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Privacy Policy

Revised May 2022

Contact

The Fermented Lady
privacy@thefermentedlady.com

What we collect

There is no requirement to provide any personal information to access the website. You will need to sign up and provide personal information if you choose make purchases in the store or set up an account in order to contribute and comment. We only collect and store the information that is relevant to our relationship with you.  This can include but is not limited to:

  • Personal data including your name and contact information.
  • The products, services or information you have requested including which products and services you have purchased
  • The amount of money you have paid for a product and any credit that you hold in your account.
  • Any agreements or memberships you have engaged with e.g. website advertising or subscription. 
  • Any contact preferences you have provided on how you would like to be communicated with or any mailings you have subscribed to.
  • Any communications you have sent to us or received from us including the date and the subject.
  • Demographic information such as post code, preferences and interests that you have chosen to provide.

We may also gather analytical information when you visit our website.  We do this in ways which are secure and in line with industry standards.  We may measure visitor activity on our site but will do so in ways that keep the information anonymous. We may use the information that we collect to measure the performance of our site and to help us continually improve it and make it more useful to visitors. See Cookie Policy

What we do with the information we gather

We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with a better service, and in particular for the following reasons:

  • Internal record keeping.
  • Improving our services.
  • Contacting you about purchases you have made
  • Contacting you with information about our products and services.
  • We may contact you by the methods you indicated when setting up your account including e-mail, phone, or mail.
  • Monitor customer interests and performance of our activities for analytical and statistical purposes
  • Comply with our legal or regulatory obligations, including the prevention of crime.

Your Contributions

If you submit a question or post to the site we will normally share this publicly along with answers and comments. If you have private or personal questions for Laurence please email her directly.

Lawful basis of processing data

Under the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), we typically process our data under three of the six lawful processing bases.  These are:

  • Consent– If you have signed up to a particular marketing mailing or subscribed to a newsletter.  You can opt out at any point and will be given the option to unsubscribe on all communications.  Where you opt out, this will not affect the lawfulness of any communications sent before that time.
  • Contractual – To send you products you have requested and any related or subsequent materials relating to the product(s). To send billing and payment information or confirmations and correspondence. To provide the service or contract you have entered into with us.
  • Legitimate Interest– If we consider the information, service or product is relevant and beneficial to you or if we think you would be genuinely interested in the content of the correspondence due to it being linked with, or related to, our relationship with you.

Who we Share your Data with

We will not share your data with any third parties except when it is necessary for the delivery of our services or to fulfil our contract with you or where we have a legal obligation to do so. We may share data with:

  • Employees or contractors of the The Fermented Lady who need to access your data to perform the tasks required to fulfil our service to you, eg to send you the products you have purchased, provide information on purchases or to or to contact you about your contract with us.
  • Third parties in order to facilitate the delivery of our products. (for instance providing a courier with your name and address in order to deliver a product)
  • Third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you; this includes, but may not be limited to, analytics, marketing, payment gateways, shipping providers, and third party embeds. See the list of third-party providers in our Cookie Policy.

Where we have a legal obligation to do so, we will share your data with the appropriate authorities such as the police or law enforcement agencies if, for example, it was required in relation to a criminal offence or for the detection or prevention of fraud.

Where third-parties access or process your data on our behalf, we ensure that they respect the security and privacy of your data and treat it in accordance to the law.

Security

We have robust systems and procedures in place to ensure your data is kept secure during the course of collection, storage and processing. We store your data on UK servers using the secure a secure e-commerce platform woo-commerce.

Transferring data internationally

We do not transfer your personal data outside of the European Economic Area.

How long we keep your data

We store and retain personal data for various periods of time in line with our legal obligations, financial regulations and internal requirements.

  • We are required by UK law to retain financial records for 7 year.
  • We will typically keep your account data for as long as your account is open and for a period of 3 years after it is closed or we identify it as inactive. Your account information will then be deleted.

Your rights

You have the right to request the personal data we hold on you, this is commonly known as a Subject Access Request. 

You also have the right to ask us to correct or change the data we hold about you if you believe it to be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date. 

You can request your personal data to be removed or deleted from our records if you feel there is no good reason for us to continue to process it.  We will, however, sometimes need to keep your data to comply with legal or statutory requirements.  It is also important for us to retain data so that we can record and document the development of the company. In these circumstances, we will, wherever possible, anonymise the record so that your personal details are removed but the record remains on the system for our analytical recording.

You can request that your data be restricted from processing by us.  This means we will no longer be able to use your data for the purpose you originally supplied it to us but we may retain your details on our system.

You can also object to your personal data being processed if you feel it is being used unlawfully or otherwise impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms, eg if you object to the direct marketing emails being processed under Legitimate Interest referred to above.  Please be aware that in some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your personal data which override your fundamental rights and freedoms.

If you need to reuse the data we hold about you for a different service, you can request the transfer of your data to either yourself or a third party.  In such cases we will provide the data to you in a safe and secure format which is readable by a commonly used platform.

Requests to exercise your rights can be made verbally or in writing and we will endeavour to respond to legitimate requests within 30 days of receipt.  Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

We will aim to respond to all requests but if we consider a request to be unreasonable or excessive we can refuse to do so, or may consider charging a fee. If we need to do this, we will advise you.

If you have any concerns about the way we process your personal data please let us know by contacting our Data Protection Officer named above.  You also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you feel that your data has been processed in a way that is not compliant with the procedures set out above or in accordance with the GDPR and/or Data Protection Act 2018.  You can contact the ICO by visiting their website at ico.org.uk/concerns or by calling 0303 123 1113.

Notification of Changes

We may at any time revise the privacy statement without notice. Please check our website at www.thefermentedlady.com/privacy for an up to date versions of this notice.

Cookie Policy

This page explains how our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. We are not saving or sharing any personal data about you through cookies – that includes your credit card number or address.

We may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. We strive to protect your personal data and only use your personal data to process your chosen transaction. If you would like to learn more about how we protect your privacy please read our Privacy Policy.

How we use cookies

Our  website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed and stored on your browser or on the hard drive of your computer or mobile phone.  Some cookies are essential and are required to make our website work, others are non-essential and will only be used if you agree.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions

Different cookies are used for different purposes. The most commonly used cookies are as follows:

  • Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, use a shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
  • Functionality /preference cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region). 
  • Statistics/performance cookies. These allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. None of this information can be used to identify you, it is all aggregated and therefore anonymized. 
  • Marketing/Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited, the links you have followed, where you have come from and your online activity. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed to you more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.

You can learn more about the individual cookies we use and the purpose for which we use them below.

Granting us permission to use cookies

When you visit our website for the first time, or the first time in a while, we will only use essential cookies and display a banner asking you to accept our cookie policy and agree to cookies being used during this and future visits to our site.  If you select Yes, I agree, we will use all essential and non-essential cookies as displayed in the table below.  If you select No, I don’t agree, we will only use essential cookies as displayed in the table below, however, doing so will likely mean that our site may not work as intended. 

Turning Cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so, however, will likely limit the functionality of our and a large proportion of the world’s websites, as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites. It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.

What cookies does thefermentedlady.com use?

Site Cookies

The website is built on the WordPress platform. WordPress uses a number of cookies to ensure that the site performs according to your preferences and screen size. It also uses cookies to identify you when you login or comment. These cookies do not identify you personally and can be removed from your device by clearing your browser history. A full list of the cookies that WordPress uses can be found here. It should be noted that this website does not use all of these cookies. We do not use google analytics to track you.

https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/cookies/

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.

Plugins and third-party services

Third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you, for example; analytics, marketing, payment gateways, shipping providers, and third party embeds. This includes, but may not be limited to:

Site Performance

litespeed-cache

This site utilises caching in order to facilitate a faster response time and better user experience. Caching potentially stores a duplicate copy of every web page that is on display on this site. All cache files are temporary, and are never accessed by any third party, except as necessary to obtain technical support from the cache plugin vendor. Cache files expire on a schedule set by the site administrator, but may easily be purged by the admin before their natural expiration, if necessary.

Akismet

We collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).

MailPoet

We use MailPoet to deliver emails generated by the site, such as shop notifications, account registration, mailing list subscription etc. We may also use MailPoet to send newsletters or marketing messages. We do NOT use MailPoet’s Engagement and WooCommerce Tracking cookies

We DO use MailPoets Form Dismissal

  • `popup_form_dismissed` cookie is used to remember if a subscription form was dismissed. The cookie is set to expire after the number of days specified in the Show form every setting for each form. 

Woo Commerce

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

What we collect and 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 basket 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 7 years for tax and accounting purposes. Other account information is removed after 3 years, or sooner.

We will also store comments or reviews, if you choose to leave them.

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 fulfil 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; for example:

Payments

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.

Stripe offers services that enables us to run businesses, and to take online payment transactions using credit or debit cards. https://stripe.com/gb/privacy

While we take every care to ensure all cookies are listed in our cookie policy, please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be statistics/performance cookies or marketing/targeting cookies.