Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 25, 2021

The team at Sew Liberated values the security of your personal data, as we know you do. We will never sell your data and oppose the trend toward “monetizing” users. You are our customer, not our product. We try to limit what we collect to only that which helps us provide value to you and the sewing community. This policy describes in detail what we record while you are with us, how we use it, and how we keep it safe.

Your payment information in particular is never processed or stored by us. We only use reputable payment processors. More details are below.

Who we are

We are Sew Liberated, registered as an LLC in North Carolina in the United States. Our website address is: https://sewliberated.com . We may also publish an app offering similar features to our website. Together, we call these the “Service” that we aim to provide.

Cookies

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.

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.

Information we collect

Information you provide to us

We probably don’t need to tell you that we collect information that you provide to us, but here is where we make that explicit. While using our service, we may ask you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify you, including to deliver our products to you. Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to:

  • Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who register for an account with Sew Liberated to provide an email address and password, along with a username and a name. You may provide us with more information — like your address so we can ship you physical goods.

    As a service to those who have set up a global profile picture (or “avatar”) with Gravatar, when you register a new account, we check to see if a profile picture has been registered to your email address. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) is provided to the Gravatar service to see if you have created a global profile picture (aka “avatar”). The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.
  • Profile information: You also may choose to add information to your site profile (visible to other logged-in members), such as your “About Me” section. You may also choose to provide information to us via surveys, forms, suggestion boxes, emails polls, or other similar subscriptions. For example, you might choose to let us know what your skill level in sewing is, so we can give you more personalized recommendations. Or you might give us feedback or improvement suggestions we can use to improve our services.
  • Payment and contact information: If you buy something from us, we’ll collect information to process those payments and contact you. If you buy something from us, you’ll provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We never store a record of your credit card information; instead, we pass those on to our trusted payment processors. We do keep a record of the purchases you’ve made. If you make a purchase, you’ll have to create a Sew Liberated account or connect an existing account.

    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.
  • Comments: When visitors save 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. When your comment is published, your profile picture, if any is provided, is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
  • Uploaded Media: If you upload images or videos to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Other visitors to the website can download and extract location data from images or videos on the website.
  • Automatic Usage Data (see next section for some details)

Automatic Collection of Usage Data

Usage Data is collected automatically when using the Service.

Usage Data may include information such as your Device’s Internet Protocol address (IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data. We’ll use this for purposes like understanding if our Service is performing well, estimating taxes and shipping, and ensuring that our Service performs well on various devices.

When you access our Service by or through a mobile device, we may collect certain information automatically, including, but not limited to, the type of mobile device you use, your mobile device unique ID, the IP address of your mobile device, your mobile operating system, the type of mobile Internet browser you use, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.

We may also collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Service or when you access the Service by or through a mobile device.

Tracking Technologies and Cookies

We use Cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on our Service and store certain information. Tracking technologies used are beacons, tags, and scripts to collect and track information and to improve and analyze our Service.

You can instruct your browser to refuse all Cookies or to indicate when a Cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept Cookies, some parts of our Service may not work.

Cookies can be “Persistent” or “Session” Cookies. Persistent Cookies remain on your personal computer or mobile device when you go offline, while Session Cookies are deleted as soon as you close your web browser.

We use both session and persistent Cookies for the purposes set out below:

  • Necessary / Essential Cookies
    • Type: Session Cookies
    • Administered by: us
    • Purpose: These Cookies are essential to provide you with services available through the Website and to enable you to use some of its features. They help to authenticate users and prevent fraudulent use of user accounts. They also keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site. Without these Cookies, our services cannot be provided. We only use these Cookies to provide you with those services.
  • Cookies Policy / Notice Acceptance Cookies
    • Type: Persistent Cookies
    • Administered by: Us
    • Purpose: These Cookies identify if users have accepted the use of cookies on the Website.
  • Functionality Cookies
    • Type: Persistent Cookies
    • Administered by: Us
    • Purpose: These Cookies allow us to remember choices you make when you use the Website, such as remembering your login details or language preference. The purpose of these Cookies is to provide you with a more personal experience and to avoid you having to re-enter your preferences every time you use the Website.
  • Tracking and Performance Cookies
    • Type: Persistent Cookies
    • Administered by: Third-Parties
    • Purpose: These Cookies are used to track information about traffic to the Website and how users use the Website. The information gathered via these Cookies may directly or indirectly identify you as an individual visitor. This is because the information collected is typically linked to a pseudonymous identifier associated with the device you use to access the Website. We may also use these Cookies to test new pages, features or new functionality of the Website to see how our users react to them.

Use of Your Personal Data

The Company may use your personal data for the following purposes:

  • To provide and maintain our Service, including to monitor the usage of our Service.
  • To manage your Account: to manage your registration as a user of the Service. The Personal Data you provide can give you access to different functionalities of the Service that are available to you as a registered user. For example, access to our Handmade Collective or pattern downloads often depends on prior purchases and establishment of an account with us. When you take our courses, ee store course progress, including completion status, quiz scores, assignments and/or essay submissions (if applicable). We will also store comments on courses, lessons, topics, assignments, and essays if you choose to leave them.
  • For the performance of a contract: the development, compliance and undertaking of the purchase contract for the products, items or services you have purchased or of any other contract with us through the Service, such as shipping you full-scale, printed pattern pieces.
  • To contact you: To contact you by email, telephone calls, SMS, or other equivalent forms of electronic communication, such as a mobile application’s push notifications regarding updates or informative communications related to the functionalities, products or contracted services, including the security updates, when necessary or reasonable for their implementation.
  • To provide you with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or inquired about unless you have opted not to receive such information.
  • To manage your requests: To attend and manage your requests to us.

We may share your personal information in the following situations:

  • With Service Providers: We may share your personal information with Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service, to advertise on third party websites to you after you visited our Service, for payment processing, to contact you. For example, if you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
  • For Business transfers: We are a small family business, but one day, to keep things going, we could sell Sew Liberated. We may share or transfer your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
  • With Affiliates: We do not currently have affiliates, being a simple small business, but if we ever restructure our business, we may share your information among the various parts. In particular, we may share your information with our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that we control or that are under common control with us.
  • With Business partners: We may share your information with our business partners to offer you certain products or services, only as needed to provide those products or services.
  • With other users: when you share personal information or otherwise interact in the public areas with other users, such information may be viewed by all users and, while we discourage such activity without consent, could be publicly distributed outside. If you interact with other users or register through a Third-Party Social Media Service, such as by pinning one of our photos to Pinterest, your contacts on the Third-Party Social Media Service may see your name, profile, pictures and description of your activity. Similarly, other users will be able to view descriptions of your activity, communicate with you and view your profile.

Retention of Your Personal Data

We will retain your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.

We will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of our Service, or we are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.

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.

Security of Your Personal Data

The security of your Personal Data is very important to us. We use only highly reputable hosting services with strong protections. Remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Data, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

Detailed Information on the Processing of Your Personal Data

Service Providers have access to your Personal Data only to perform their tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.

Analytics

This website collects personal data to power our site analytics, including:

  • Information about your browser, network, and device
  • Web pages you visited prior to coming to this website (so we can understand how people learn about us)
  • Your IP address

This information may also include details about your use of this website, including:

  • Clicks
  • Internal links
  • Pages visited
  • Scrolling
  • Searches
  • Timestamps

We may use third-party Service providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service.

  • Google Analytics
    • Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network. You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity. For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Email Marketing

We may use your Personal Data to contact you with newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information that we believe may be of interest to you. You may opt-out of receiving any, or all, of these communications from us by following the unsubscribe link or instructions provided in any email we send or by contacting us.

We may use Email Marketing Service Providers to manage and send emails to you.

  • Mailchimp: Mailchimp is an email marketing sending service provided by The Rocket Science Group LLC. For more information on the privacy practices of Mailchimp, please visit their Privacy policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/

Payments

We provide paid products and services within the Service. In that case, we may use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).

We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information is governed by their Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information.

Behavioral Remarketing

The Company may use remarketing services to advertise on third party websites to you after you visited our Service. We and our third-party vendors use cookies to inform, optimize and serve ads based on your past visits to our Service.

Google Ads (AdWords): Google Ads (AdWords) remarketing service is provided by Google Inc. You can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customise the Google Display Network ads by visiting the Google Ads Settings page: http://www.google.com/settings/adsGoogle also recommends installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on – https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout – for your web browser. Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on provides visitors with the ability to prevent their data from being collected and used by Google Analytics.For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

  • Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
  • Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services);
  • Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
  • Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one); and
  • Inferences we make (such as your fiber-related interests and possible interest in our offerings).

If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

  • Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
  • Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
  • Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
  • Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify You of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the “Last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Policy.

We will let You know via email and/or a prominent notice on Our Service, prior to the change becoming effective and update the “Last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Policy.

You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding this Privacy Policy, please contact us: