Privacy and Data Protection Policy

How our personal data gets used, and abused, on the internet is rightly a big concern. Generally, Rational Hearts supports regulations and controls put in place to limit and make more transparent how companies use personal data.

We need to do business in a new way, a way that puts love and relationships first. This is our attempt to be more transparent and aware of how we use data.

About Collecting Personal Information

We collect personal information because without your information, we can’t be in relationship with you.

• If you’re a client of ours, we need to know where you are to reach you and deliver what we promise!
• If you’re not yet a client, but interested, we often need your personal information to send you invitations to our offers and free content, so you can consider the invitations and benefit from the free content.
• Your mere looking at our website or social media content doesn’t give us any information at all, but if you interact with our content (such as liking or commenting on Facebook or blog content), we do want and need to collect that information so we can continue to be in relationship with you.

We only send information to folks who ask for it, usually when you fill out a form

• on our website, or
• on one of the platforms that we show up on (Facebook, for instance), or
• when you make a purchase with us, or
• in a conversation with someone on our team.

What personal information is collected?

What we collect depends entirely on how you interact with us. We don’t take anything you don’t voluntarily share with us– we do not participate in nefarious “data mining” of personal data.

Some of the data that we may ask you for (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Name
• Email address
• Mailing Address
• Phone Number
• Credit Card Information
• Date of Birth
• RationalHearts username/password
• Photo
• Website
• Other contact information or preferences
• Details on your purpose for Rational Hearts‘ services.

How personal information is used

First and foremost, we use your data to deliver information and services to you. We also use it to help us learn about who our best clients are, and how to reach other people like them.

We do attempt to coordinate data across the different platforms we show up on. So, for instance, we may take personal information you give us through our website and share that information with our Facebook account, so we can find more people like you. We share no personal details, payment information or otherwise, from one platform to another. Generally, when we do share across platforms, it’s just name and email so that we can see if you also have an account on the other platform.

The Rational Hearts team, which is my spouse and I, has access to the data in our systems in order to our job.

All data is stored in online systems we use; there is no paper storage of information. Some examples of the systems we’re using at the time this is written: WordPress, ContactForm7, MailChimp, Moxie, PayPal, Zoom, and maybe soon Facebook ad manager and business manager.

We do not store credit card information on any local systems. All payment information is stored within secure third party platforms, whose business is to do that securely with high levels of encryption. We cannot, for instance, look up your credit card number ourselves and use it.

Non-personal information- collection and use

This means information that does not identify a specific person.

We do not use website analytics, pixel tags, or cookies to help us understand how people use our website and our services, to look for larger patterns. We might in future.

If at any time non-personal information is connected with personal information, then it will all be considered personal information and treated as such.

We don’t share your information

This means we don’t consciously give out or sell your information to other companies that would then market to you. Never ever ever.

We do share your information with our third party services that, essentially, are the tools that we use to run the business. Those companies all have privacy policies in place so they are not accessing your data (without our accounts) to market to you or otherwise use your information for any reason, yet we can still direct that tool to perform a function, for us, within our account. For instance, your email address is stored within our email system (which, at the time of this writing, is MailChimp. We direct MailChimp to send our written emails to the email addresses of people who have opted in, and MailChimp carries this out.

This is not considered the same as giving your email address to the company MailChimp so they can market their services to you. This latter example we would never, ever do.

Security and Protection

We use tools and third party companies that are committed to high levels of security encryption. We are not encryption or data security experts by any stretch of the imagination, and are basically trusting these services to provide the high levels of security they are claiming to. So far, at the time of this writing, they haven’t failed us.

No physical (paper) documents with personal information are kept on file. All technology is kept up-to-date in as reasonable a time-frame as is possible (generally within the month the update is released).

We instruct our contractors delete any information they may temporarily place in files so they can do their work, and shred any paper copies once their work is complete (this includes any hand-written notes-to-self as they do their work.)

It’s your data, you retain control

You can unsubscribe, or otherwise let us know that you don’t wish us to use your data, and we will honor your request. You can ask us how your data has been used, and we will let you know.

You can ask to be entirely deleted from our system, and we can do that, with the exception that if you’ve bought anything from us, we are required to track income for tax purposes, and your receipts would remain in our accounting system for at least seven years. But you would be removed from our marketing or client delivery systems as entirely as we can without compromising our tax records.

Bear in mind that we are a tiny company, at the time of this writing only 1 person, basically. We will honor all requests, and… please be patient for us to follow-up with you. It may take up to two months to meet some requests.

You can customize some of how we use your data by using the personal link at the bottom of any email we send you using MailChimp.

Questions

We’re doing our darndest to honor your needs and desires around your data, meet legal requirements, and our live our desire to be transparent and serve you well. If you have any questions, please ask.

As we learn more about how to do this well, this privacy policy may be updated from time to time without notice, so feel free to check back as often as you like.

With deep gratitude for your trust in us,
Briana Jacoba,
RationalHearts.com

– last updated March 3rd, 2024