This is the privacy policy for the Muffy Young Handweaving website, http://MuffyYoung.com. Throughout this document, “I” refers to me, the owner (or sole proprietor) of Muffy Young Handweaving, and “we” refers to me, my two site administrators, and anyone else working on my behalf to support and maintain this site. “You” refers to anyone visiting or using this website.
Basic philosophy and intent:
We treat your personally identifying information (including your name, email address, IP address, information on devices you use to access the site, and credit card payment and address information) as confidential, and we protect it accordingly. We do not do anything with your information that I, Muffy Young, would not expect or agree to have done with my own information when visiting a website and making an online purchase.
In particular,
- We collect and access your personally identifying information only as required to operate the site, to support your browsing, shopping, and purchasing, and to follow through on completed purchases.
- If you opt into our mailing list we keep your email and/or postal address in order to communicate with you in the future.
- We never sell or rent your personally identifying information to anyone.
- We will not disclose your personally identifying information to anyone unless we are legally required to.
- We work with other services to operate, support, and monitor the website and store. Some of them collect personal data that they may share with us. We describe all this in more detail below.
Some data are under our direct control:
This website resides on a server that is hosted by Digital Ocean. We can access information on that server, as can support personnel working for Digital Ocean. The server keeps a log of every visit to the website, including, if you visit, the IP address of your device and its user agent (technical details about your device, operating system, and browser). This information is used for security and troubleshooting, and is discarded after four weeks.
The content you see on our website is created and maintained using WordPress software. WordPress stores all the data that produces our website—including any comments you add to our blog, “On the Loom”—in a database that is kept on our server at Digital Ocean. If you make a comment on the blog, the database stores:
- The contents of your comment and, if you include them, a display name and URL, which are all immediately made public; and
- The IP address of your device and, if you include it, an email address. These are never made public, but we can access them to contact commenters for clarification or to address other concerns. We may also use IP and email addresses to identify and block users who leave abusive or otherwise inappropriate comments.
- Blog comments usually remain public indefinitely, and if they are removed from the public site for some reason they are still stored in the WordPress database indefinitely to help us manage abusive users and to distinguish real users from spambots. If you would like your comments removed permanently from the site and from the database, please write to us through the contact page.
Payment processing in our web store is handled by Square, and no credit card numbers are ever stored in any database or server that we control or access directly. Square gives me (but not our other site administrators) access to limited data about user credit cards, as described below under Payment Processing.
Some data are collected and controlled by third parties:
Several third parties provide services that help us maintain and operate the website and store, and all of these collect some data. They are explained below, organized by the type of service they provide. Each third party is governed by its own privacy policy, and links to those policies are provided in the descriptions.
Mailing Lists. We use Mailchimp to maintain mailing lists for email notifications of new blog posts and for communications about new products, upcoming shows, and special online sales. When you enter address information on our contact page or during store check out, we ask whether or not you want us to keep your address on those lists. Please see Mailchimp’s privacy policy for more information.
If you purchase from our web store or create a customer account with or without making a purchase, we maintain your name and address in our customer database for up to two years. Our customer database is maintained for us by Woocommerce; their privacy policy can be found here. You may ask us to remove your customer information from our database by using the contact form.
Payment processing. If you make a purchase in our web store, your credit card payment will be processed by Square. Square gives me access to the name, billing address, credit card type (AmEx, Visa, etc.), and the last 4 digits of your credit card number. In addition, I will be informed if an attempted charge to a credit card is declined. All of the actual payment information is held by Square; for more information, see Square’s security and privacy policies.
Analytics. We use two services to track visits to our website. Google Analytics gathers site use statistics, in part by storing cookies on users’ computers (see more on cookies below). Google gives us reports about the use of our site and also stores this information for their own use. See Google’s privacy policy for details.
We also use WooCommerce Analytics for store use and sales statistics. For more information, see the WooCommerce privacy policy.
Cookies. Some or all of the above services make use of cookies, which consist of information which is sent by a web server to your web browser, and then stored by your browser on your device. Your browser sends some of this information back to the web server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This helps the server to tailor web pages to your needs and preferences, and often speeds up the browsing process.
Our site uses both session cookies and persistent cookies; session cookies keep track of you while you navigate the site and persistent cookies enable the site to recognize you when you revisit.
Session cookies are deleted from your computer when you close your browser (end your browsing session). Persistent cookies may remain stored on your computer until deleted, or until they reach a specified expiration date. You can delete any cookie whenever you choose; follow this link to find out more about how to delete cookies from your browser.