Privacy Policy • Peppermint Stick Learning Company Inc.

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If you do not agree to this policy, please do not use our website.

This Privacy Policy tells everyone how Peppermint Stick Learning Company Inc. collects, uses, maintains, and discloses information that is collected from users of the https://www.peppermintsticklearningco.com website and all products and services offered by Peppermint Stick Learning Company Inc., including our Facebook page, Vimeo page, and our Pinterest boards (pinterest.ca/peppy_likes). This privacy policy was last updated January 11, 2022.

Who we are

This website address is: https://www.peppermintsticklearningco.com. Our website provides information, encouragement, and practical advice about teaching and homemaking; it sells products which are primarily educational in nature. Some of the products we produce ourselves and other products we preview and distribute from other suppliers. This website also provides personal stories, for example, in the blogging sections. Although some of the personal stories relate to health matters, these stories are anecdotal in nature and are never intended to be taken as official medical advice. We live in and operate from Canada as an incorporated business. The owners are Robert and Joy Delmore and they can be contacted through the business address/e-mail listed on this website (e.g. scroll down towards bottom of this page).

What data we collect and why we collect it

First of all, we want to put our policy in plain, ordinary language: Cookies exist on our website because that is how a website functions well. “Third-parties” technically include functional things such as Google Fonts and social media buttons but we aim to minimize cookies as much as possible while still designing a nice, working website. This year’s up-to-date compliant cookie notices are standardized as very wordy (especially under the tiny tab “Customize”). We would hope that wording can be simplified eventually to reflect what we do here in reality, however, the trend currently is for these notices to have a lot of extra jargon in it which doesn’t really apply to us as a business. Read below for details for how we explain our privacy and cookie policy:

We do collect appropriate information for the purpose of selling our products to our customers. This includes data such as your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and the items you want. We keep basic customer information in our administration files so that we can help you better if you have a future question, for example, we associate your name with the product titles you purchased in our records and we retain these records indefinitely. We ourselves have never stored credit card information for our customers. To be honest, we personally are not overly interested in tracking you or analyzing extra cookies for marketing purposes but rather prefer to follow the tracks of rabbit, deer, and chickadees in our backyard instead! We do not sell, share, or trade your information with others unless legally or otherwise required to do so or by nature of the services we offer and thus use the apps, etc. for providing those services (e.g. online shopping, a Facebook community) or if you have specifically requested that we do so in writing. Any information that gets shared through links and cookies with affiliate websites we link to, to our knowledge, is for the purpose of reasonable affiliate relations, such as to assign affiliate earnings from a particular link if someone clicks on that link on our website in order to purchase that recommended product or event from its original website.

However, as mentioned below, in order to provide you with a nice and functional website, there ARE the also typical “cookies” which will grab the typical information that you provide simply by using this/our website.

We are adding a newsletter subscriber feature to our website. Any information that you submit to us in order to subscribe or communicate with us, may be kept indefinitely for legal purposes or communication purposes so that we can communicate better with you in the future. You always have the option to ask us to delete your information and you will always have the option to unsubscribe. We will never sell, share, or trade our subscriber list – we want to treat you with the same courteousness and consideration you would expect from an honest, down-to-earth, family business.

In April 2021 and following, we will be adding affiliate links to promote some events, such as homeschool conferences. This means that there will be tracking cookies and anything else common to having an affiliate link for these sorts of events. Any affiliate link will be clearly marked as such and, if you click on that link and make a purchase for that event through that link, we earn a commission. This paragraph applies to both activities through our website, our social media pages, and any future newsletter which might have such an affiliate link(s) on it.

In July 2021 and following, we are also adding affiliate links to promote some products we recommend. This means that there will be tracking cookies and anything else common to having an affiliate link for these products. Any affiliate link will be clearly marked as such and, if you click on that link and make a purchase for that product through that link within a set time period (that “time period” is set according to the business we’re an affiliate of and each one may vary for how long those cookies remain), we earn a commission for telling you about it. This paragraph applies to both activities through our website, our social media pages, and any future newsletter which might have such an affiliate link(s) on it.

We cannot control the tracking or cookies if you choose to click on a link on our website to go to another website. We do use Faithlife Reftagger to give you pop-up Bible verses to references on our website for your convenience.

We do not control third-party tracking or cookies but that is how affiliate marketing works. You remain responsible for choices when interacting with websites that you choose to click on links to see. We aim to choose only to partner with businesses and organizations that we feel are trustworthy and genuinely care about their potential customers.

The work of website design is much more complicated than when we first began and a lot of the settings that are in today’s web programs are complex, standardized, and essentially unchangable by us. While we have some choices when we design this website, many options are pre-chosen or required by a program itself, our web host, or other components on the internet such as search engines. We might use a plug-in for one purpose that we like but it might also come with tracking-type settings, etc.. Your information could therefore be tracked and analysed by such types of computer programming, depending on settings on your device or within those systems of analytics. We’re sure you are aware by now that the world of the internet lacks a lot of the privacy that many of us still desire. We will do what we know how to do in order to maximize your right to privacy with your information in our business while keeping our website operating with high functionality.

WordPress also states the following:

“By default WordPress does not collect any personal data about visitors, and only collects the data shown on the User Profile screen from registered users. However some of the plugins may collect personal data.”

Our Social Share component is GDPR-compliant.

We use Pinterest Save widget at our website to allow you to pin images to Pinterest from our webpages. These requests may track your IP address in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy

We use a Twitter Tweet widget at our website. As a result, our website makes requests to Twitter’s servers for you to be able to tweet our webpages using your Twitter account. These requests make your IP address visible to Twitter, who may use it in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://twitter.com/en/privacy#update

We use a Facebook widget to allow you to be able to share/recommend/like our webpages. This widget may collect your IP address, your web browser User Agent, store and retrieve cookies on your browser, embed additional tracking, and monitor your interaction with the widget, including correlating your Facebook account with whatever action you take within the widget (such as “liking/sharing/recommending” our webpage), if you are logged in to Facebook. For more information about how this data may be used, please see Facebook’s data privacy policy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update. We do receive analytical data through the Page Insights section of our Facebook page, even though it is really not overly interesting to us.

We use an Instagram widget to allow you to be able to share/recommend our webpages. As a result, our website makes contact with your Instagram account to allow you to do that if you request such action. These requests make your IP address available to Instagram who may use it in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://help.instagram.com/155833707900388

One of the options available to any customer who purchases at our online store is to pay us for our products through PayPal. PayPal thus also has access to a portion of the information you provide on this website in order to process the sale. Paypal’s privacy policy and what they do with your information is stated here: https://www.paypal.com/ca/webapps/mpp/ua/privacy-full

We use the hCaptcha anti-bot service (hereinafter “hCaptcha”) on our website. This service is provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., a Delaware US Corporation (“IMI”). hCaptcha is used to check whether the data entered on our website (such as on a login page or contact form) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. To do this, hCaptcha analyzes the behavior of the website or mobile app visitor based on various characteristics. This analysis starts automatically as soon as the website or mobile app visitor enters a part of the website or app with hCaptcha enabled. For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI. hCaptcha analysis in the “invisible mode” may take place completely in the background. Website or app visitors are not advised that such an analysis is taking place if the user is not shown a challenge. Data processing is based on Art. 6(1)(f) of the GDPR (DSGVO): the website or mobile app operator has a legitimate interest in protecting its site from abusive automated crawling and spam. IMI acts as a “data processor” acting on behalf of its customers as defined under the GDPR, and a “service provider” for the purposes of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). For more information about hCaptcha and IMI’s privacy policy and terms of use, please visit the following links: https://www.hcaptcha.com/privacy and https://www.hcaptcha.com/terms.

Contact Forms

Personal data is captured when someone submits a contact form (e.g. to e-mail us with a question or comment). We keep that contact form submission indefinitely (although tend to delete it within a reasonable timeframe). We use the information submitted for customer service purposes. (In order to be on any newsletter list, you’d need to sign up specifically for that on a different form, not the contact us form. Information about the newsletter is mentioned elsewhere in this document.)

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/. Your profile picture may be visible to the public in the context of your comment. We do not enable public comments on our website however, public comments are possible on our Facebook page.

If the comment is one we wish to display on our www.peppermintsticklearningco.com website such as for advertising purposes (such as the testimonial rotator), we will do so without any additional compensation to the original person beyond what we previously agreed upon. (We do invite customers who purchase some of our e-book titles to send in a review/comments to us in return for a small discount on a future purchase with us.) Whenever we use a comment, we may use a generic name such as “a mom from Ontario” or initials such as “J.D., Newfoundland” or if the person gives clearly expressed consent to have his/her personal name publicly displayed on our website with the comment. There is no compensation for submitting a comment or little story or review on our website although we appreciate the participation and say “thank you”.

Please note that any comments are moderated. Any comment for our website is also possibly edited by us (Rob and/or Joy Delmore). Most of the time, nothing will likely be edited. However, we put this statement in here so that you understand we have the full right to do any editing to delete parts of comments because this is our website. To be accepted, anything that we publicly display on our website MUST be respectful to people and to God. We will delete any swearing/taking of God’s name in vain, even if it is in a popular “short-form”.

Comments placed on our Facebook page obviously are displayed with your identification in accordance with the terms of service and use of Facebook itself. (The same is true of any other social media platform.)

Cookies and Analytics

We do use cookies and plug-ins in order to design and run/operate our website. We use them to help us provide excellent customer service, analytics, accessing affiliate links, handling payments, hosting and backend infrastructure, detection of illegal, unlawful or harmful actions, and to comply with legal and regulatory obligations/requirements.

Technologies such as cookies are being used to monitor your internet activities and as website designers, we only have some options of controlling a certain amount of that if we want a website that retains a reasonable interactive experience. Our website host and programs or other electronic components of the internet experience which help to create this website and lead to our website may use cookies. But Peppermint Stick Learning Company Inc. does not purposely create extra cookies or grab your data/personal information to analyze it beyond our needs to provide our customers a beneficial and interactive experience and to participate as an affiliate for our chosen events or products to recommend to our audience. We try to keep your web experience on our pages, simple and sweet, for you and us.

We do use SEO (e.g. keywords) so that people can find our website easier when they search for it in a search engine. It might even be part of the reason that YOU found our website originally! But using SEO and similar things produces a bunch of analytics as well.

About GOOGLE ANALYTICS (GOOGLE LLC): Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google LLC (“Google”). Google utilizes the Data collected to track and examine the use of this Website, to prepare reports on its activities and share them with other Google services. Google may use the Data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.

There are also analytics as part of our newsletter’s ESP (“e-mail service provider”) services to us. These will include cookies too.

One example of what information we have the opportunity to digest is our newsletter subscriber statistics, such as the “open rate” which can be useful information to help us send our newsletters to people who are, in general, taking the time to read them.

Another example of what information we have the opportunity to digest include which pages people visit on our website, what time of day, for how long, and from where they were referred.

An example of an interactive experience our website provides are the “share” buttons which you can click on for your convenience to pin something to one of your social media accounts.

We have attempted to reduce the amount of analytics and tracking by autoblocking some common scripts since this is part of the cookie compliance which we are set-up with.

To reduce the amount of tracking that cookies and website analytics do on your web activities, you can try to delete your cookies in your browser or use an “in-private” setting. You may be able to refuse cookies on your computer too; however, some parts of the website may not function properly if you do. There are no guarantees these actions work sufficiently to increase your privacy to the level that you might desire it. But we’re supposed to tell you here how you can opt out of tracking and that is the best recommendation we can come up with. Just remember what my first computer professor told his class 20+ years ago – “When you’re online, think of it being as private as someone always peeking over your shoulder.” It’s just one of those realities in the technological world!

The cookies which WordPress installs by default come with the following statements, as of January 8, 2020:

“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.” (end of quote)

Content from other websites

Articles on this site may include content from other websites such as a link to something elsewhere that may be helpful to you. We have no control over how other websites behave or track information.

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.

About Pinterest: There are cookies that come with linking to our Pinterest site and we are aware that Pinterest does track activities that occur on our boards and provides the analytics to us automatically. We have no control over what Pinterest does if you click on a Pinterest-related link but we put this in here so that you know about it clearly.

About Facebook: There are cookies that come with linking to and from our Facebook page or Peppermint Stick Learning Company’s main website and/or using our Facebook page – they track the activities and other information such as demographics of Facebook users, according to their terms. Facebook provides us analytics automatically too. We have no control over this if we want to have a Facebook business site but we put this in here so that you know about it clearly.

About Vimeo: We also link to Vimeo for some video content which “Peppermint Stick Learning Company Inc.” has produced for the benefit of our customers. There are cookies that come with linking there as well.

Many web hosts, ours included, collect some anonymous analytics data as part of their standard services to their clients to have a website hosted by it.

Until April 2021, we have not been a part of affiliate marketing, even though there are some great products out there. From April 2021 onwards, we are sometimes part of affiliate marketing for homeschool events or products which we recommend and can earn a commission if those events or products are purchased as a result of clicking on the affiliate link from our website or social media site(s). (As a result, we will be taking time over this summer to go back through past blogs to update the specific links and notes regarding the products we are now an affiliate with because those blogs are still being referred to and read. Thank-you for your patience as we update those pages.)

Many products mentioned on our website are sold in our online shop or through an affiliate link. Some products mentioned on our website are simply recommendations which we do not receive compensation for mentioning. Please see our Disclosure Statement for more information about this.

Who we share your data with

We prefer not share to your data unless required by law or normal operations of this website to provide you a reasonable interactive experience or by your express consent to do so.

If our company changes ownership, any information will be transferred only to the new owner of this company unless legally required otherwise.

For online purchases, we do share your data with payment processors for the purpose of completing the purchase. Another example of sharing of data is using a plug-in which has a cookie to track the items that you choose to click on so that it stays put in your cart showing that you want it. It’s how websites that do e-commerce can work to provide the services desired by online customers.

With affiliate marketing, tracking cookies are, of course, shared with the company’s website that the affiliate link is associated with. (Clicking on an affiliate link indicates your “express consent” to share the cookie data with the parties involved for that action.)

How long we retain your data

If you allow cookies or set preferred cookie settings, these can remain for a month up to a year (depending on the setting) to our understanding.

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 and e-mails may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Otherwise, to our knowledge, the data is kept with our website host as well as in another off-site back-up service. Some of it may also be put into our administration files (in Canada). But in the world of the internet, the storage of visitor data could be anywhere in the world.

Comments placed on our public Facebook page would be an example of information going anywhere in the world too.

Your contact information

To complete an order, we do require your first and last name and address. This is used to calculate taxes (if any) and shipping fees. You may phone us with an order or question. You may e-mail us with an order or question. (E-mail is probably the quickest way to reach us for an answer to a question.) You can “snail mail” us too with an order and a cheque or money order. We also accept e-transfers so that means your contact information will be in that. We keep the information needed to respond to you indefinitely.

We ended our original newsletter subscriber list in early 2019. As a result, if you have previously subscribed, you no longer receive newsletters from our business. (This is because we discontinued that activity, until July 2021.) If you were on that list previous to 2019 and you wish to be part of our newsletter now, you will need to subscribe as a new subscriber in order to receive it. Any information that you provide as a result of subscribing to our newsletter, will be stored with our ESP (e-mail service provider). You can see ConvertKit’s privacy policy on their page at this link: Privacy Policy – ConvertKit

We do retain most of the basic contact information of people who have purchased from us or asked a specific question to us unless you ask us to delete it in writing. We do this so that we have something to refer back to if you have a future question.

We do not telemarket by phone nor do we send out personal e-mails beyond what is necessary to respond to your questions or comments or that which is related to your order, unless you are one of our personal friends or family members who happens to use that e-mail address. (Anyone who subscribes to our newsletter will, of course, receive e-mail newsletters, which will contain advertising for our products or the affiliate products and events.)

Compliance with children’s online privacy protection act: Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 16 years of age. If there has been an error, Parent(s)/Guardian(s) please let us know so we can delete such information. By the way, while we encourage parents/guardians to teach children/teens how to use a computer as a tool, we also encourage you to carefully monitor and greatly limit the length of time they spend on screen-time.

Any changes to this privacy policy will be posted here.
Our contact information for any questions or concerns is: Peppermint Stick Learning Company Inc. P.O. Box 125, Margaree Valley, NS B0E 2C0 peppy at peppermintsticklearningco dot com Attention: Rob and/or Joy Delmore

Additional information

How we protect your data

We protect your data by choices of web designing and by taking normal administrative actions and precautions to prevent others from compromising our computer system. Within the web design program that we use, there is encryption for some data by default so we use that too because it relates to e-commerce situations and we want our customers to be protected in this manner.

This site is protected by hCaptcha and its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

We do not have paid advertisements on our website however, we do occasionally display links (in word or as a graphic) to products or events we are an affiliate with. That means that when those links are clicked on, there are additional cookies and tracking leading to a website business or organization where we may earn a commission if a product(s) or event is purchased. We carefully choose any affiliate marketing situation to reflect a wise and trustworthy decision.

Additional Comments