Updated July 12, 2022
Who Are We?
Full name of legal entity: PLAYFUL PLOTS
Email address: SARAHJONES@PLAYFULPLOTS.COM
Welcome to https://playfulplots.com (the ”Site”). We understand that privacy online is important to users of our Site, especially when conducting business. This statement governs our privacy policies with respect to those users of the Site (”Visitors”) who visit without transacting business and Visitors who transact business on the Site and make use of the various services offered by Playful Plots (collectively, ”Services”) (”Authorized Customers”).
Please read the Privacy Policy carefully. By using the Site, you accept and agree to the Privacy Policy.
The Site uses WordPress.com as its platform and is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc.
You can find their privacy policies here:
https://automattic.com/privacy/
Personally Identifiable Information
Personally Identifiable Information (“personally identifiable information”, “data”, or “information”) refers to any information that identifies or can be used to identify, contact, or locate the person to whom such information pertains. Personally Identifiable Information does not include information that is collected anonymously (that is, without identification of the individual user) or demographic information not connected to an identified individual.
We will only use your personal data for the purpose it was collected for or a reasonably compatible purpose if necessary.
In addition to our direct collection of information, our third-party service vendors may collect Personally Identifiable Information from our Visitors and Authorized Customers. Please note that if you use a third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled in accordance with the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services.
Information We Collect
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.
We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources.
Information You Provide to Us
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:
Payment and contact information: There are various ways in which you may provide us payment information and associated contact information. For example, if you purchase a service from us or make a donation on our site, we’ll collect information to process those payments such as your name, billing address, mailing address, email, contact information, and card details. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made.
Communications with us: You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, sign up for a newsletter, communicate with us via form, email, phone, comment, feedback, social media message and/or post, or otherwise.
Information We Collect Automatically
We also collect some information automatically:
Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, which may include, but is not limited to the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, page views, how often you visit our Site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services to analyze your use of our Site and our Services.
Transactional information: When you make a purchase, we collect information about the transaction, such as product details, purchase price, and the date and location of the transaction.
Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about what happens when you use our Services (ex. page views) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Cookies and other technologies like pixel tags are used to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.
Information We Collect from Other Sources
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:
Financial Account Info: If you use our PayPal payment button to purchase a Service, we’ll receive information relating to the purchase, such as your email address, mailing address and phone number.
The information we receive depends on which Services you use or authorize and what options are available.
Third-party services may also give us information, like mailing addresses. We use this information for marketing purposes like emails, postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.
How and Why We Use Information
How does the Site use Personally Identifiable Information?
We use Personally Identifiable Information to customize the Site, to communicate with you, to make appropriate service offerings, and to fulfill buying and selling requests on the Site. We may email Visitors and Authorized Customers about information related to the subject matter of the Site. We may also use Personally Identifiable Information to contact Visitors and Authorized Customers in response to specific inquiries, to provide requested information, and when in line with preferences you have shared with us, provide you with advertising related to our products and services. We also use Personally Identifiable Information to screen for potential risks (for example, your IP address) and fraud, and to improve and optimize our Site (for example, generating analytics).
Purposes for Using Information
We use information about you for the purposes listed below:
To provide our Services. For example, to provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services to provide the best content for our users.
To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns, and understanding and forecasting user retention.
To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Playful Plots and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant content, notifications and advertisements for our Services.
To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback or keep you up to date on Playful Plots; email or texting you to verify your payment; or contacting you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt-out of marketing communications at any time.
Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information
A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:
(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you.
(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or
(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or
(5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.
Sharing Information
How We Share Information
Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf.
Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us.
Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.
To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Playful Plots, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.
With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, the use of pictures and media for marketing purposes.
Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
Third-party service vendors
We use Akismet for spam protection. Their privacy policy can be found here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.
We use Mailchimp to manage our subscriber list and for our email marketing. Their privacy policy can be found here: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/.
We use Google Analytics to help us understand our customers and measure advertising ROI. Their privacy policy can be found here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/. You can also opt-out of Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
We use Google Drive and Google Forms to manage our integration data. Their privacy policy can be found here: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en.
We use PayPal to manage our estimates, invoices, and payments. Their privacy policy can be found here: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full
We use Jetpack for security, backups, site performance, and growth tools. Their privacy policy can be found here: https://jetpack.com/support/privacy/
Information Shared Publicly
Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.
That means information like your “Likes” and comments are all available to others.
Please keep this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.
How long is Personally Identifiable Information stored?
We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it and we’re not legally required to keep it.
What choices are available to Visitors regarding the collection, use, and distribution of the information?
Visitors and Authorized Customers may opt-out of receiving unsolicited information from or being contacted by us and/or our vendors and affiliated agencies by responding to emails as instructed, or by contacting us at sarahjones@playfulplots.com.
Cookies
Cookies are used for a variety of reasons. We use Cookies to obtain information about the preferences of our Visitors and the services they select. When you visit the Site, a cookie may be placed on your browser. Information gathered through cookies and server logs may include the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our site, and the websites visited just before and just after our own, as well as your IP address.
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address, and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
You can opt to refuse cookies, however, it could negatively impact user experience and you may not be able to use all of our services.
For more information about cookies, and how to disable cookies, visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org.
How does the Site keep Personally Identifiable Information secure?
While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect your Personally Identifiable Information. Playful Plots uses services like Jetpack and Akismet Anti-Spam for added security. Sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, are protected by encryption protocols, in place to protect information sent over the Internet.
Monitoring Suspicious Activity
WordPress.com continuously watches web traffic and monitors suspicious activity. We also have security measures in place to help protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Security Testing
WordPress.com regularly checks the security of its services and looks out for potential vulnerabilities, and operates a bug bounty program via HackerOne to reward people who find bugs and help improve the security of its services.
While we take commercially reasonable measures to maintain a secure site, electronic communications and databases are subject to errors, tampering, and break-ins, and we cannot guarantee or warrant that such events will not take place and we will not be liable to Visitors or Authorized Customers for any such occurrences.
Choices
You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:
Limit the information that you provide: For example, you can choose not to provide transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services — for example, purchases, may not be available.
Opt-out of marketing communications: You may opt-out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know
Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, Automattic does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Automattic’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Automattic’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
How can Visitors correct any inaccuracies in Personally Identifiable Information?
Visitors and Authorized Customers may contact us to update Personally Identifiable Information about them or to correct any inaccuracies by emailing us at sarahjones@playfulplots.com.
Can a Visitor delete or deactivate Personally Identifiable Information collected by the Site?
We provide Visitors and Authorized Customers with a mechanism to delete/deactivate Personally Identifiable Information from the Site’s database by contacting Playful Plots. However, because of backups and records of deletions, it may be impossible to delete a Visitor’s entry without retaining some residual information.
Minimum Age Requirements
Our Services are not directed to children. You’re not allowed to access or use our Services if you’re under the age of 13 (or 16 in Europe). If you register as a user or otherwise use our Services, you represent that you’re at least 13 (or 16 in Europe). You may use our Services only if you can legally form a binding contract with us. In other words, if you’re under 18 years of age (or the legal age of majority where you live), you can only use our Services under the supervision of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to the Agreement.
Links and Embeds
The Site may contain links to other sites or third parties. Please note that when you click on one of these links, you are moving to another site. Your data will be handled in accordance with the other site’s or third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these sites or third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services. We encourage you to read the privacy statements of these linked sites as their privacy policies may differ from ours.
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
What happens if the Privacy Policy Changes?
We encourage you to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by posting such changes on the Site. It is your responsibility to review our Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.
Questions
Email Playful Plots at sarahjones@playfulplots.com.