Our Take On Your Privacy

When I first started August in 2012, it was prompted by a very personal experience I had where I was traveling and had a friend staying at my house. She had lost the key and was locked out, with no way to get back in. From that day, I was committed to helping people avoid situations like those. I knew there had to be a better way for people to give others access to their homes, without having to worry about keys being lost or stolen.

While that concept is a simple one, there are a lot of complexities that surround it. Your home is a private place — one where you should feel safe, secure and in control. And while you want to be able to grant access to those you trust, you also want to make sure that the products enabling it aren't going to take and distribute your personal information in a way you don’t approve.

As a company that creates products that manage access to your homes, August understands the importance of this and takes privacy seriously. Security is at the core of who we are as a company and how our smart locks and doorbell cameras were created. We understand that you are placing your trust in us and do not take that for granted. We are committed to protecting our customers’ data in all the most secure ways possible.

To put your mind at ease, here’s some of the ways in which we’ve always safeguarded your data since day one —

• We require a two-factor authentication process and owners must authenticate their identity with a validated email address, phone number, and password.

• Data/videos are always encrypted in transport and we use TLS in our mobile applications. Information about videos is restricted to the accounts that own the doorbell cameras.

• An August Doorbell Cam uses Amazon S3 to store videos, and those videos are automatically deleted 30 days after they’ve been uploaded by the doorbell through our August Video Recording subscription.

• We always ask for permission before accessing our customers’ video content. Access to this data is limited to an extremely restricted set of employees who require it to provide support.

• We do not share or sell any data to third parties — ever. Our business is 100% focused on providing the best access control services - with no other motives.  

• Complying with law enforcement or judicial authorities — Our customer’s data belongs to our customers and will only be shared with legal authorities when we are forced by court order or warrant.

This year, we’re taking it one step further and will be GDPR compliant by April 2019. This means that there will be an option in our software where you will be able to automatically request that your data be deleted or downloaded. Today, that’s done on an on-demand basis.

On behalf of August, I thank you for trusting us with your home. We will continue to do everything in our power to deserve it.

Jason Johnson

CEO and Co-founder, August