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Does Clearview Social store my data?
Does Clearview Social store my data?

Learn how Clearview Social stores and manages your social media connections.

Lindsey Ziccardi avatar
Written by Lindsey Ziccardi
Updated over a week ago

Many Clearview Social users are concerned with privacy. It's fairly common for sites to be hacked and any stored logins and passwords leaked on the internet. Don't worry! Clearview Social doesn't store any of your social media passwords.

How are logins managed through Clearview Social?

Clearview Social uses a special code called a token to manage each user's connections. When you connect one of your social media accounts, (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) Clearview Social sends a request to that network asking for posting access on your behalf. If you're not already logged into that network in the same browser, you'll be asked to log in. This is the only time you will be prompted for your password.

For example, this form will appear when connecting a LinkedIn account or logging in with LinkedIn:

This page is hosted by LinkedIn so your username and password will go directly to LinkedIn's system rather than being passed through Clearview Social. LinkedIn will then send back a token that is used to confirm access to your LinkedIn account through Clearview Social. These tokens expire every 60 days, so you'll need to refresh your token through the Settings page every two months unless you're consistently using LinkedIn to log into Clearview Social.

For more information on connecting to your social media networks, refer to Setting Up Your Clearview Social Account.

What information is actually stored?

Clearview Social only stores information necessary for connecting your social media accounts and information related to the shares made through Clearview Social. We do not store any passwords or any information from your social media profiles or lists of contacts.

An example of what is stored for each connected social media account is:
Identifier: christie@clearviewsocial.com
Access Token: AKJISDFHUHADkdljfkljsdfoihJOIADHFOAHOFmsdlkf
Expires: May 15, 2017

The identifier is your account name for the connected social media account. For LinkedIn, this is your primary email address. For Twitter, it's your @ username. For Facebook, this is a numeric identifier that Facebook uses internally as your user id.

The access token is stored as a very long string of numbers and letters. It's usually much longer than the example provided and is unique to your account.

We also store an expiration date, so our system knows when you need to refresh your access tokens. LinkedIn and Facebook tokens expire every 60 days. Twitter tokens do not automatically expire but can be manually revoked from the Twitter Settings page.

You can find this information on the Settings page:

The only information from your social media profiles that is stored beside your user identifiers is your chosen profile picture, as shown in the bottom left corner of Clearview Social and on the Results and Leaderboard pages. You can choose which of your networks this picture is pulled from or upload your own.

In addition to connection information, we store data related to the shares made through Clearview Social. This information is exactly what you see when you share an article—the title, link, description, and any personal comment for each share. Additionally, we store a link to your share (as shown on the success window after clicking Share Immediately), the time/date the share happened, and any known information about who/when your share was clicked (as displayed in the Find Out Who section).

Update: (as of May 2020) In compliance with GDPR regulations, Clearview Social is now detecting if an inbound request to our link forwarder comes from a country within the EU, if so, the link is anonymize or disregarded (depending on your tier level) to comply with regulations. For more information about the Find Out Who feature, click here.

For a more detailed version of our data management and security policy, see Clearview Social's Security and Compliance Summary and Clearview Social User Agreement.

Further Questions?

If there is anything else we can assist you with, you can contact Clearview Social Support either by emailing support@clearviewsocial.com or through the Intercom chat button in the bottom right of the site.

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