provider that processes Customer Data.

OwnFold uses a single first-party cookie, cf_session, to keep you signed in. It is strictly necessary for the Service to work, is marked HTTP-only and secure, and expires after at most 7 days or when you sign out. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party analytics cookies on our website or in the app.

Stripe and Plaid may set their own cookies when you use their checkout, onboarding, or bank connection screens; those are governed by their privacy policies.

• Account and Customer Data is kept for as long as your organization’s Workspace is active. After a subscription ends or a Workspace is closed, the organization may request an export for 30 days, after which we delete or de-identify Customer Data within 90 days.
• Backups are kept on a rolling basis by our database provider and are overwritten as they expire.
• Billing and tax records are kept for as long as required by law, generally up to seven years.
• Audit logs are kept for the life of the Workspace, because cooperatives rely on them as a governance record.
• Contact-form messages and support tickets are kept as long as needed to respond and for a reasonable period afterward for quality and legal purposes.
• Rate-limit records expire automatically, typically within an hour.

We use industry-standard safeguards appropriate to financial and membership records: encryption in transit with HTTPS and HSTS; salted password hashing; AES-256-GCM encryption for sensitive values such as bank access tokens and taxpayer identification numbers; role-based access controls inside each Workspace; per-organization data scoping; rate limiting on sensitive actions; and audit logging. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we learn of a breach affecting your information, we will notify affected customers and individuals as required by law.

Account users can review and update profile information in the app. Workspace administrators can correct or remove member and other records, and can request a full export or deletion of their organization’s data by contacting us.

Members and others whose data a cooperative stores should send access, correction, or deletion requests to that cooperative, which controls the data. If you contact us directly, we will forward your request to the cooperative where we can identify it.

US state privacy rights. Depending on where you live, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and other states with consumer privacy laws, you may have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to access, correct, or delete it, to receive a copy in a portable format, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information or of targeted advertising. We do not sell or share personal information for those purposes, so there is nothing to opt out of; we treat Global Privacy Control signals consistently with that. To exercise a right, email support@ownfold.com. We will verify your request using information associated with your account, respond within the time the law requires, and not discriminate against you for exercising your rights. You may use an authorized agent, and if we decline your request you may appeal by replying to our decision.

Email. Our emails are transactional and relate to your account or Workspace, such as invitations, security notices, and billing. We do not send marketing email without your consent.

The Service is intended for organizations and adults. It is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

OwnFold is operated from the United States and information is stored and processed in the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your country.

We may update this Privacy Policy as the Service changes. We will post the updated version here with a new “Last updated” date and, if the changes are material, notify Workspace administrators by email or in the Service before they take effect.

For privacy questions or requests, email support@ownfold.com or use our contact form and choose “Privacy or legal request.”