Privacy Policy

By continuing to use this website, you signify your acceptance of this policy.

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 (Refreshing Homeschool with Joy) and our Pinterest boards (pinterest.ca/peppy_likes).  This privacy policy was last updated January 8, 2020.

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/phone number 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. 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 have never stored credit card information for our customers. Honestly, we are not overly interested in tracking you or analysing extra cookies for marketing purposes like some other businesses. We have better things to do with our time and energy and 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 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.

Having said that, 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.

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

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, not for marketing back to you.

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.

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 compensation to the original person. 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 these comments are moderated. Any comment 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 (Refreshing Homeschool with Joy) obviously are displayed with your identification in accordance with the terms of service and use of Facebook itself.

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.

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 good interactive experience. We plan on keeping 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 apparently produces a bunch of analytics as well. Oh, we do wish life was simpler and that all cookies were as delicious as the freshly-baked real food kind, however, the computer world seems to covet user information, eats it up, and then either spits it back at us with an announcement or stores it in our cupboard because somehow it thinks we’d long for that information too.

An 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.

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 this 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.

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.

At this point, we have not been a part of affiliate marketing, even though there are some great products out there. If in the future we choose to add affiliate marketing to our business, we will notify this page with those related policies. This means that at this point, all of the recommendations for resources which we do not have currently in our e-store or have not sold in the past years are simply personal recommendations from our family and we do not receive money for recommending them. Please see our Disclosure Statement for more information.

Who we share your data with

Our policy is that we prefer not share to your data unless required by law 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.

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. 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 (yes, you can talk to a real person). 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 because we discontinued that activity, at least for a period of time. If we choose to reinstate a newsletter subscriber list in the future that you wished to be part of, you would need to re-subscribe at that time. Please consider bookmarking our website and checking our website from time to time and/or join our Facebook community for occasional updates.

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 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.

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.  357 Skyhills Road, Huntsville, ON P1H 2N5

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.

We do not have third-party advertisers on our website.

Additional Comments

By continuing to use this website, you signify your acceptance of this policy.

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

If you still want to order items from our product-line but do not wish to order on our website, please feel welcome to contact us by phone or e-mail and we would be very happy to assist you. (We have both the ability and the willingness to do orders without putting your personal information through the internet upon your request too.)