Finding a secure and reliable online tool can be a bit of a minefield. How do you know who to trust and which site is safe to use? How can you be confident your data will be protected, and not sold to other companies for marketing? And how can you be sure that you won’t be downloading a virus to your computer with your converted file?
These are all valid questions to ask, and it pays to be cautious when using online tools. In this article, we explain why you can be confident that Zamzar is safe to use, and that your data and files will be kept secure when you use our service.
How Zamzar keeps your files and personal data safe
We take the security of your data very seriously, so we employ a number of measures to ensure your files and personal information are kept safe. These include:
- Physical security 🏢
- Technical measures 💻
- Compliance with data protection regulations🧑⚖️
- Secure payment processing 💳
- Transparent privacy policies 📄
- No external ads 🚫
- Giving you more control 🧑💻
Let’s take a look at each of these measures in a bit more detail:
Physical security:
All of our hardware infrastructure is hosted in world-class, highly secure data centres. These sites strictly control physical access, using measures such as professional security staff, video surveillance, multi-factor access-control systems, intrusion-detection systems, and other electronic means. This prevents any unauthorised person from accessing our hardware setup.
Technical measures:
There are lots of different technical measures we take to ensure your files and data are kept safe. For example, we secure all the traffic to and from our servers with Transport Layer Security (TLS) sent over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), and secured using an AES 256-bit SSL certificate. Basically, this means that data sent between your system and ours is encrypted using military-grade encryption to protect it from prying eyes. Zamzar account passwords are also encrypted, using the Bcrypt password-hashing function.
As Zamzar employees need access to production systems for operational tasks, we use various authentication mechanisms to make sure that only authorised personnel can access the systems. Multi-factor authentication devices and whitelisting of specifically-allowed IP address are two of the methods we use for this.
We don’t see security as a ‘one-and-done’ issue, and even with these measures in place we continue to take a proactive approach to maintaining high security standards. We do this in a number of different ways, such as by ensuring software patches are regularly applied (to maintain a strong security posture to known software vulnerabilities), and by employing an external company to run security scans of our infrastructure each month.
Compliance with data protection regulations:
To ensure your personal information is kept safe, Zamzar complies fully with the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). These are data privacy and security laws that control how organisations can use and manage your personal information, and they help give you more control over your data. You can read more about the steps we took to be GDPR-compliant, on our blog. We are also registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the Register of Data Controllers (registration number Z1127652). The UK ICO ensures organisations comply with the legal requirements for handling personal data.
Secure payment processing:
We use PayPal and Stripe as our secure payment-processing platforms. This allows us to process your payment details securely when you make payments for a subscription with us. Both Stripe and PayPal are PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, which means they have to meet the highest security standards, in order to protect sensitive payment data. They both also employ powerful fraud detection and prevention tools. Because of this, you can be confident that your payment details are safe when you sign up for a subscription with Zamzar.
Transparent privacy policies:
We want you to be clear about what personal information we collect when you use our service, as well as how that data is processed and managed, so we have a detailed Privacy Policy providing all the information you might need. This includes information on how we handle your data, data retention and deletion policies, and your rights regarding your data, and explains the steps we take to keep your personal information secure.
No external ads:
To keep you safe and improve your experience using Zamzar, we don’t run any external ads on our site, even for people using our free service. We know that these ads – which are common on sites offering a free service – can be misleading and intrusive, and it can be easy to accidentally click on an ad when downloading your converted file. We don’t want you to download any questionable software by clicking on an ad by mistake, so we took the decision to remove ads completely from our site.
Giving you more control:
Another way we protect your data is by allowing you to have more control over data deletion. For example, if you have a Zamzar account you can delete any converted files that we are storing for you from your My Files section on our site. This will permanently delete the files from our servers. For files converted through our free service, the original file is automatically deleted as soon as it’s converted, and the converted file is deleted 24 hours later so that files are held no longer than necessary.
Here are some other reasons you can be confident Zamzar is safe to use
1. We’ve been converting files for users since 2006, with millions of happy customers. We’ve got a 4.4-star rating on Trustpilot, and a 4-star rating on Sitejabber. Just take a look at what some of our customers have to say about our service:
2. Zamzar is trusted by employees of some of the world’s best-known brands and most prestigious organisations, such as the BBC, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix and Harvard University.
3. Well-established and respected tech publications regularly review and recommend Zamzar’s service to their readers. For example, Lifewire lists Zamzar as the number one free document converter, and also recommends Zamzar for converting EPUB files to PDF. Meanwhile, TechRadar reviewed Zamzar, and rated us 4.5 stars overall, and 5 stars for user experience. They also listed Zamzar as the best free PDF to AutoCAD converter.
So, is Zamzar safe?
Yes! With all the measures we take to protect your files and personal data, along with our years of experience in looking after millions of happy customers, you can be confident Zamzar’s service is safe to use.
In the words of TechRadar, a technology news and reviews website for consumers, “You’ll find Zamzar to be a superhero, and certainly not a supervillain!” 🦸
