This Privacy Notice explains in detail the types of personal data we may collect about you when you interact with us. It also explains how we store and handle that data, and keep it safe. For the sake of simplicity in this privacy notice, the term 'Sophia's Kitchen' refers to the domain sophiaskitchen.blog including any subdomains that may exist (e.g. shop.sophiaskitchen.blog).
We know that there’s a lot of information here, but we want you to be fully informed about your rights, and how the Sophia's Kitchen uses your data; for example we will explain things such as our credit checking procedure.
We hope the following sections will answer any questions you have but if not, please do get in touch with us.
Who we are
At Sophia's Kitchen, we are committed to maintaining the trust and confidence of our visitors to our web site. We are a small, family run, online shop and blog. The Sophia's Kitchen team work to create, design and inspire. Together we make delicious food, design exciting, innovative products, and, most importantly, connect with you! We spend each day working around the clock to bring fun, excitement, and deliciousness into your kitchens - and we love every minute of it! In particular, we want you to know that Sophia's Kitchen is not in the business of selling, renting or trading email lists with other companies and businesses for marketing purposes. We just don’t do that sort of thing. But just in case you don’t believe us, in this Privacy Policy, we’ve provided lots of detailed information on when and why we collect your personal information, how we use it, the limited conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure. Grab a cuppa and read on.
Explaining the legal basis we rely on
The law on data protection sets out a number of different reasons for which a company may collect and process your personal data, including:
Consent:
In specific situations, we can collect and process your data with your consent. For example, when you tick a box to receive email newsletters.
When collecting your personal data, we’ll always make clear to you which data is necessary in connection with a particular service.
Contractual obligations:
In certain circumstances, we need your personal data to comply with our contractual obligations. For example, if you order an item from us for home delivery, we’ll collect your address details to deliver your purchase, and pass them to our courier.
Legal compliance:
If the law requires us to, we may need to collect and process your data. For example, we can pass on details of people involved in fraud or other criminal activity affecting the Partnership to law enforcement
Legitimate interest:
In specific situations, we require your data to pursue our legitimate interests in a way which might reasonably be expected as part of running our business and which does not materially impact your rights, freedom or interests.
For example, we will use your purchase history to send you or make available personalised offers.
We also combine the shopping history of many customers to identify trends and ensure we can keep up with demand, or develop new products/services.
When do we collect your personal data?
- When you visit any of our websites, and use your account to buy products and services, or redeem vouchers from the Sophia's Kitchen online.
- When you make an online purchase and check out as a guest (in which case we just collect transaction-based data).
- When you create an account with us.
- When you engage with us on social media.
- When you join our VIP loyalty programme.
- When you contact us by any means with queries, complaints etc.
- When you ask us to email you information about a product or service.
- When you enter prize draws or competitions.
- When you book any kind of appointment with us or book to attend an event, for example a cooking class.
- When you choose to complete any surveys we send you.
- When you comment on or review our products and services.
- When you fill in any forms on the site.
- When you’ve given a third party permission to share with us the information they hold about you.
What sort of personal data do we collect?
- If you have a web account with us: your name, gender, date of birth, billing/delivery address, orders and receipts, email and telephone number. For your security, we’ll also keep an encrypted record of your login password.
- Details of your shopping preferences.
- Details of your visits to our websites, and which site you came from to ours.
- Information gathered by the use of cookies in your web browser. Learn more about cookies below.
- We’ll only ask for and use your personal data collected for recommending items of interest and to tailor your shopping experience with us. Of course, it’s always your choice whether you share such details with us.
- Payment card information.
- Your comments and product reviews.
- To deliver the best possible web experience, we collect technical information about your internet connection and browser as well as the country and telephone code where your computer is located, the web pages viewed during your visit, the advertisements you clicked on, and any search terms you entered.
- Your social media username, if you interact with us through those channels, to help us respond to your comments, questions or feedback.
Cookies
Like most websites, Sophia's Kitchen uses cookies to collect information. Cookies are small data files which are placed on your computer or other devices (such as smart ‘phones or ‘tablets’) as you browse this website. They are used to ‘remember’ when your computer or device accesses our websites. Cookies are essential for the effective operation of our websites and to help you shop with us online. They are also used to tailor the products and services offered and advertised to you, both on our websites and elsewhere.
Some cookies collect information about browsing and purchasing behaviour when you access this website via the same computer or device. This includes information about pages viewed, products purchased and your journey around a website. We do not use cookies to collect or record information on your name, address or other contact details. Sophia's Kitchen can use cookies to monitor your browsing and purchasing behaviour.
The cookies stored on your computer or other device when you access our websites are designed by:
- Sophia's Kitchen, or on behalf of Sophia's Kitchen, and are necessary to enable you to a make purchases on our website;
- third parties who participate with us in marketing programmes.
The main purposes for which cookies are used are: -
- For technical purposes essential to effective operation of our websites, particularly in relation to on-line transactions and site navigation.
- For Sophia's Kitchen to market to you, particularly web banner advertisements and targeted updates.
- To enable Sophia's Kitchen to collect information about your browsing and shopping patterns, including to monitor the success of campaigns, competitions etc.
- To enable Sophia's Kitchen meet its contractual obligations to make payments to third parties when a product is purchased by someone who has visited our website from a site operated by those parties.
Google Analytics
When someone visits Sophia's Kitchen we use a third party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.
Mailing Lists
As part of the registration process for our e-newsletter, we collect personal information. We will only send you e-newsletters if you have explicitly agreed to be added to our mailing list. We use that information for a few reasons: to tell you about stuff you’ve asked us to tell you about; to contact you if we need to obtain or provide additional information; to check our records are right and to check every now and then that you’re happy and satisfied; to let you know about any new recipes, videos, products and offers; to assist with your checkout process, especially if your shopping cart has been abandoned. We don't rent or trade email lists with other organisations and businesses.
We use a third-party provider, Privy to run our popups on the site, and MailChimp, to deliver our newsletter. We gather statistics around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. For more information, please see Privy's and MailChimp’s privacy notice. You can unsubscribe to general mailings at any time of the day or night by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails or by emailing our data protection officer at [email protected]
Tickets to classes
When you purchase a ticket (or tickets) from Sophia's Kitchen, your name, address data, email and contact number will be stored in our Box Office system. This is so that we can keep track of who attends and so that we can distribute the invitations. We only store this information for as long as is necessary to run the class and to distribute leaflets, information and recipes shortly after the event. Once this process is complete, all personal information about the attendees of the class are securely removed from our booking system.
How and why do we use your personal data?
We want to give you the best possible customer experience. One way to achieve that is to get the richest picture we can of who you are by combining the data we have about you.
We then use this to offer you promotions, products and services that are most likely to interest you. The data privacy law allows this as part of our legitimate interest in understanding our customers and providing the highest levels of service.
Of course, if you wish to change how we use your data, you can contact our data protection officer at [email protected]
Remember, if you choose not to share your personal data with us, or refuse certain contact permissions, we might not be able to provide some services you’ve asked for. For example, if you’ve asked us to let you know when an item comes back into stock, we can’t do that if you’ve withdrawn your general consent to hear from us.
Here’s how we’ll use your personal data and why:
- To process any orders that you make by using our websites. If we don’t collect your personal data during checkout, we won’t be able to process your order and comply with our legal obligations. For example, your details may need to be passed to a third party to supply or deliver the product or service that you ordered, and we may keep your details for a reasonable period afterwards in order to fulfil any contractual obligations such as refunds, guarantees and so on.
- To respond to your queries, refund requests and complaints. Handling the information you sent enables us to respond. We may also keep a record of these to inform any future communication with us and to demonstrate how we communicated with you throughout. We do this on the basis of our contractual obligations to you, our legal obligations and our legitimate interests in providing you with the best service and understanding how we can improve our service based on your experience.
- To protect our business and your account from fraud and other illegal activities. This includes using your personal data to maintain, update and safeguard your account. We’ll also monitor your browsing activity with us to quickly identify and resolve any problems and protect the integrity of our websites. We’ll do all of this as part of our legitimate interest. For example, by checking your password when you login and using automated monitoring of IP addresses to identify possible fraudulent log-ins from unexpected locations.
- To process payments and to prevent fraudulent transactions. We do this on the basis of our legitimate business interests. This also helps to protect our customers from fraud.
- With your consent, we will use your personal data, preferences and details of your transactions to keep you informed by email about relevant products and services including tailored special offers, discounts, promotions, events, competitions and so on.
How long will we keep your personal data?
Whenever we collect or process your personal data, we’ll only keep it for as long as is necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.
At the end of that retention period, your data will either be deleted completely or anonymised, for example by aggregation with other data so that it can be used in a non-identifiable way for statistical analysis and business planning.
Warranties
If your order included a warranty, the associated personal data will be kept until the end of the warranty period.
Who do we share your personal data with?
We sometimes share your personal data with trusted third parties.
For example, delivery couriers, for fraud management, to handle complaints, to help us personalise our offers to you and so on.
Here’s the policy we apply to those organisations to keep your data safe and protect your privacy:
- We provide only the information they need to perform their specific services.
- They may only use your data for the exact purposes we specify in our contract with them.
- We work closely with them to ensure that your privacy is respected and protected at all times.
- If we stop using their services, any of your data held by them will either be deleted or rendered anonymous.
Examples of the kind of third parties we work with are:
- IT companies who support our website and other business systems.
- Operational companies such as delivery couriers.
- Direct marketing companies who help us manage our electronic communications with you.
- Google/Facebook to show you products that might interest you while you’re browsing the internet. This is based on either your marketing consent or your acceptance of cookies on our websites.
- Data insight companies to ensure your details are up to date and accurate.
Sharing your data with third parties for their own purposes:
- For fraud management, we may share information about fraudulent or potentially fraudulent activity in our premises or systems. This may include sharing data about individuals with law enforcement bodies.
- We may also be required to disclose your personal data to the police or other enforcement, regulatory or Government body, in your country of origin or elsewhere, upon a valid request to do so. These requests are assessed on a case-by-case basis and take the privacy of our customers into consideration.
- We may, from time to time, expand, reduce or sell Thermshop and this may involve the transfer of divisions or the whole business to new owners. If this happens, your personal data will, where relevant, be transferred to the new owner or controlling party, under the terms of this Privacy Notice.
- For further information please contact our Data Protection Officer at [email protected]
To help personalise your journey through Sophia's Kitchen websites we currently use the following companies, who will process your personal data as part of their contracts with us:
- Shopify
- Wordpress
- Youtube
- James and James
- Coghlan Pty Ltd
- Privy
- Mailchimp
- Help Scout
- Judge.me
- Smile.io
- OneSaas
- Corknine Development
- Swym Corporation
- Thinkific
What are your rights over your personal data?
You have the right to request:
- Access to the personal data we hold about you, free of charge in most cases.
- The correction of your personal data when incorrect, out of date or incomplete.
- For example, when you withdraw consent, or object and we have no legitimate overriding interest, or once the purpose for which we hold the data has come to an end (such as the end of a warranty).
- That we stop using your personal data for direct marketing (either through specific channels, or all channels).
- That we stop any consent-based processing of your personal data after you withdraw that consent.
- Review by Sophia's Kitchen of any decision made based solely on automatic processing of your data (i.e. where no human has yet reviewed the outcome and criteria for the decision).
You have the right to request a copy of any information about you that Sophia's Kitchen holds at any time, and also to have that information corrected if it is inaccurate. To ask for your information, please contact out Data Proteciton Officer, or email [email protected]. To ask for your information to be amended, please update your online account, or contact us.
If we choose not to action your request we will explain to you the reasons for our refusal.
Your right to withdraw consent
Whenever you have given us your consent to use your personal data, you have the right to change your mind at any time and withdraw that consent.
Where we rely on our legitimate interest
In cases where we are processing your personal data on the basis of our legitimate interest, you can ask us to stop for reasons connected to your individual situation. We must then do so unless we believe we have a legitimate overriding reason to continue processing your personal data.
Direct marketing
You have the right to stop the use of your personal data for direct marketing activity through all channels, or selected channels. We must always comply with your request.
Checking your identity
To protect the confidentiality of your information, we will ask you to verify your identity before proceeding with any request you make under this Privacy Notice. If you have authorised a third party to submit a request on your behalf, we will ask them to prove they have your permission to act.
What if you have a complaint?
You have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Officer (ICO), which regulates data protection compliance in the UK, if you are unhappy with how we have processed your personal data. You can find out how to do this by visiting www.ico.org.uk
Changes to this Privacy Notice
We may make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes we make will be posted on this page. We may also notify you by email if significant changes are made.