Our details
Stitchmastery is a product developed and sold by Catherine Scott trading as Stitchmastery.
Our registered office is at Church Hall Cottage, Chapel Street, Alyth PH11 8DA, United Kingdom. We are registered as a data controller with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. Our data protection registration number is ZA211350.
You can contact us by emailing us at support@stitchmastery.com
What information do we collect?
This Policy applies to any information that you provide to us when using our website (“www.stitchmastery.com”). It also applies to any data you give us in person at events, via emails and social media messages, or via occasional surveys and competitions. It includes:
- Your email and password which you provide when registering for an account.
- Any information you provide when completing a form on our website, such as your name, email address, postal address, payment details, VAT information.
- Details of any transactions made by you through our website.
- Any communication that you send to us, for example to report a problem, ask a question, or make a comment about our website, website content or software.
- Details of your computer/device’s visits to our website including, but not limited to, a unique identifier for your computer, traffic data and other communication data and the resources that you access.
What do we use the information for?
We use the information we collect about you for the following purposes:
- To activate the Stitchmastery software and ensure that it is only used by a registered user with a valid activation key.
- To enable your use of the services available on our website.
- To improve our customer service, website and software.
- To ensure that content from our website and software is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your device.
- If you subscribe to our email newsletter, to send you emails relating to updates to our software, products, pattern releases, promotions, special events, upgrade offers and on-off marketing promotions.
Our lawful basis for holding information related to a purchase or support request is Contract, and for mailing list subscriptions is Consent.
How do we store and handle information?
Data relating to purchases is held by Paypal or Stripe (depending on which payment method you use), by the sales software on our WordPress website, and in our accounting software. This data is also shared with our accountants who are based in the UK and fully GDPR compliant.
Newsletter registrations are held on Mailerlite and we use this programme as our email automation platform. We provide mailing options to help us tailor the content of the newsletters to fit with your preferences.
We hold some data on our Google Drive – for example, details of mailing list registrations made on paper (as proof of consent until you opt in electronically), survey results collected on external websites (so that we can remove your data from those websites). We anonymise personally identifiable data wherever possible and only keep this data for as long as it is in use.
We use Google Analytics to monitor traffic to our website, and by using this service, Google is also able to view and use anonymised information about your use of our websites.
Data Retention
We keep details of sales transactions for a period of 10 years for VAT and accountancy purposes. We also retain enquiry emails from you in order to provide relevant customer service should you have a future problem using our software.
We carry out twice-yearly deletions of newsletter subscribers who have not engaged with an email (opened it or clicked a link – information which is gathered by Mailerlite) for over 12 months. You are welcome to resubscribe at any time if you are still interested in hearing from us. You can opt to unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails, or by writing to us to let us know that you wish to unsubscribe. When you unsubscribe from our Mailerlite contact list, we can still see that you were once a subscriber on our account, along with any details that you submitted when you signed up, even though you will no longer receive emails from us. We will delete your data during the twice-yearly clear, unless we receive instruction from you that you would like your information to be deleted as soon as possible. In that case, we will delete your information from the mailing list as soon as we can and within 30 days after receiving your request.
Disclosing personal information
We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees, professional advisers, agents or contractors insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.
If you contact us to request a copy of a Stitchmastery Activation Key which you have lost, we will only disclose this information if we are confident that you are the rightful owner of that key. If you have contacted us from an email address which is not connected to a purchase in our system, we will ask you to provide more identifying details eg the email address used for the original sale, the Paypal or Stripe transaction details, or the date of purchase.
If required to do so by law, we may disclose your personal information in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk) or in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings.
Beyond this, we do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties, your personally identifiable information.
Third-party links
Our website may, from time to time, contain links to external sites. If you follow a link to any of those sites, please note that we are not responsible for the privacy policies or the content of such sites and we suggest that you check those policies before you submit any personal data to these websites. We do not provide any personally identifiable customer information to these third-party sites.
Cookies
In order to provide certain of the Services we use “cookies”. These are small text files that a website transfers to your browser for added functionality or for tracking your usage of the website. Cookies help us to improve our websites and to deliver a better and more personalised service.
For example, we use “session cookies” when you add products to your basket, and also to obtain statistical data about our users’ browsing actions and patterns. These are saved to the browser only and disappear when the browser is closed.
We also use “permanent cookies” to remember if you have visited us before; these will stay on your computer after you leave our website.
On most browsers you can refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies or by clearing your cookies. The Help menu on the menu bar of most browsers will tell you how to disable cookies altogether, prevent the addition of new cookies or have a notification sent to you when you receive a new cookie. However, if you disable your cookies, your use of our websites or services may be adversely affected.
For more information about cookies, please visit www.aboutcookies.org.uk.
Your rights
Under GDPR, you have the following rights over your data and its use:
- The right to be informed about what data we are collecting on you and how we will use it;
- The right of access – you can ask to see the data we hold on you;
- The right to rectification – you can ask that we update or correct your data;
- The right to object – you can ask that we stop using your data for a particular purpose;
- The right to erasure – you can ask us to delete the data we hold on you;
- The right to restrict processing – you can ask that we temporarily stop using your data while the reason for its use or its accuracy are investigated;
- The right to data portability – you can ask to receive a copy of your data or for it to be passed to another data controller;
- You also have rights related to automated decision making including profiling.
With regards to your rights to object or erasure, we will uphold these rights as far as is possible within our own legal obligations, for example VAT and accountancy rules. Where possible, we will anonymise and minimise the information stored if we are unable to delete it in its entirety.
If you have a Stitchmastery account, you can log in via the My Account (at the bottom of our web pages) and in the dashboard you will find a tab called Account Details. On that page, you can click a button to be sent a copy of all the data that is held about you on that website. Bear in mind we may hold information on you in other places (eg Mailerlite, saved emails, details of older purchases). If you want copies of that data please email us using the contact details provided at the start of this policy. In most cases, there will be no charge for an individual to access or update their personal information – if you want to learn more about your rights and the conditions which might lead us to charge a fee to handle the request, please see the Information Commissioner’s Office webpage: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/
If you have a complaint about our use of your information, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office via their website at www.ico.org.uk/concerns.
Updates
We reserve the right to amend this Privacy and Cookie Policy at any point. The latest Privacy and Cookie Policy will be published on this page. This Privacy and Cookie Policy was last updated on 12th December 2022.