About Stack Overflow

The Stack Overflow Network (also referred to herein as “Stack Overflow” or “Network”) is a set of related Internet sites and other applications for questions and answers, owned and operated by Stack Exchange, Inc. (“Stack Overflow”, “we” or “us”), a Delaware corporation.

Stack Overflow welcomes you to the Network, the largest community of developers in the world, and invites you to participate in the community by sharing knowledge with your peers and colleagues.

This Privacy Notice is applicable to you when you interact with us on the Stack Overflow Talent platform in connection with Talent or Jobs.

Here you will find details about the personal information we collect about you when you use the talent and Jobs Platform, how and why we collect it, how we use it, and how we keep it secure. This Privacy Notice also tells you about your rights, how you can exercise those rights, and how the law protects you.

Stack Overflow Inc is the controller responsible for your personal data.

About Stack Overflow Talent and Jobs

The Stack Overflow Talent platform allows for companies looking to hire and those seeking job opportunities to connect with each other and to engage in new employment opportunities.

To optimize the recruitment experience, and to connect job seekers with job opportunities, we collect certain personal information on you the account holder (or an unregistered job seeker), and on the company and its authorized recruiters.

What information we collect

Whether you are a recruiter seeking to hire on our Talent platform, or are an unregistered user or a registered account holder using our Jobs platform while seeking employment opportunities, we collect certain account registration information on you.

For job seekers on the Jobs platform, we collect your name, location, email and resume (where applicable) along with certain optional information including your phone number, job matching preferences (optional)

• Their profile & developer story (includes all their work history, etc)
• Site activity (i.e. monitoring which jobs they've interacted with on our site)
• A cover letter (where applicable).

For company authorized users using our Talent Platform to recruit developers, we collect certain account registration information on you including your name, email, IP address ( as part of the site activity logs) and affiliated company details.

For job seekers who chose to participate in our Jobs platform your public profile can be observed and collected by those looking to hire you. For example, you can use the jobs platform and set up a developer story, but it won't be visible to employers unless you explicitly set your job seeker status to 'actively looking' or 'passively looking for new opportunities'.

For company authorized users your profiles are visible to authorized users of the company account and your contact details are visible to job seekers via direct messaging on the Talent platform.

How is your personal data collected?

Generally, we collect personal information related to you when you interact with us on our Public Network.

We collect data in the following ways:

• Direct interactions: you may give us personal information by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by mail, phone, email, in person at events, as part of our contractual arrangement with you, by inputting that data into one of our customer facing platforms, or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you order or express an interest in our products or services; subscribe to our services or publications; request marketing to be sent to you; enter a competition, promotion or survey; or give us some feedback.
• Automated technologies or interactions: as you interact with our website, we may automatically collect technical data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, server logs and other similar technologies. We may also receive technical data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies.
• Telephone or product demonstration conversations which may be recorded by us to help us improve our training and quality
• Third parties or publicly available sources: we may receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources including: social media platforms, our own corporate prospect/customer databases or online research referrals.

How we use your personal data

The information we collect on you as a job seeker is also used by Stack Overflow to customize job recommendations. You may additionally opt-in to specific features that rely on personal information. For example, you may elect to provide personal information in your Developer Story which collects certain CV-like information and achievements including employment history which may be used for recruiting purposes.

We may use the above categories of personal information for the following purposes:

• To verify your identity and enable you to access your or your organization’s products and services when you contact us or access our services.
• To supply services to you and manage your subscriptions.
• To operate and improve our websites and services.
• For statistical analysis (e.g. on the use of our websites).
• To operate and improve our websites and services.
• To notify you of any changes to our websites or our services and products which may affect you.
• To provide you with technical and customer support.
• To ask your opinion or feedback on our services or surveys.
• To enforce our legal rights or comply with legal requirements.

Advertising Products

Stack Overflow partners with third parties to display advertisements on our public Network and within our Talent Platform. These partnerships provide third parties access to the developer community to promote themselves or services and to provide you with visibility into companies and third parties seeking to recruit you for employment opportunities, and for other purposes. In providing this opportunity, Stack Overflow and its third party partners may collect and use your personal information to tailor your advertising experience to suit your interests, skills, as well as to monitor your account activity in order to optimize our products and services.

We seek to limit what information advertisers and similar third parties have access to, as well as to ensure that your user experience on the public and private Stack Overflow network is not overwhelmed by advertising initiatives.

However, our advertising products and services require us to collect certain personal and non-personal information on you, which includes:

• Data from advertising technologies like cookies, web beacons, pixels, ad tags, and browser/device identifiers
• Information you have provided to us directly including profile information, your Developer Story, and in limited instances, your job history (if you have enabled opted in to display these to potential employers).
• Usage analytics including your visits to the Network, browsing and search history
• Information from our advertising partners (e.g., device type and location)

We do not display third-party banner ads on Talent and Jobs. We use cookies, pixels, and ad tags but only for the purposes of source attribution & tracking with our customers (the people posting the jobs that these trackers are placed on).

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. We will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.
• Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
• Where it is in our legitimate interests, including our commercial interests in operating the Public Network ad providing you with access to it.

Whenever we rely on legitimate interests for processing, we ensure that we consider and balance our interests against the individual’s interests before processing. We do not use your personal data on the basis of legitimate interest for activities where individuals’ interests override our interests.

Tracking

Stack Overflow emails use Javascript for email tracking of opens, clicks, and unsubscribes or may contain a small, invisible, one pixel image which can be used to let us know when the email is opened or forwarded. If the email recipient has images enabled on their device, when the email is opened, a message (an automatic request) is sent to Stack Overflow’s server requesting the image. That request is logged by Stack Overflow and tells us that the email has been opened. A similar process may be used in relation to links or attachments in the email, with a request being sent to Stack Overflow for the content that is accessible via the links or attachments, thus telling Stack Overflow that the link or attachment has been accessed.

How we share your personal data

We may share your personal data with companies within the Stack Overflow and other parties detailed below. We may also transfer your personal data outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), but only when specific safeguards have been put in place in order to protect your personal data.

We may share your personal data with one or all of the following:

• Any content you provide in the course of your use of the Stack Overflow Enterprise product is shared privately with authorized users of your Team, and may include private questions and answers, votes, source code, and other sensitive data.
• Internal Third Parties: Stack companies incorporated in the UK and Germany
• External Third Parties as follows:
  • Suppliers who we engage to provide services on our behalf, for example cloud services providers and marketing services companies. These companies are based in the EU and North America.
  • Professional advisors including lawyers, accountants and insurers where necessary to enable them to provide their services to us.
  • Authorities who require reporting of processing activities in certain circumstances.

We may also share your personal data with third parties to whom we may choose to sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets. Alternatively, we may seek to acquire other businesses or merge with them. If a change happens to our business, then the new owners may use your personal data in the same way as set out in this privacy notice.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with contractual obligations which ensure adequate protection for your personal data.

International transfers

We may share your personal data with entities within Stack Overflow and transfer it into marketing systems used by Stack Overflow. Given that we are an international organization with our headquarters in the U.S., this may involve transferring your personal data outside of the European Economic Area (EEA). Some of the third parties to whom we transfer your personal data are also based outside of the EEA, so their processing of your personal data will likewise involve a transfer outside the EEA. Where your personal data is transferred outside of the EEA we will use specific contracts approved by the European Commission giving your personal data the same protection as it has in the EU.

How we protect your personal data

We are committed to protecting your personal data. We put in place safeguards including appropriate technologies, policies, and contractual arrangements, so that the data we have about you is protected from unauthorized access and improper use, and we will not keep your personal data for longer than necessary.

The safeguards we have put in place to protect your personal data include:

• Technical and Organizational Measures

How long will we use your personal data?

We will keep your personal data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this privacy notice and to fulfill our legal obligations. We will not keep more data than we need. While you remain a user of the Public Network, we will retain your data in order to keep providing services to you.

We are required to keep some basic information about our customers for a longer period in accordance with applicable tax laws. In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data.

Your rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data, including the right of access, the right to rectification, the right to erasure, the right to restrict processing, the right to data portability, and the right to object.

Under EU data protection laws you have a number of rights in relation to your personal data. These rights are not absolute – in some cases they will not apply to you, or to the particular use that we are making of your data. There are exceptions, for example if we have to process the data to comply with our own legal obligations; if that is the case we will let you know.

Your rights include:

• Access to your personal information (by what is commonly known as a "data subject access request").
• Require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold.
• Require the deletion of personal information concerning you in certain situations.
• Receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and have the right to transmit that data to a third party in certain situations.
• Object at any time to processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing.
• Object to Stack Overflow’s decisions being taken by automated means (including profiling) which produce legal effects concerning you.
• Object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information.
• Otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.

For further information on each of these rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, See the guidance from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on individual rights under the General Data Protection Regulation.

You also have the right to take your concerns at any time to the Data Commissioner's Office (ICO, the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk).

Children

The Stack Overflow Enterprise platform is not intended for children. We do not knowingly offer this service to anyone under the age of 16.

CONTACT US

General Contact Information

Privacy Officer

• Privacy Officer, 14 Wall Street, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10005, privacy@stackoverflow.com, phone: 212-232-8280

Privacy Shield

• Privacy Trust, Communications House, 26 York Street, London, W1U 6PZ

EU Representative

• Privacy Officer, Bentima House, 168-172 Old Street, London EC1V 9BP, privacy@stackoverflow.com, phone: +44 (0) 20 3349 1000