Data privacy

At Shopify, the privacy of merchants and their customers is held to a high standard. When using Shopify Audiences, we help you to ensure that the data privacy of you and your customers is protected.

The following steps are taken to help ensure that you and your customers have control over contributed data, and that your data is kept safe:

The steps taken at Shopify to keep Shopify Audiences data safe

Steps	Details
Legal compliance	Shopify Audiences is currently available to Shopify Plus merchants in the US and Canada, and was built to enable merchants to comply with applicable privacy laws of the region where the service is available.
Pseudonymised data and hashed audiences	When you generate an audience, the customer information contained within the audience is hashed before it's sent to the marketing platform. The marketing platform compares their own hashed information to the hashed audience. When the hashed information of both parties is matched, the ad is able to be delivered to the intended audience.
Choice to participate	You are given the choice to contribute your customer data to the Shopify Audiences' network by adding the Shopify Audiences app and activating data contribution. You have the ability to deactivate data contribution and turn off data sharing at any time
Confidential participation	To protect confidential information of your business, no store can find out which other stores use Shopify Audiences. It's not possible for any merchant to create an audience from another merchant's entire customer base.
Contribution to the network	At any point in time, each merchant does not contribute more than 5% to the full Shopify Audiences’ customer pool. This ensures that no single audience can be reverse engineered to build your customer list.
Request for information	Your customers are eligible to know where and who their information is being shared with. If a customer asks for this information, they can be provided with this information.
Erasing of information	When you delete a customer’s personal information, such as when a customer requests to opt out, this information is also deleted from data contributed by your store to the audiences network.