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Privacy Policy
Effective on November 1, 2004
LAST UPDATED: October 16, 2008
The Plate Lady™
® takes the privacy
and security of our customers very seriously. We are providing this
Online Privacy and Security Statement because you have the right
to know what information we collect, how it is protected, and how
it is used.
The Plate Lady™
® Privacy and Security
Statement
Our policy is to provide a pop-up free, advertisement free, and
spyware free family oriented shopping experience for our customers.
We do not gather or store any personal information about visitors
to our site unless they order from us and we never sell or share
any information that we gather during the secure ordering process.
Everything we do is aimed at making shopping with us safe and convenient.
We value your privacy and your right to shop for only what you choose
to shop for.
We do not use any type of spyware and we do not subscribe to any
type of pop-under or pop-up advertisement technology. We do not
use banners and we do not advertise for other companies on our site.
We are only in the business of selling art collectibles. If you
do find that any covert personal information gathering technology
has been generated in connection with our site, please notify us
and we will investigate immediately.
If you have further questions regarding this statement, please contact
us via Email.
To Whom this Statement Applies
This Statement only applies to the site belonging to The Plate Lady™
®, the web pages on that
site with addresses that begin with http://theplatelady.com/ and
The Plate Lady™
® secure shopping cart.
The Plate Lady™
® is a registered Tradmark.
All pages on our site are clearly marked with our logo: The
Plate Lady of Tampa Bay, Florida. If you do not see this
Logo, then you are not on a website that belongs to The Plate Lady™
®.
This Statement does not apply to affiliated entities you may find
via links on our site or to third parties. Our search engine is
actually generated by Google and is the responsibility of google.com,
even though they display our logo at the top of the page as a service
to us. We are working on replacing the Google search engine with
our own internal search engine in the near future. Also, if you
use a credit card while shopping with us, your credit card company
will have a separate privacy policy that will describe their collection,
use, and protection of information about you and your account.
The Personal Information We Collect and How It Is Gathered
We collect only the Personal Information our customers voluntarily
provide to us. "Personal Information" means your name,
shipping and/or mailing address, telephone number, Email address,
credit or debit card account number. We do not store credit or debit
card information after a transaction has been completed, but we
do store other information for our customer data base.
How We Use Your Personal Information
We do not share or sell any of your personal information with anyone.
We only use information gathered to contact customers when there
is a problem with their order or to send occasional special offers
to our customers. We will never call by phone unless we do not get
an email reponse about problems with orders or if you have requested
rush delivery and we can not meet your deadline. We will never make
sales calls and we will never spam you. If you receive an Email
from us that you do not want, just Email us
here with a message to take you off our Email list. BUT
Never use the reply button if you suspect an email is spam!
A Note About Spam: We do not spam. Unsolicited Email spam
messages have become a serious problem. They overflow email boxes,
so that important emails are not easily found, and they can potentially
carry scripts that can seriously harm computers. Spammers
have even found a way to spoof Email addresses so that you
think the mail is coming from someone you trust. If you ever
receive spam that appears to be comming from any of our Email addresses,
PLEASE do not use the reply button, but do
notify us immediately!
The Personal Information We Share and With Whom We Share It
We do not share any of your Personal Information with anyone, ever.
Email You May Receive From Us
All of our outgoing and incoming email is automatically checked
for viruses by both our email service and our installed Virus Protection
program. All emails from persons not on our mailing list,
go first to our Suspect Email folder to wait for preview and approval
before being downloaded to our computer.
We will only send you Email that relates to a specific purchase
or to respond to your Email inquires. If you have ordered from us,
you will get an email from a different, private, email address than
the one we used to reply to customers who have not ordered from
us. This is to give our customers priority in reaching us
by email.
You may also occasionally receive special offer coupons after you
have ordered from us. You can cancel this service at any time by
responding to the Email with a note to take you off our mailing
list. We will do so immediately on receipt of your Email.
We do have frequent storms in Florida and on rare occasions we may
not respond to your Emails immediately, due to power outages or
other conditions beyond our control, but be assured that you will
have our full attention as soon as we are back online.
Please be aware that we may not answer your emails at all, if you
are selling something or if you put unrequested attachments on your
email. Those emails will be deleted and not read while still
in our suspect folder. If you are already in our address book
when we receive such an email, your email address will be removed
so that no further emails will be received from you without preview.
We do not buy from unsolicited sources and we do not want the risk
of opening unrequested attachments.
Types of Information We Gather and How It is Used
We will never use any technology that places any type of adware
or spyware onto your computer. Our visitor counter software and
shopping cart software do each place a cookie on your computer,
if you have cookies enabled.
We do have a small javascript on our website that runs the picture
show on our home page and there may be one or two other javascripts
used to enhance the visual on our website, but we never use scripts
to place anything on your computer.
The visitor counter cookie that our server puts on your computer
tells our server that that you have visited our site before, on
each return visit, but it does not track you once you leave our
website. This is used to differentiate between new and repeat
visitors and does not uniquely identify you.
Our shopping cart will temporarily store your selections and will
also store your address on a cookie, if you ask it to, for future
assistance with filling out our order form. However, we do not require
you to have cookies enabled to browse our website or to order from
us. In fact, if you exit the secure portion of our order form, your
sensitive information is automatically deleted and you will have
to put it in again when you are ready to complete your order.
Our shopping cart will not send us any information until you actually
complete the checkout process, and then your order information is
encrypted before it is sent to our secure server.
The shopping cart we use will save information on the items you
have selected with the "add to cart" link until you either
complete the checkout process or delete the information. Sometimes
the information will be automatically deleted when you close your
web browser, but sometimes it will not, depending on your personal
settings. You can delete any unwanted information retained on our
order form by placing a 0 in the quantity box and pressing the recalculate
button. We cannot view your shopping cart and we do not know what
is in it until you submit your order.
We Use Technology To Collect Anonymous, Non-Personal Information
About How Our Site Is Used
Our visit counter allows us to see which search engines or links
our visitors are entering from and what search phrases they used
to find our site. It also gives us anonymous information that helps
us adjust our web pages to accommodate the different browsers our
visitors are using. We use this information to make sure that our
site is clearly displayed, no matter what browser or resolution
our visitors use and to optimize our site. We also use this information
to improve our site navigation and to determine what new products
we should offer. We do not share this information with our affiliates
or other third party companies. Although your computer displays
an IP address to every website it visits, we do not use that information
to identify you or any other user of our web site.
We never track our visitors once they leave our site. We do not
track visits to our shopping cart site either, nor can we see any
information in your shopping cart. We only receive that information
on our secure server after you complete the ordering process. (Make
sure that you receive the automated order confirmation Email to
be sure your order was received).
Your computer may store a temporary copy of the web pages you have
visited on our site, so that you can view them off line and so that
the page will load faster the next time you visit us. You can delete
these files from your computer at any time by deleting your temporary
internet files.
How
We Protect Your Personal Information
We are completely PCI Compliant in accordance with the latest Credit
Card Security Standards. That means that our computer has
undergone extensive testing by Security Metrics, a third-party company,
which has shown that our computer is operating in full Stealth mode
and that our firewalls have proven to be invulnerable. It
also certifies that we are handling sensitive personal information
in a manner that protects our customers from Identity Theft.
The Plate Lady™
® of Tampa Bay uses a Mal's
E-commerce shopping cart that encrypts your personal information
before transmitting to its secured
Rackspace server. That server is part of a 100% Cisco Powered
Network, built on hardened routers and audited by Cisco to ensure
maximum security protection. The network incorporates a patented
Intrusion Detection System to protect against external threats,
to protect your information with the industry’s most potent
security tools and techniques that are designed, built and maintained
specifically for enterprise-class Web operations. It also uses firewalls
that are managed by security specialists and are kept PCI Complient.
Your information is only stored on the Mals-E server temporarily,
in an encrypted form, until we retrieve it. Server access to the
orders in our shopping cart is restricted and double password protected.
When we retrieve your sensitive information, it is downloaded directly
to hard copy and then deleted from the server. Credit card
numbers and sensitive information are never saved on our computer.
After your order information is downloaded from the secure server,
we use additional security safeguards to protect your information.
It is stored offline on hardcopy and can only be accessed by authorized
employees who need your personal information to provide the products
and services that are related to your order.
As soon as you order from us, Mals-E emails us a copy of your
order that does not contain your credit card number or any other
sensitive information. That copy is stored on our computer,
so that Customer Service can quickly access your order for any possible
future references to your account.
Our Policies Regarding Children
We do not sell products for purchase by children; however, we do
sell children's products for purchase by adults. If you are under
18 years of age, please do not submit any information without the
express consent and participation of a parent or guardian. We will
not knowingly collect personal information about any person under
13 years of age. If you believe that we have information from or
about anyone under 13 years of age, please notify us by Email.
We will also not knowingly link to any sites that contain adult
content or gambling. Our affiliations are carefully screened so
that our site content and links remain family oriented. If you find
any sites linked to our site that you believe to have adult only
content, please notify us by Email. We will investigate immediately.
Links to Other Sites
We provide links to affiliated entities and to other sites we think
you may enjoy visiting. These sites operate independently of The
Plate Lady™
® of Tampa Bay and have
established their own privacy and security policies. For the best
online experience, we encourage you to review these policies before
submitting any personal information to them.
Updates to this Statement
We will update our privacy statement from time to time to reflect
changes in our business. If we change how we use your personal information,
we will post the policy change notification on the web site. Our
current Statement was LAST UPDATED: October 16, 2010
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