Privacy Policy

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Last Updated: August 15, 2024

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This privacy notice for PenPals ("we," "us," or "our"), describes how and why we might collect, store, use, and/or share ("process") your information when you use our services ("Services"). By using the Services, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and our practices. Please read this policy carefully before using our Services.

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Information collected

Personal information you provide to us directly.

Your Personal Information. When you register for an account and submit information for a user’s Address Book or otherwise on our Site, we collect personal information (“Personal Information”), which may include information like your name, physical address, zip code, telephone number, e-mail address(es), birthdate, and the names and addresses of the contacts to whom you send cards. When you place an order, we collect your phone number, name and credit card information (which is processed by a third party) in order to fulfill your order and ship your products. We retain information on your behalf, such as custom designed cards and landing pages that you store in your Account. These saved designs, including their text, may contain Personal Information including names, photographs, addresses, contact information, dates and locations of events and any other Personal Information you may provide. This information is only available to the registered user and PenPals employees and contractors. If you provide feedback, interact with our customer service, or provide responses to any surveys, we retain your name and any information provided in order to send a reply or improve our Services.

Information About Other People. If you provide information about anyone other than yourself, you represent and warrant that you have the permission and right to provide the information. If you submit your information in response to a registered user’s request for information/referral link through our Site, your Personal Information will not be shared with any third parties for marketing purposes.

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Information automatically collected. To help us improve our services, we may also automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services, including the time and date of your visits to our Site, the web pages viewed during a visit, time spent on a particular web page, the links followed, the referring websites, language preferences, operating system, and the IP address used. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, to better tailor our Services to your needs, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.

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Cookies. We may collect your email address via cookies and pixels on the website through the use of trusted third party partners. We use cookies to help understand your preferences, for personalization and targeted advertising, or for analysis of the performance of our Site and Services. We use cookies that are not specific to your account but unique enough to allow us to analyze general trends and customize your experience on our Site. You can choose to turn off all cookies through your browser (e.g. Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer). However, if you turn cookies off, this may affect your ability to make purchases on our Site or access the Services.

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Information not collected

We do not process sensitive information or any “Special Categories of Personal Data” (including details about your race, ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, biometric data, health data, trade union membership, political beliefs or sexual orientation).

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Use of information

We process your Personal Information to operate, improve, understand and personalize our Services. We use Personal Information for the following reasons:

To provide and maintain our products and Services
To create or manage your Account
Printing recipient addresses in your orders
Personalizing website content and communications based on your preferences
Sending reminders and follow up notices based on your preferences
Responding to correspondence received from you, contacting you when necessary or requested, including to update you regarding orders, order status and purchases made
To provide you with surveys, newsletters and new offers that we think you will be interested in for other marketing purposes of PenPals
For business transfers
Improving the Services, including research, analytics and product development
Fraud protection, security and debugging
Fulfilling our legal obligations under applicable law

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Sharing of your personal information

PenPals will not sell or share your Personal Information with other or non-affiliated companies except to provide products or Services that you have requested, as disclosed in this Privacy Policy, or as you have otherwise agreed. We do not sell your personal information for money. We may need to share your Personal Information in certain situations, as described below:

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Third Party Service Providers. We may share your information with third party service providers to provide you with our Services, products or promotions; process your payments; market our products and Services to you; and provide technical support, detect security incidents and protect against malicious or fraudulent activity.
Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
Affiliates. We may share your information with our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this privacy notice. Affiliates include our parent company and any subsidiaries, joint venture partners, or other companies that we control or that are under common control with us.‍
Legal Matters. We may disclose Personal Information if we believe in good faith that such disclosure is required to comply with relevant law or respond to any subpoena, court orders, or warrants, or to protect the rights of PenPals, its users or the rights of third parties.

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Data retention

We will only keep your Personal Information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements).

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

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Our security measures

We take security seriously and have implemented commercially reasonable administrative, physical and technological measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, loss, misuse or disclosure. We have established procedures to handle any actual or suspected personal data breach and in certain circumstances, we may notify you of breaches affecting your personal data. We limit access to your personal data to only those employees and other staff who have a business need to have access. If you wish to report a security concern or if you have a question around security, please submit your inquiry to support@penpalsapp.com.

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Your rights

California residents are provided specific rights regarding their Personal Information. If you are a resident of California, you have the following rights:

Right to Notice. You have the right to be notified what categories of Personal Information are being collected and the purposes for which the Personal Information is being used. We collect (and have collected over the past 12 months) the categories of Personal Information described under “Information Collected”, and may disclose this information for the business purposes described under “Use of Information”.
Right to Access. You have the right to request certain information about our collection and use of your Personal Information over the past 12 months. In response, we will provide you with the following information, as requested by you:
- The categories of personal information that we have collected about you
- The categories of sources from which that personal information was collected
- The business or commercial purpose for collecting, sharing or selling your personal information
- The categories of third parties with whom we have shared or to whom we have sold your personal information
- The specific pieces of personal information that we have collected about you
- If we have shared or sold your personal information to any third parties for a business purpose over the past 12 months, the categories of personal information shared with each category of third party recipient
Right to Correct Inaccurate Personal Information. You have the right to request that we correct inaccurate Personal Information that we maintain about you.
Right to Opt-Out. You have the right to direct us not to sell your Personal Information. PenPals does not sell any Personal Information for money.
Right to Request Deletion. You have the right to request that we delete Personal Information that we have collected about you, subject to certain legal exceptions where retention of such information may be required.
Right to Transfer. You have the right to receive a copy of your Personal Information, in a commonly-used and machine-readable format unless doing so would cause us an undue burden.‍
Right to Limit Use and Disclosure of Sensitive Personal Information. You have the right to request that we restrict further processing of your Personal Information.

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Exercising your rights

To exercise the rights described above, you must send us a request that (1) provides enough information to allow us to verify that you are the person about whom we have collected personal information, and (2) describes your request in enough detail to allow us to understand, evaluate and respond to it. Please send your request by emailing us at: support@penpalsapp.com

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We cannot respond to your request or provide you with your Personal Information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the Personal Information belongs to you.

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We will work to respond to your request within 45 days of receipt, though this time period may be extended if we need more time to complete your request.

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Typically, we will not charge you a fee for making a request unless your request(s) is excessive, repetitive or clearly unfounded. If we determine that your request warrants a fee, we will notify you of the fee and explain that decision before completing your request.

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Non-Discrimination

We will not discriminate against you for exercising the rights above. We will not deny you our goods or services, charge you different prices or rates, or provide you a lower quality of goods and services if you exercise these rights. However, we may offer different tiers of our Services as allowed by applicable data privacy laws with varying prices, rates or levels of quality of the goods or services you receive related to the value of Personal Information that we receive from you. In addition, for technical reasons, your account will not function if we delete all of your Personal Information.

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Withdrawing your consent

If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the “Contact Us” section below.

However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

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Other matters

Use of cookies and other tracking technologies

We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to gather information when you interact with our Services. Some online tracking technologies help us maintain the security of our Services, prevent crashes, fix bugs, save your preferences, and assist with basic site functions.

We also permit third parties and service providers to use online tracking technologies on our Services for analytics and advertising, including to help manage and display advertisements, to tailor advertisements to your interests, or to send abandoned shopping cart reminders (depending on your communication preferences). The third parties and service providers use their technology to provide advertising about products and services tailored to your interests which may appear either on our Services or on other websites.

If you would rather not accept cookies when you visit us, please configure your specific browser settings to reject cookies. To opt-out of third-party cookies, please use the appropriate option(s) below:

To opt-out of ad targeting cookies set by Google and Doubleclick on our Site, visit the following link: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads?hl=en.
To opt-out of receiving personalized ads from third party advertisers and ad networks who are members of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) or who follow the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising (i.e. for all websites and not just this Site), visit the opt-out pages on the NAI website and DAA website or visit the following link: https://preferences-mgr.truste.com/
In order to control the collection of data for analytical purposes by Google Analytics, you may want to visit the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
For instructions on how to configure your browser settings to reject cookies being served by companies that are not part of the NAI or DAA, please visit your browser Help menu. You can also delete all cookies that are already on your computer's hard drive by searching for and deleting files with "cookie" in it.

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Transfer of Personal Information

Our servers are located in the United States. If you are accessing our Services from outside the United States, you understand that the information you provide through our Site will be transferred to, stored, and processed by us in our facilities and by those third parties with whom we may share your personal information.

If you are a resident in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), or Switzerland, then these countries may not necessarily have data protection laws or other similar laws as comprehensive as those in your country. However, we will take all necessary measures to protect your personal information in accordance with this privacy notice and applicable law.

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Children’s privacy

We do not knowingly collect, solicit data from, or market to children under 18 years of age (though adults may choose to provide information about those under 18, as described in “Source of Information - Information About Other People”), nor do we knowingly sell such personal information. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 18 or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to such minor dependent’s use of the Services. If we learn that personal information from users less than 18 years of age has been collected, we will deactivate the account and take reasonable measures to promptly delete such data from our records. If you believe that a child under 18 may have provided us with Personal Information, please contact us using the contact details provided in the “Contact Us” section below.

Account termination

If you request to terminate your account, we will deactivate or delete your account and information from our active databases. However, we may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our legal terms and/or comply with applicable legal requirements.

Email marketing

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By creating an account, purchasing our products or saving a design on the Site, you may be opted into receiving email messages. These messages could include changes to features of our service and additional email messages about our products, services, contests, and promotions that we feel may be of interest to you. If you no longer wish to receive these types of promotional communications from us, you may (i) select the unsubscribe link which is present in each email, (ii) update your email preferences in account settings, (iii) contact customer service at any time, or (iv) email support@penpalsapp.com. Opting out may prevent you from receiving email messages regarding special offers, improvements, or other updates from Minted.

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Online policy only

This Privacy Policy applies only to information collected through our Site and Services and not to information collected by us offline.

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Do-not-track

Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track ("DNT") feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this privacy notice.

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Updates to this notice

We may update this privacy notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated "Revised" date at the top of this privacy notice. If we make material changes to this privacy notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this privacy notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

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Contact us

If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may contact us via email at support@penpalsapp.com