Privacy Policy

American Peony Society Privacy Policy

Your Online Privacy is Important to Us

 

Who we are

The American Peony Society’s website address is: https://americanpeonysociety.org.

This privacy statement demonstrates a commitment by the American Peony Society to maintain the privacy of personal information provided by those visiting and interacting with our website.   By using our website, you consent to our privacy policy.

We will never release information about our website users to any other person or organization for marketing purposes.  Unless you tell us otherwise, when you provide your information online we assume you are agreeing to allow us to use and disclose it as allowed by law and our policies to deliver your request and in furtherance of our mission.

♦Offsite Links

Our website may include links to other websites whose privacy practices may differ from those of the American Peony Society. If you submit Personal Information to any of those sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy policies of any website you visit.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

♦Personal Information

Personal Information is information about you that is not otherwise available to the public and that you willingly provide to the American Peony Society.  In order to operate of our site, the American Peony Society collects two types of Personal Information while interacting with our website: (1) data you provide through voluntary contact and forms; (2) anonymous traffic and survey information. Paying customer information also may include but is not limited to, your name, email address, credit card or debit card number, your zip code, your address, and phone number. This may also include information such as your computer’s Internal Protocol (“IP”) address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Site that you visit, the time and date of your visit, and the time spent on those pages and other statistics.

We may use this information to:

  • Address requests and provide information to you
  • Confirmation of receipts
  • Respond to questions and inquiries
  • Improve our website and organization
♦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.

♦Cookies

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 have an account and you log in to this site, 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.

♦Embedded content from other websites

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.

♦Analytics

As is true of most websites, we automatically gather information about your computer such as your IP address, browser type, browser settings, navigation through our site(s), referring/exit pages, and operating system. This information does not include Personal Information. Information is collected on an anonymous basis. We may use analytical services to gather and analyze this information from browsing.

Who we share your data with

We will share your Personal Information with third parties only in the ways that are described in this privacy statement. We do not sell your Personal Information to third parties.

We may provide your Personal Information to companies that provide services to help us with our activities such as credit/debit card processing, sending your order or offering customer service. These companies are authorized to use your Personal Information only as necessary to provide these services.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

What we collect and store

We collect information about you during the checkout process on our store.

While you visit our site, we’ll track:

  • Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
  • Location, IP address and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping
  • Shipping address: we’ll ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and send you the order!

We’ll also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as, to:

  • Send you information about your account and order
  • Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
  • Process payments and prevent fraud
  • Set up your account for our store
  • Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
  • Improve our store offerings
  • Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for XXX years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.

Who on our team has access

Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example, both Administrators and Shop Managers can access:

  • Order information like what was purchased, when it was purchased and where it should be sent, and
  • Customer information like your name, email address, and billing and shipping information.

Our team members have access to this information to help fulfill orders, process refunds and support you.

What we share with others

We share information with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you.

♦E-Commerce Providers (third party financial processors)

To make a purchase from us, you may opt to use our third-party credit processing vendor to finalize and pay for your order. Third party privacy statement and security practices will also apply to your Personal Information. We encourage you to read that privacy statement before providing your information.

The American Peony Society uses established third-party vendors via SSL links to manage the processing of refunds and updates of credit card and debit card numbers and expiration dates. These companies do not use this information for any other purpose. We do not store credit card and debit card numbers on our servers or systems.

Your personal data supplied to the third-party vendors will only be used for the agreed upon purposes. We request that those third parties implement adequate levels of protection in order to safeguard your personal information.

♦Payments

We accept payments through PayPal. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to PayPal, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information.

Please see the PayPal Privacy Policy for more details.