Privacy Policy

The Cactus Creative Terms of Service

1. Terms

By accessing the website at https://www.thecactuscreative.com, you are agreeing to be bound by these terms of service, all applicable laws and regulations, and agree that you are responsible for compliance with any applicable local laws. You agree that you are at least 13 years of age. If you do not agree with any of these terms, you are prohibited from using or accessing this site.

2. Use License

a. Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of the materials on The Cactus Creative’s website for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only. This is the grant of a license, not a transfer of title, and under this license you may not:

(i) modify or copy the materials;
(ii) use the materials for any commercial purpose, or for any public display (commercial or non-commercial);
(iii) remove any copyright or other proprietary notations from the materials; or
(iv) transfer the materials to another person or “mirror” the materials on any other server.

b. This license shall automatically terminate if you violate any of these restrictions and may be terminated by The Cactus Creative at any time. Upon terminating your viewing of these materials or upon the termination of this license, you must destroy any downloaded materials in your possession whether in electronic or printed format.

3. Disclaimer

a. The materials on The Cactus Creative’s website are provided on an ‘as is’ basis. The Cactus Creative makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all other warranties including, without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights.

b. Further, The Cactus Creative does not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on its website or otherwise relating to such materials or on any sites linked to this site.

c. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

d. The compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog. All advertising is in the form of advertisements generated by a third party ad network. Those advertisements will be identified as paid advertisements.

e. The owner of this blog might be compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owner. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

f. This blog might contain content which might present a conflict of interest.

4. Limitations

In no event shall The Cactus Creative or its suppliers be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for loss of data or profit, or due to business interruption) arising out of the use or inability to use the materials on The Cactus Creative’s website, even if The Cactus Creative or a The Cactus Creative authorized representative has been notified orally or in writing of the possibility of such damage. Because some jurisdictions do not allow limitations on implied warranties, or limitations of liability for consequential or incidental damages, these limitations may not apply to you.

5. Accuracy of materials

The materials appearing on The Cactus Creative’s website could include technical, typographical, or photographic errors. The Cactus Creative does not warrant that any of the materials on its website are accurate, complete or current. The Cactus Creative may make changes to the materials contained on its website at any time without notice. However The Cactus Creative does not make any commitment to update the materials.

6. Links

The Cactus Creative has not reviewed all of the sites linked to its website and is not responsible for the contents of any such linked site. The inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by The Cactus Creative of the site. Use of any such linked website is at the user’s own risk.

7. Modifications

The Cactus Creative may revise these terms of service for its website at any time without notice. By using this website you are agreeing to be bound by the then current version of these terms of service.

8. Governing Law

These terms and conditions are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of South Africa and you irrevocably submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts in that State or location.

Your privacy is important to us. It is The Cactus Creative’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect from you across our website, https://www.thecactuscreative.com, and other sites we own and operate.

1. Information we collect

Log data

When you visit our website, our servers may automatically log the standard data provided by your web browser. It may include your computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, your browser type and version, the pages you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on each page, and other details.

Personal information

We may ask for personal information, but only if you voluntarily provide it to us. This includes: Name and Email.

This data is considered “identifying information”, as it can personally identify you. We only request personal information relevant to providing you with a service, and only use it to help provide or improve this service.

2. Legal bases for processing

We will process your personal information lawfully, fairly and in a transparent matter. We collect and process information about you only where we have legal bases for doing so.

These legal bases depend on the services you use and how you use them, meaning we collect and use your information only where:

it’s necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party or to take steps at your request before entering into such a contract (for example, when we provide a service you request from us);
it satisfies a legitimate interest (which is not overridden by your data protection interests), such as for research and development, to market and promote our services, and to protect our legal rights and interests;
you give us consent to do so for a specific purpose (for example, you might consent to us sending you our newsletter); or
we need to process your data to comply with a legal obligation.

Where you consent to our use of information about you for a specific purpose, you have the right to change your mind at any time (but this will not affect any processing that has already taken place).

We don’t keep personal information for longer than is necessary. While we retain this information, we will protect it within commercially acceptable means to prevent loss and theft, as well as unauthorised access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. That said, we advise that no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure and cannot guarantee absolute data security. If necessary, we may retain your personal information for our compliance with a legal obligation or in order to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another natural person.

3. Collection and use of information

We may collect, hold, use and disclose information for the following purposes and personal information will not be further processed in a manner that is incompatible with these purposes:

to enable you to customise or personalise your experience of our website;
to contact and communicate with you;
for internal record keeping and administrative purposes;
for analytics, market research and business development, including to operate and improve our website, associated applications and associated social media platforms;
to run competitions and/or offer additional benefits to you;
for advertising and marketing, including to send you promotional information about our products and services and information about third parties that we consider may be of interest to you; and
to comply with our legal obligations and resolve any disputes that we may have.

Email Addresses
We may collect your email address, but only if you voluntarily provide it to us. This may occur, for example, if you sign up to receive an email newsletter, or enter a promotion. We will use your email address for the purposes for which you provided it to us, and also from time to time to send you emails regarding the Site or other products or services that we believe may be of interest to you. You may opt out of such email communications at any time by clicking the “unsubscribe” button in the email.

We will not sell your email address to any third parties.

We use Mailchimp to manage our email marketing subscriber list and to send emails to our subscribers. Mailchimp is a third-party provider, which may process your data using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our newsletter.

Mailchimp’s privacy policy is available at https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy.

Social analytics for sharing

We use Google Analytics to track social shares made at our website. Google automatically collect and store certain information in their server logs which includes device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL, cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account, in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy.

We embed a Facebook widget to allow you to see number of likes/shares/recommends and /share/recommend” our webpages. This widget may collect your IP address, your web browser User Agent, store and retrieve cookies on your browser, embed additional tracking, and monitor your interaction with the widget, including correlating your Facebook account with whatever action you take within the widget (such as “liking/sharing/recommending” our webpage), if you are logged in to Facebook. For more information about how this data may be used, please see Facebook’s data privacy policy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update.

We use a Twitter Tweet widget at our website. As a result, our website makes requests to Twitter’s servers for you to be able to tweet our webpages using your Twitter account. These requests make your IP address visible to Twitter, who may use it in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://twitter.com/en/privacy#update.

We use Pinterest Save widget at our website to allow you to pin images to Pinterest from our webpages. These requests may track your IP address in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy.

4. Disclosure of personal information to third parties

We may disclose personal information to:

third party service providers for the purpose of enabling them to provide their services, including (without limitation) IT service providers, data storage, web-hosting and server providers, debt collectors, maintenance or problem-solving providers, marketing or advertising providers, professional advisors and payment systems operators;
our employees, contractors and/or related entities;
courts, tribunals, regulatory authorities and law enforcement officers, as required by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings, or in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights; and
third parties to collect and process data.

Data processing and storage

The personal information we collect is stored and processed in, or where we or our partners, affiliates and third-party providers maintain facilities. We only transfer data within jurisdictions subject to data protection laws that reflect our commitment to protecting the privacy of our users.

We only retain personal information for as long as necessary to provide a service, or to improve our services in future. While we retain this data, we will protect it within commercially acceptable means to prevent loss and theft, as well as unauthorised access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. That said, we advise that no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure, and cannot guarantee absolute data security.

If you leave a comment on our blog, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

We keep contact form submissions for as long as necessary for customer service purposes.

Analytics data is stored for one year.

Data captured via the newsletter subscription forms are kept for as long as you stay subscribed. When you unsubscribe, your data is still stored in our program, Mailerlite, in case you want to re-subscribe.

If you request your personal information be deleted, or where your personal information becomes no longer relevant to our operations, we will erase it from our system within a reasonable timeframe.

5. International transfers of personal information

The personal information we collect is stored and processed in South Africa and United States, or where we or our partners, affiliates and third-party providers maintain facilities. By providing us with your personal information, you consent to the disclosure to these overseas third parties.

We will ensure that any transfer of personal information from countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) to countries outside the EEA will be protected by appropriate safeguards, for example by using standard data protection clauses approved by the European Commission, or the use of binding corporate rules or other legally accepted means.

Where we transfer personal information from a non-EEA country to another country, you acknowledge that third parties in other jurisdictions may not be subject to similar data protection laws to the ones in our jurisdiction. There are risks if any such third party engages in any act or practice that would contravene the data privacy laws in our jurisdiction and this might mean that you will not be able to seek redress under our jurisdiction’s privacy laws.

Comments

The owner of this website reserves the right to edit or delete any comment made on this site. Spam comments, comments that contain foul language, profanity or that attack a person individually will be deleted.

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Cookies

We use “cookies” to collect information about you and your activity across our site. A cookie is a small piece of data that our website stores on your computer, and accesses each time you visit, so we can understand how you use our site. This helps us serve you content based on preferences you have specified. Please refer to our Cookie Policy for more information.

Third-party access to information

We use third-party services for:

Analytics tracking
User authentication
Advertising and promotion
Content marketing
Email marketing

These services may access our data solely for the purpose of performing specific tasks on our behalf. We do not share any personally identifying information with them without your explicit consent. We do not give them permission to disclose or use any of our data for any other purpose.

We may, from time to time, allow limited access to our data by external consultants and agencies for the purpose of analysis and service improvement. This access is only permitted for as long as necessary to perform a specific function. We only work with external agencies whose privacy policies align with ours.

We will refuse government and law enforcement requests for data if we believe a request is too broad or unrelated to its stated purpose. However, we may cooperate if we believe the requested information is necessary and appropriate to comply with legal process, to protect our own rights and property, to protect the safety of the public and any person, to prevent a crime, or to prevent what we reasonably believe to be illegal, legally actionable, or unethical activity.

We do not otherwise share or supply personal information to third parties. We do not sell or rent your personal information to marketers or third parties.

Children’s Privacy

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children who use our services. We encourage parents to engage with us in protecting their children’s privacy, ensuring a safe and enjoyable online experience. Please refer to our Children’s Privacy Policy for more information.

Limits of our policy

This privacy policy only covers The Cactus Creative’s own collecting and handling of data. We only work with partners, affiliates and third-party providers whose privacy policies align with ours, however we cannot accept responsibility or liability for their respective privacy practices.

Our website may link to external sites that are not operated by us. Please be aware that we have no control over the content and policies of those sites, and cannot accept responsibility or liability for their respective privacy practices.

Changes to this policy

At our discretion, we may change our privacy policy to reflect current acceptable practices. We will take reasonable steps to let users know about changes via our website. If you are a registered user on https://www.thecactuscreative.com, we will notify you using the contact details saved in your account. Your continued use of this site after any changes to this policy will be regarded as acceptance of our practices around privacy and personal information.

6. Your rights and controlling your personal information

Choice and consent: By providing personal information to us, you consent to us collecting, holding, using and disclosing your personal information in accordance with this privacy policy. If you are under 16 years of age, you must have, and warrant to the extent permitted by law to us, that you have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to access and use the website and they (your parents or guardian) have consented to you providing us with your personal information. You do not have to provide personal information to us, however, if you do not, it may affect your use of this website or the products and/or services offered on or through it.

Information from third parties: If we receive personal information about you from a third party, we will protect it as set out in this privacy policy. If you are a third party providing personal information about somebody else, you represent and warrant that you have such person’s consent to provide the personal information to us.

Restrict: You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your personal information. If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by contacting us using the details below. If you ask us to restrict or limit how we process your personal information, we will let you know how the restriction affects your use of our website or products and services.

Access and data portability: You may request details of the personal information that we hold about you. You may request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. Where possible, we will provide this information in CSV format or other easily readable machine format. You may request that we erase the personal information we hold about you at any time. You may also request that we transfer this personal information to another third party.

Correction: If you believe that any information we hold about you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, please contact us using the details below. We will take reasonable steps to correct any information found to be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading or out of date.

Notification of data breaches: We will comply laws applicable to us in respect of any data breach.

Complaints: If you believe that we have breached a relevant data protection law and wish to make a complaint, please contact us using the details below and provide us with full details of the alleged breach. We will promptly investigate your complaint and respond to you, in writing, setting out the outcome of our investigation and the steps we will take to deal with your complaint. You also may the right to contact a regulatory body or data protection authority in relation to your complaint.

Unsubscribe: To unsubscribe from our e-mail database or opt-out of communications (including marketing communications), please contact us using the details below or opt-out using the opt-out facilities provided in the communication.

7. Cookie Policy

We use “cookies” to help improve your experience of https://www.thecactuscreative.com. This cookie policy is part of The Cactus Creative’s privacy policy, and covers the use of cookies between your device and our site. We also provide basic information on third-party services we may use, who may also use cookies as part of their service, though they are not covered by our policy.

If you don’t wish to accept cookies from us, you should instruct your browser to refuse cookies from https://www.thecactuscreative.com, with the understanding that we may be unable to provide you with some of your desired content and services.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small piece of data that a website stores on your device when you visit, typically containing information about the website itself, a unique identifier that allows the site to recognise your web browser when you return, additional data that serves the purpose of the cookie, and the lifespan of the cookie itself.

Cookies are used to enable certain features (eg. logging in), to track site usage (eg. analytics), to store your user settings (eg. timezone, notification preferences), and to personalise your content (eg. advertising, language).

Cookies set by the website you are visiting are normally referred to as “first-party cookies”, and typically only track your activity on that particular site. Cookies set by other sites and companies (ie. third parties) are called “third-party cookies”, and can be used to track you on other websites that use the same third-party service.

We use Google Analytics on this website. To opt out of analytics tracking, you may install this browser add-on. You may view Google Analytics’ privacy policy here.

You can obtain up-to-date information about blocking and deleting cookies via these links:

(a) https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?hl=en (Chrome);
(b) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences(Firefox);
(c) http://www.opera.com/help/tutorials/security/cookies/ (Opera);
(d) https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/17442/windows-internet-explorer-delete-manage-cookies (Internet Explorer);
(e) https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21411 (Safari); and
(f) https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10-microsoft-edge-and-privacy (Edge).

Please note that blocking cookies may have a negative impact on the functions of many websites, including our Site. Some features of the Site may cease to be available to you.

Types of cookies and how we use them

Essential cookies

Essential cookies are crucial to your experience of a website, enabling core features like user logins, account management, shopping carts and payment processing. We use essential cookies to enable certain functions on our website.

Performance cookies

Performance cookies are used in the tracking of how you use a website during your visit, without collecting personal information about you. Typically, this information is anonymous and aggregated with information tracked across all site users, to help companies understand visitor usage patterns, identify and diagnose problems or errors their users may encounter, and make better strategic decisions in improving their audience’s overall website experience. These cookies may be set by the website you’re visiting (first-party) or by third-party services. We use performance cookies on our site.

Functionality cookies

Functionality cookies are used in collecting information about your device and any settings you may configure on the website you’re visiting (like language and timezone settings). With this information, websites can provide you with customised, enhanced or optimised content and services. These cookies may be set by the website you’re visiting (first-party) or by third-party service. We use functionality cookies for selected features on our site.

Targeting/advertising cookies

Targeting/advertising cookies are used in determining what promotional content is more relevant and appropriate to you and your interests. Websites may use them to deliver targeted advertising or to limit the number of times you see an advertisement. This helps companies improve the effectiveness of their campaigns and the quality of content presented to you. These cookies may be set by the website you’re visiting (first-party) or by third-party services. Targeting/advertising cookies set by third-parties may be used to track you on other websites that use the same third-party service. We use targeting/advertising cookies on our site.

We use third-party advertisements on The Cactus Creative to support our site. These are served by Google Adsense.

Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google Adsense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited.

You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings by visiting this website: https://www.google.com/settings/ads, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. You may also opt out of some third-party vendors’ uses of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services and programs, such as logging into forums and accounts.

Children’s Privacy Policy

We are committed to protecting the privacy of children who use https://www.thecactuscreative.com and its services. This children’s privacy policy is part of our approach to privacy, and covers the way we collect, store and manage information provided by children under the age of 13, in accordance with the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

We encourage parents to engage with us in protecting their children’s privacy, ensuring a safe and enjoyable online experience.

8. Business transfers

If we or our assets are acquired, or in the unlikely event that we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, we would include data among the assets transferred to any parties who acquire us. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any parties who acquire us may continue to use your personal information according to this policy.

9. Collecting information from children

At times, we may require information from children to enable participation in certain activities, for example, registering an account, customising a profile, or receiving notifications. When collecting non-personal information, we encourage children never to provide any details that may personally identify them or reveal their location. We do not require children to provide more information than is necessary to participate in an activity.

We do not use children’s contact details for marketing purposes, though we may use them for our internal marketing and research in order to improve the quality of products and services offered across our site.

Parental consent

In accordance with COPPA, if an activity does require any personal information (such as first name, last name, or email address), we will provide notice to and seek consent from a parent or guardian prior to collecting the information. We only retain collected information for as long as necessary to enable participation in the requested activity.

In the event we discover we have collected personal information in a manner non-compliant with COPPA, we will either delete the information or seek parental consent.

As a parent/guardian, if you believe your child is participating in an activity that collects personal information, and you have not received a notification or request for consent, please feel free to get in touch via our contact page https://www.thecactuscreative.com/contact. We do not use parent contact details for marketing purposes unless marketing materials are explicitly requested.

Safeguarding children’s privacy

We take security seriously, and do what we can within commercially acceptable means to protect your child’s personal information from loss or theft, as well as unauthorised access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. That said, we advise that no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure, and cannot guarantee absolute data security.

Information abuse and community misconduct

We do not tolerate doxing (publishing of private or personal information about an individual without their consent), cyberbullying, or other forms of information abuse on https://www.thecactuscreative.com.

If we discover that a child’s personal information has been disclosed on our site without the express consent of their parent/guardian, we will remove the content in question as quickly as possible and effect disciplinary measures (a warning, suspension or ban) on the offending account.

Third-party access to information

We do not knowingly disclose any personally identifying information or personal information provided by children to third parties. We may, however, disclose anonymised and aggregated versions of this information (analytics and statistics) for business, marketing or public relations purposes.

Parental controls and intervention

As a parent/guardian, you may at any time refuse to let us collect further information from your children for a particular activity or account. If you have given us consent previously, you may contact us via the contact form on our site to request the removal of the information from our records.

Please be aware that the removal of certain information may result in the termination of the associated account, or withdrawal from the associated activity.

10. Limits of our policy

11. Changes to this policy

At our discretion, we may change our privacy policy to reflect current acceptable practices. We will take reasonable steps to let users know about changes via our website. Your continued use of this site after any changes to this policy will be regarded as acceptance of our practices around privacy and personal information.

If we make a significant change to this privacy policy, for example changing a lawful basis on which we process your personal information, we will ask you to re-consent to the amended privacy policy.

The Cactus Creative Data Controller
admin@thecactuscreative.com

This policy is effective as of 8 August 2018.