Privacy Policy

Sips by™ wants how you discover tea to be fun, personalized, and affordable. We hope you feel inspired to explore the big wide world of tea with us, and are ready to be introduced to new teas, brands, and friends along the way.  We know you trust us with your personal information when you visit our Site or Services, and our commitment is to protect that trust. This Privacy Policy explains our practices for sipsby.com (the "Site") and Services provided by Sips by LLC ("Sips by™," "we," “our”, or "us").

We believe in full disclosure when it comes to our privacy practices. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect from you, how we collect it, how we use it and how we protect it. We want you to feel safe, so we use industry-standard safeguards and procedures. We also let you control how much personal information you share and how certain information is used.

By visiting our Site, you accept this Privacy Policy's terms. You're not authorized to use this Site unless you agree with this Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Policy applies only to our Site. We're not responsible for the practices employed by any third-party sites including ones to which we link or that link to us. Those sites will have rules and practices of their own.

If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at www.sipsby.com/pages/contact.

 

SECTION 1: INFORMATION COLLECTED OR RECEIVED

We collect information from you on this Site to provide a meaningful, safe, efficient, and customized experience. We use this information to: make it easier for you to use this Site, communicate with you about your orders, billing and payment, verify your identity when you make a purchase on our Site, help you more quickly find information on our products and services, provide targeted online marketing for the Site, create content on this Site that's more relevant to you, and alert you to new products, services and special offers that might specifically interest you.

  1. Information you provide.
A. When You Create an Account.  In order to join Sips by™ you must complete a profile quiz that asks for information about your preferences for tea, and about how you shop for tea. We use the Profile information to personalize your experience. If you subscribe to our Tea Sample Box then we will use the Profile information to send you Tea Sample Box items that fit your unique profile, alert about our products, services, and other related news that might interest you. In order to create an account with Sips by™ you must choose a password. You also must provide a valid email address and your date of birth. We use your email to communicate with you about our Site and your registration. We ask for your date of birth to make sure you're old enough to use our Site and services. And, of course, we also like to wish you a happy birthday. If you provide us your email address but choose not to become a Subscriber, then we will retain your email address for a period to invite you back to the Site.

 

B. When You Order from Us.  If you subscribe to our Tea Sample Box or order any products from us, you must provide your: name, shipping address, billing address, and credit card information. If you order products through a brand partner’s web site, you are not providing your name, shipping address, billing address or credit card information to us you are providing it to the store you accessed from our website. Please review the privacy policy for that store before providing your information. When you order from us, we use the foregoing information, along with your email, for billing purposes, to fulfill your orders, and to communicate with you about your orders. We securely collect your credit card information through a Third Party Site. The credit card information is encrypted, and transmitted for storage to a high security vault according to strict industry standards. Once the data reaches the vault it is "tokenized". No credit card information is retained in our own systems. Instead we retain a token associated with your account that has no intrinsic value. Your credit card information is not exposed anywhere in our own systems. Please do not send your credit card information to our team directly, for example, please only use our secure, online system to enter your credit card information – do not email your credit card information to us.

C. When You Add Products to the Cart. Our website uses cookies to help keep track of the items you put into your shopping cart, including when you have abandoned your cart. This information helps to determine when to send a cart reminder message via email or SMS if you have provided these to Sips by.

D. When You Request Information from Us. If you want us to notify you regarding particular products or special offers, including Giveaways, or if you sign up for our emails or sms programs, you'll need to give us your email address and/or phone number. We use it to honor your requests, whether that's emailing or texting you information about certain products or informing you about a Sips by™ Giveaway.

E. When You Post Public Content. We use this content to bring our community of tea lovers closer together.

Public information you post on the Site. Information you post publicly on our Site is intended for public consumption. If you have posted information publicly that you cannot remove yourself, please contact us at www.sipsby.com/pages/contact and request removal. We may request additional information from you in order to complete your request. We cannot control who reads your postings or what other users may do with the information you voluntarily post, so we encourage you to exercise discretion and caution with respect to your personal information. You can reduce the risk of being personally identified by taking care to exclude any personal information in your comments or reviews.

Public information you post on other sites.
We also may collect information you post publicly on third-party sites, but only if you choose to follow instructions we provide. For example, we may collect pictures you post publicly on Instagram and re-post them on our Site, but only if you choose to use the hash tag "#sipsby" inside your Instagram post. You can always have us remove the information from our Site by emailing us using this link www.sipsby.com/pages/contact.

F. When You Share Information about Your Contacts. You may choose to share personal information about friends, relatives or colleagues with us, such as the person's name, shipping address and email address. Please do not do so without their express permission. You may choose to manually invite your friends to our Site using their email addresses. You also may grant us permission to access your contacts list and pull the email addresses of your contacts to invite them to the Site. If you use the Site to send others an email invitation to become account holders or Subscribers, we may store the personal information of each recipient in order to process those requests or facilitate future activities. All information that you enter or upload about your contacts is covered by the Agreement including our Privacy Policy. We use this information about your friends to enable us to send invitations and reminders to your friends and to ship products to your friends, if applicable. By providing personal information of others to us, you represent that you have authority to do so.

G. When You Connect to Us with a Third-Party Service. You can connect to your account using external third-party services. The Site collects personal information about you from your social media accounts, but only if you opt-in and permit us to do so. When you connect to us through a third-party service like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Instagram, we receive information from that third party identifying your account. We collect and store this information and use it to help you connect to our Site and to share your public content. Connecting your account to a third-party service is completely optional, and you will have the opportunity to grant permission when you attempt to connect. You can revoke permission by logging into the third party service and disconnecting the application from there, and through the native applications on your smart phone. We may retain the information we collected previously from you.

2. Information we automatically collect or receive.

A. Log Files. Like most sites, we automatically receive and store log files information from your browser when you visit the Site. This information includes your Internet protocol ("IP") address, browser type, Internet service provider, the referring/exit pages, your operating system, and the date/time stamp of your Site visit. We use this information, which doesn't identify individual Site visitors, to analyze and understand how the Site works for you so we can improve it, to administer the Site, and to gather demographic information about Site visitors for targeted online marketing purposes. We may link this automatically collected information to your personal information.


B. Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies Policy

Introduction We use a variety of technologies to help us understand how you the Site and our services (collectively, "Sips by"). This guide explains the tracking technologies we use and is part of our commitment to a high standard of transparency in our privacy practices.


Types of tracking technologies

        • Cookies. This is a small data file sent from a server to your web browser that is stored in your browser and sent back to the server each time the browser makes a request to the server. Cookies can improve a site user's experience by, for example, allowing the site to keep a user logged in while browsing, saving a user's site preferences, and allowing a user to add items to a shopping cart and preserve cart contents between site visits, even when the user is not logged in.
        • Clear gifs, web beacons, tracking pixels. These are tiny graphics with a unique identifier. They function similarly to cookies and are used to track the online movements of web users. Unlike cookies which are stored on a user's computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded on web pages and are single pixel wide. We do not tie information gathered by clear gifs to your personally identifiable information.

    Tracking Technology Lifespans

          • Single-session tracking technology: lasts only as long as your site visit. Single-session cookies expire and delete themselves when you leave the site or close your browser. They are used for technical purposes such as enabling better navigation through a site or generating aggregated statistics about how a site is used. Single-session cookies do not publicly expose your personal information.
          • Multi-session or persistent tracking technology: remains on your browser or mobile device until you choose to delete it or the cookie expires. Persistent cookies are used to recognize a computer that has previously visited a site. This can improve the user's experience, for example by continuing preference settings from previous visits and by allowing users to login without entering a password with every site visit.
      Tracking Purposes
      We use tracking technologies for these general purposes:
            • Because it is strictly necessary. This tracking is needed to make our Site work properly.
            • For performance. This tracking helps us understand how the Site is functioning so we can improve the Site.
            • For functionality. This tracking retains your personal preferences as you use the Site.
            • For advertising. This tracking gathers data to help deliver advertising to you that interests you.

        Cookies we currently use

              • Single session cookies are used to ensure the Site displays correctly on your device.
              • Persistent cookies are used to measure Site metrics such as which pages are popular, how often people visit the Site, whether people are visiting the Site for the first time, and whether visitors make purchases on the Site. They also are used to enhance Site functionality, for example to allow returning users to use the Site without logging in.
          Cookies for email subscribers We may use cookies to measure the effectiveness of our email communications and to tailor email content. For example, we may connect the data showing that you clicked a link in an email from us then completed an action on our Site such as buying a Subscription. This links cookie data with an individual user, so we only do this for users who have consented and opted in to receiving emails from us.
           
          Third Party Cookies We partner with third-party service providers who set cookies and tracking pixels for Site visitors and members on our behalf in order to deliver their services. These services include targeted online marketing and analysis of data collected through cookies. These technologies allow a partner to recognize your computer or mobile device each time you visit our Site or other sites that also utilize the third party's services, but do not allow access to personally identifiable information from us. Third parties may choose to include our widgets on their sites. When you load a site that has chosen to include our widgets, we receive analytics information through a cookie that may be used to enhance our data or to improve our services. We do not have access to or control over these third-party technologies, and they are not covered by our Privacy Policy.

          Managing Cookies You can delete cookies stored in your browser at any time. You also can choose not to accept cookies from any site, including ours, by changing the settings of your browser. If you reject or block all cookies in your browser settings, then you will not be able to fully use our services. We do not currently act on "do not track" request headers.
          For more information about cookies, including how to delete them from your computer and configure the type of browser you use to refuse cookies from any site, visit www.getnetwise.org

          C. Information from other sources. We may receive information about our users from third party social platforms, such as Facebook. When you access or use our site or mobile application through such a site, you allow us to access or collect information made available by the third party site in accordance with its privacy policy. This information may be available from your profile or account with the third party site or from cookies placed on your device by the third party site. Depending on your privacy settings this information may include: Facebook interests, gender, friends and location.

          D. Information collected automatically. We automatically collect information from your browser or device when you visit the Site. This information includes your IP address, device ID, your browser type and language, access times, the content of any undeleted cookies that your browser previously accepted from us, and the referring site address. This information also includes your operating system or application, your location, and your activities voluntarily have submitted to us (for example, your email address). If you are accessing our third party Affiliate’s stores through the Site, this information is automatically collected, too.


           3. Other information we receive about you.

          As you might expect, we usually collect or receive information through our Site. But we also may collect information offline, and it's important to us that we preserve the privacy of your personal information both online and off. For example, if you call us to place an order, we ask for the shipping address needed to place that order. There are other ways we could learn of personal information offline, but this Privacy Policy doesn't try to predict all those methods. We just want you to know that we try to treat offline information collection, uses, and disclosures consistently with our online privacy practices.

          If you're not an account holder but we contacted you, then we may have received your contact information from one of your friends. An account holder may give us your name and email address so we can send a personalized invitation to you to join. We also may send you personalized email ‘reminders' about us from your friends. Similarly, an account holder may provide your personal information to us so we can ship a gift or other merchandise to you. We ask your contacts to share your personal information only with your permission, and you may unsubscribe from any commercial email you receive by following the direction contained at the bottom of the communication.

           

          SECTION 2: HOW WE MAY DISCLOSE THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT OR RECEIVE

          Information we collect from you may be either personal or aggregate. Personal information is identifiable to you, like your name, email address, shipping and billing addresses, credit card information, and phone number. Aggregate information is summary data of the behaviors and interests of groups or categories, so it won't identify you.

          1. Aggregate information. We use aggregate information for the purposes of internal business research, sales and business development and reporting back to our brand partners. We may share aggregated information about our visitor and user base with third parties such as our advertising partners. This information may include the number of daily visitors to our Site and the number of orders placed on a certain date. We also may share Profile information with brand partners. We do not link aggregated data with our customer personal information.

          2. Personal information. We do not sell, rent, trade, license, or otherwise disclose your personal information to third parties, except in these limited circumstances: 

          A. Disclosures to Sips by™ Agents, Consultants and Related Third Parties.

          Like most Internet retailers, we use third parties to help ensure our business runs smoothly. We disclose your information to these third-party companies so they can perform their specific functions for us. For example, we may provide your name, shipping address, and email third-party shippers like the U.S. Postal Service and the United Parcel Service to deliver our products to you. We also may provide your credit card information to third-party credit card processors and issuers to help us process your orders from us. Sips by™ third party vendors may recognize a tracking code used by your browser or application to enable you to receive customized content, or to enable you to use other technologies such as tags and scripts. The tracking code may reflect de-identified demographic or other data linked to data you. We do not share text messaging originator opt-in data and consent with any third parties except Klaviyo, our email and SMS service provider.

          When we employ other companies to perform functions of this nature, we only disclose the information that they need to perform their requested function. We do not authorize them to retain, share, store, or use personal information provided by us for any other purpose. We may also disclose to our affiliates who operate the stores information about the frequency with which you visited the store or accessed a product, which may in turn result in you receiving an email or push notification about that product or service.


          B. Disclosures Required by Law or Otherwise. We may disclose your personal information if we need to: (1) comply with a legal obligation such as in response to a court order or subpoena; or if we believe, in good faith, that it's necessary to (2) protect the safety of other account holders, subscribers, or the public; (3) protect against legal liability; or (4) protect and defend our rights or property.

          C. Disclosures for a Business Transaction or Insolvency. We also may disclose your personal information in connection with an actual or proposed corporate transaction or insolvency proceeding involving all or part of our business or assets. For example, if we merge with another company, we may disclose your personal information to that company, but the disclosure would be subject to our Privacy Policy.

          D. Disclosures of Giveaway Winners. We post the social media handles of our lucky Giveaway winners on our Social Media.

          E. Disclosures through Social Media. Remember that you control the privacy settings on each of your social media platforms. We allow you to share information from the Site to social media. In order for this to happen you first must opt-in. You can revoke permission to do this by logging into the social media service and disconnecting the application from there.

           

          SECTION 3: HOW YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

          1. Log In to Your Account. You can change the personal information you provide to us and remove any content you post publicly on our Site by logging into your Sips by™ account and making the appropriate changes.

          2. Contact Us. If you are unable to remove content you have posted publicly, you can request that we take down public posts on the Site by contacting us here: www.sipsby.com/pages/contact. We will remove your public posts from view, but we may retain personal information about you solely for the purposes authorized under this Privacy Policy. For example, we may retain information to prevent, investigate, or identify possible wrongdoing in connection with the Site or to comply with legal obligations. If you do not want your profile information displayed, you may terminate your account.

          3. Opt-Out. You can always "opt-out" of having your personal information used for certain purposes. At your request, we will stop sending you certain emails or even deactivate your account to prevent any future purchases through it. You can submit these requests at any time by contacting us here: www.sipsby.com/pages/contact

          4. Block Cookies and Targeted Advertising. You can prevent Sips by™ and its third-party partners from setting and accessing cookies on your computer by setting your Internet browser to block cookies. You also may remove yourself from the targeted advertising of companies participating in the Digital Advertising Alliance program by opting out here: aboutads.info/choices/ Our Site does not act on "do not track" request headers, but you can still limit tracking by taking these steps.

          5. Cancel Your Subscription or Deactivate Your Account. You may cancel your Subscription by logging into your account, clicking on "SETTINGS", then clicking on“MANAGE SUBSCRIPTION”and choosing "Cancel Order" under the manage dropdown list. You may deactivate your Sips by™ account by contacting us here: www.sipsby.com/pages/contact with the subject line: "Account Deactivation Request."

           

          SECTION 4: HOW WE PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

          At Sips by™, we take data security seriously. We use technical, physical and administrative safeguards. Online, we encrypt your personal information using Secure Sockets Layer ("SSL"). SSL allows for a private, reliable Site connection where your identity is authenticated with cryptography. Offline, we restrict access to your personal information to only those Sips by™ employees who need it to perform a specific job function. And we require all Sips by™ employees with access to your personal information to follow specific practices concerning its proper handling. We also hold our vendors who need access to your personal information to strict confidentiality requirements. Third-party service providers assist us with the physical security of some of our computer hardware. When you visit our Site, you access servers that we backup constantly. Our servers are hosted at locations which are private and secure data center facilities, behind physical and virtual firewalls.

          But please remember, while we use industry-standard precautions to safeguard your personal information, we can't guarantee absolute security. We wish we could, but 100% security just doesn't exist anywhere online or off.

           

          SECTION 5: CHILDREN'S PRIVACY

          We respect children's privacy. This Site is not intended for persons under the age of 13 (see our Terms of Use). If you're under 18 years old, you must have your parent/guardian’s permission to have an account and we ask that you not submit any personal information to us or post on our Site without the consent and supervision of a responsible parent or legal guardian.

           

          SECTION 6: DATA RETENTION

          Sips by™ will retain your information as long as we deem necessary. If you no longer want Sips by™ to use your information to provide you Services, you may close your account. If you close your account then your profile and the content you posted to the Site will no longer appear on the Site.

          You may inform us of any changes or requests in regards to your personal data, and in accordance with our obligations under local data protection law, we will use all reasonable means to update or delete your personal data accordingly. Please email us using this link: www.sipsby.com/pages/contact. You should not expect that all of your information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your request. Sips by™ will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements.

           

          SECTION 7: UPDATES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

          We will post any changes and updates to this Privacy Policy on this Site so you can always be aware of what information we collect, use and disclose. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically so you'll know if it has been changed or updated.

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          Created: January 1, 2017

          Effective: January 1, 2017