PRIVACY POLICY
It was brought to our attention that, since we're capturing your details, we should have a privacy policy in place. Fair enough.
We had a look around and found two options: we
1) copy/paste someone else's, and replace some other company's name with ours or
2) get a legal firm to draft one for us.
Option one is lame and option two bloody expensive. And we're all about not being lame and being cheap.
So, here's our best effort at explaining what data we capture, what we do with it and –more importantly- what we don't do with it.
This is not a legal document, but rather an explanation in laymen's terms of what we do and don't do. A Privacy Policy suitable to the good viewers of Sesame Street, if you will.
Email Address Database
We collect your email addresses for inclusion in our daily email. This only happens with your express consent: when you leave an email address in the subscribe box, you will receive an email asking you to confirm. This is called a "double opt-in" and is considered best practice in countries where governments are highly concerned about their citizen's privacy. In South Africa this is not required, but we decided to do this anyway.
We use Mailchimp.com for our email communications, and we have a database on their website containing your email address, your name (in some cases, since it's optional), and on what page on our website or Facebook you signed up. Mailchimp is continuously doing everything in their power to make sure that data is safe. We trust them implicitly with this task, not in the last place since they are one of the biggest in this field and they quite clearly know what they're doing.
Our pledge: when you signed up to our mailing list, you did so because you want to receive emails from us, and not from someone else. We will never, ever, sell your email address to anyone else. Occasionally, we may include a 3rd party promotion in our emails to you, but this will be in line with what we do. We have your best interest at heart and would only send you something that we feel would be of genuine interest to you.
Personal Data on laatlamgifts.co.za
On our own website we capture your name, billing and delivery addresses, contact details and your order history. There is no real top-secret information here, and we do trust our website's security.
Our pledge: It's really safe. But if the worst possible thing would happen and this data got out, no-one would get hurt.
Payment details
We would never trust ourselves with building a website that will securely hold such critical data as credit card numbers. So we use Payfast for this specific reason. We do send data to them (including your order number and the amount payable) and receive data back from them (basically whether the transaction was successful). On the payment providers' dashboards, we can see the first 6 and the last 4 digits of your credit card number, the card holder, issuing bank and the country in which that bank operates, but NOT the expiration date, CVC numbers, your bank balance, medical history or star sign. At no point do we have access to enough data to reproduce your credit card. We can only charge your card after you have given your express consent: the only change we can make to a payment is a reduction, by reversing an authorisation or refunding a payment. We cannot, under any circumstances, increase the amount that you have given authorisation for.
Our pledge: we promise to always leave the handling of highly sensitive credit card data over to people that really know what they're doing. We may switch to taking credit card payments on our own website at some point, but this would only happen when we can guarantee the safety of this data and the transfer thereof between the necessary parties involved.
Payment Details on laatlamgifts.co.za
Occasionally, we receive fraudulent transactions. These usually stick out like a sore thumb, so these credit card authorisations are not settled and the orders not processed. We try to spot all of them, but sometimes one slips through. In that case, we are contacted by the card issuing bank, the payment is reversed and Laatlam's private army of ex-SWAT personnel is dispatched to collect the goods paid with a stolen credit card.
Our pledge: we hate criminals and will do everything in our power to make their lives blow.
The official bit
The above, in legalese, states that Laatlam collects information (such as your name, shipping and billing address, email address, etc.) from you that we need to:
- process your order;
- provide you with member support;
- allow you to use the community forums and participate in contests and other forum features; and
- send you newsletters and other communications such as polls, surveys, and special offers.
Laatlam will set and access our own cookies on your computer to allow you to buy and interact at the site. We also use web beacons to gather anonymous, aggregated statistical information (e.g. unique hits, page views, etc.) about our website traffic.
Laatlam may share information collected by us with third parties to help process your order (e.g. shipping companies, credit card processors, etc.) or to provide statistical and demographic analysis to Laatlam to help us and our business partners provide you with better services and offerings.
Laatlam will not share, rent, lease, or sell your personal information (e.g. your email address, your name, your address, etc.) to any third party for their independent use or benefit. Never. Ever.
We hope this makes sense. Future changes to this Privacy Policy may be made at any time by sending you an email or posting notice of the changes on the site, with the changes effective 30 days after Laatlam's dispatch of the email or posting of the notice. To ask questions about this policy or to remove your personal information from our database, write us at hello@laatlamgifts.co.za: our people would love to tell you more about this.