Privacy Policy
Below, you will find our privacy policy which describes how we collect, use, process and distribute your information. We do not use or share your information with anyone except as described in this policy. The use of information collected through our website shall be limited to the purposes of this policy.
We may change this privacy policy at any time, but we will let you know via email and/or a prominent notice on our website if changes are made!
By using our website, you consent to this policy.
WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT FROM YOU?
Registration Profile
To register for a challenge, you will need to create a profile which includes a username, password, name, email address, phone number, and your country of residence. You can edit or change this information anytime you want in your account dashboard. If you sign in with your Facebook account, we will receive your name, profile picture and email address. (See the Facebook Privacy Policy HERE.) If you sign in with your Google account, we will be able to view your email addresses, view your language preferences, view your approximate age, and manage your contacts. We would never mess with your contacts though! (See the Google Privacy Policy HERE.)
We use this information to:
- Verify your identity to allow access to any challenges you have paid for.
- Verify your identity to create an entry in a challenge
- Verify your identity to vote in a challenge
- Contact you if your entry is not within the guidelines
- Contact you if you win a prize or recognition for your entry
- Contact you with feedback about your entry if you requested and paid for it
- We may share the countries where our members come from with the rest of the membership during a challenge to create comradery.
Registration Fees
If you purchase from us, all your payment information goes directly to PayPal. Please read their privacy policy to understand how they use that information and how it’s stored. The information we receive from PayPal with any transaction includes: the name and email address associated with your PayPal account, as well as your residence country. This information is used solely for sending out email communication regarding the challenge you signed up for, including:
- Verification of your payment
- Reminders of deadlines
- Winners announcements
If you wish to receive information about future challenges, you will need to sign up for those newsletters separately HERE.
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. We’ll delete it if you want us to, just ask.
Media
If you upload images to the website for entering a challenge, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website once the challenge is over.
Contact forms
If you submit contact forms on our website, we collect the data shown in the contact form as well as your IP address and browser user agent string to help with spam detection.
After you submit a contact form, the information is emailed to us at [email protected] so we can read and respond to your message. The submitted information is kept securely in our database and in our email service for two years. After that, it’s deleted.
Embedded content from other websites
Sometimes our tutorials may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if you visited the website it came from.
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.
Communication
If you opt-in to receive our emails, we may use your personal information to provide you with information about future challenges, available soap tutorials, and winners announcements. We might even ask for feedback via survey. We send out approximately 3-4 emails per month.
If you do not wish to receive emails from us after subscribing, you may opt-out by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails.
We store your communication preferences when you sign up. It helps us make sure we email you exactly how you like to be emailed. This data is retained until you request the removal of your data.
We keep a log of some of the communication that we have with you. We keep these logs to improve our marketing and communication with you and other customers. These logs are retained until you request removal of your data.
If you opt-in to receive text messages, we may use your personal information to provide you with information about future challenges, available soap tutorials, and winners announcements. We send out approximately 3-4 text messages per month.
If you do not wish to receive text messages from us after subscribing, you may opt-out by replying STOP.
Summary:
We may use the information we collect from you when you register, make a purchase, sign up for our newsletter, respond to a survey or marketing communication, surf the website, or use certain other site features in the following ways:
- To personalize your experience and allow us to deliver the type of content and techniques in which you are most interested
- To improve our website in order to better serve you
- To allow us to better service you in responding to your customer service requests
- To administer the monthly challenges
- To quickly process your transactions
- To send periodic emails regarding your registration or upcoming challenges
HOW LONG DO WE STORE DATA?
If you have an account, you can see, edit, or delete your personal information at any time (except you cannot change your username) on your account dashboard.
If you have an account and do not log in to this site, we remove your account and all relevant information after two years of inactivity. We figure, after two years, you’ve probably moved on, and deleting your data makes room for new people.
If you place an order and fully complete it, we delete the order information after four years.
If you sign up for marketing emails and do not want to receive them any longer, you may opt-out by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails. We do not delete the information collected from email subscribers unless requested.
The rights you have over your data
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. Just drop us a line to put in a request.
Where we store your data
For the most part, we keep your data right where you leave it. Your user information, such as account data and order information, is stored in our web host’s secure database. And if you are an email subscriber, your information is stored in our email service’s secure database. Please see the Third Party Disclosure for more information.
HOW DO WE PROTECT YOUR INFO?
Our website is scanned on a regular basis for security holes and known vulnerabilities to make your visit to our site as safe as possible.
Your personal information is contained behind secured networks and is only accessible by a limited number of people (me and my two tech people) who have special access rights to such systems and are required to keep the information confidential. When you register for an account on our website, you are responsible for maintaining your account’s security by using a strong password.
We implement a variety of security measures when a user submits, or accesses their information to maintain the safety of your personal information. All transactions are protected by SSL encryption technology, processed through PayPal, and are not stored or processed on our servers. See our Third Party Disclosure for more information.
If you are not in the United States, you should know that your personal information will be processed in the United States.
In the ridiculously low-chance but unfortunate event of a data breach, we will contact you and the relevant authorities within 72 hours.
DO WE USE COOKIES?
Yes, we do.
If you don’t know what they are, cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer’s hard drive through your web browser that enables the site’s or service provider’s systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information.
We use the following types of cookies:
- Necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the essential operation of our websites such as to authenticate users and prevent fraudulent use.
- Functionality cookies. These are used to recognize you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalize our content for you.
You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being set or you can choose to turn off all cookies, although this may seriously alter your ability to navigate our website. You can do this through your browser’s settings or preferences. Every browser is a little different, so look at your browser’s Help files to learn the correct way to modify your cookies. Here are some popular browsers:
- Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
- Cookie settings in Firefox
- Cookie settings in Chrome
- Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS
You may choose to delete cookies on your computer at any time. Use your browser preferences to do so.
THIRD PARTY DISCLOSURE
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information except for the following services:
- We use Google Analytics for analytical information. Some of your anonymized non-identifying data will be passed to Google Analytics to help us improve the website. Please see the Google Privacy Policy for more details.
- 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.
- We use MailChimp for email marketing. Your data may be transferred to MailChimp for processing in accordance with their Privacy Policy. You can opt-out at any time by clicking the link in an email from us.
THIRD PARTY LINKS
We will often include third party information, products, or services on our website – usually these are sponsors who provide prizes for the challenges. These third party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites.
Contact Us
We are the data controllers since we collect and use the data we just talked about. We use trusted third parties as our data processors for technical and organizational purposes, including for payments and email marketing.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at [email protected]