Glossary

Analytics: Technologies gathering data for audience measurement purposes. Analytical trackers typically do not collect sensitive personal information and are not directly involved in serving targeted advertising.

Advertising: Technologies used to profile users and their interests in order to serve them with targeted advertising.

Analytics/Survey: Technologies enabling online research surveys and opinion polls. Typically they are not directly involved in serving targeted advertising.

Device exploiters: Device Exploiters are usually small software programs designed to gain covert access to your digital device where they can track and copy your personal data including login user IDs and passwords. They can then hold you ransom or purposely alter the behavior of the affected device and/or abuse its resources.

Social/Advertising: Often in the format of widgets, these technologies are enabling social networking interaction (most popular being sharing, liking, discovering) while also profiling users in order to serve them with targeted advertising.

Social/Analytics: Often in the format of widgets, these technologies are enabling social networking interaction (most popular being sharing, liking, discovering)

Dashboard

This is a personalized analytics interface that displays insights on your personal data saved in your Managers. It also reports on the types of data you’ve shared or left on websites, with an analysis of your behaviors, interests, and habits.

Master Key

Your Master Key is a sequence of characters that you create and that you, and only you, know. It encrypts the private encryption key used to decrypt all of your protected data throughout Privowny App. Learn more about how this is done

This is now the only password you need to remember! It is all that will be asked when you want to fill login forms automatically on all your favorite websites and apps.

As we do not store it in any way, and since you are its only guardian, make sure to keep your Master Key safe and not lose it or you wouldn’t be able to decrypt any of your encrypted data (including your passwords) and we wouldn’t be able to help. If you do forget it, you will be able to create a new one (from your My Account page) and start re-encrypting and re-decrypting your data with the new Master Key.

We will always ask you to enter your Master Key before retrieving sensitive data for you.

On your Android phone or iPhone, your Master Key can be linked to your fingerprint or Face ID for faster access.

Login credentials

Most websites require a pair of identifiers to login. One is usually public knowledge (often an email address) and the other is a secret password. These are your login credentials.

Login credentials = User ID + Password.

The Password Manager stores all your login credentials and keeps them safe (encrypted). It allows you to add account credentials manually, decrypt passwords as needed, search through them, etc.

To allow for an even more private and secure set of login credentials, Privowny allows you to generate an alias email address and use it as a User ID. Coupled to a strong password, this gives you a set of strong, safe, and private credentials.

Alias email address (or “alias”)

An alias email address (or “alias”) is a unique anonymized email address that is designed to protect your personal/professional one. It creates a buffer between the real you and spammers, hackers, identity thieves, etc. Any email sent to an alias will be forwarded to the email address linked to your account. You can manage what reaches your personal inbox in the Alias Manager.

Spam

Spams are irrelevant or unsolicited emails. They are generally sent in bulk for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

Tracker

We use the term tracker as a general term that includes commands, scripts or cookies, embedded in websites or mobile applications and used to track people’s online activities.

While cookies are the most commonly known form of online tracking, there are many other techniques used to track people’s behaviors when they navigate the internet. Some may be harmless (while sneaky) but others can be quite dangerous and extremely intrusive. In order to help you decide which ones you should block, we classified them in 6 categories depending on their jobs.

Personal data

We call personal data a piece of information about you that you wish to keep secret either because it could compromise your identity or just because you consider it private.

The European Union talks more specifically about Personally Identifiable Information (PII). It refers to any data that could potentially identify a specific individual. Any information that can be used to distinguish one person from another and can be used for de-anonymizing anonymous data can be considered PII.

Smartfield Icon

The Smartfield Icon provides you with quick and easy access to generate new credentials or retrieve saved ones directly on a registration or login page online. Although with slightly different looks, the Smartfield Icon can be found in both the Browser Extension and in our Android app. We have other ways to make this happen on Apple devices (with the Safari Extension and Privowny Autofill).