Improvements to Zendesk’s terms and policies

It’s the blog post that you’ve anxiously been awaiting—Zendesk’s updates to its Terms and Policies! We periodically update our terms to keep up with changing times, for example, updates to our product features or amendments to the law.

In an effort to provide continued transparency and the best customer experience, we’ve put together this summary of the noteworthy changes to our Terms and Policies.

If You are a new Subscriber, then our updated Master Subscription Agreement (MSA) will be effective as of November 1, 2018. If You are an existing Subscriber, we are providing You with prior notice of these changes which will be effective as of December 1, 2018. For our channel customers, such as those customers that purchased a subscription to our products through a reseller, we have made similar changes to our Reseller Subscription Services Agreement that will also be effective November 1, 2018 for new customers and December 1, 2018 for existing customers.

The major updates for our MSA include:

Use of Services – Sections 2.1 and 2.7

We have revised Section 2.1 to provide clarity on the circumstances under which Affiliates can use the Services.

We revised 2.7 to provide additional clarity regarding activities that require individual logins.

Service Data – Sections 3.3, 3.8, and 3.10

We have updated Section 3.3 to clarify that our customers own their Service Data.

In accordance with our Privacy Policy, we share Agent data with third party analytics providers to help us evaluate the use of our Services and improve them. We revised Section 3.8(iii) to explain this.

We also added Section 10 to further explain how we may use aggregated and/or anonymized data in the machine learning context.

Supplemental Terms – Section 3, Australia

Our country-specific terms for Australia now provide additional explanation as to how Zendesk complies with privacy obligations as least as strict as those under the Australian Privacy Principles and the Privacy Act.

Privacy Policy updates:

We updated our Privacy Policy to further address the standards we abide by to protect personal information in transmission, our access to and use of information collected, and use of mobile analytics software.

Additionally, to align with the General Data Protection Regulation and in an effort to provide greater transparency, we have expanded Section 8 to clearly reflect the legal bases on which we may transfer personal data outside of the European Economic Area with an adequate level of protection.

Other Zendesk policy updates:

Sub-processor and Subcontractor Policy

This policy now includes an additional Sub-processor, Sendgrid, and an update to the Service applicability for another Sub-processor, Smooch Technologies.

Regional Data Hosting Policy

We updated the Hosting options for Unstructured Service Data in the Zendesk Support Service and added additional information concerning data processing with respect to our Sub-processor, Cloudflare.

That is all!