Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy describes the types of information we collect on the Sites, how we use such information and to whom and under what circumstances we may disclose it. This Privacy Policy applies only to this website (www.highergroundstrading.com), our mobile sites, and our use of social media sites (collectively, the “Sites”), and any other personal information obtained when you visit our stores, call, email, or otherwise communicate with Higher Grounds. By accessing the Sites on any computer, mobile phone, tablet, or other device (collectively, “Device”), making a purchase from Higher Grounds, or otherwise interacting with Higher Grounds, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the policy, please do not use the Sites.
We may modify this Privacy Policy at any time, and will post the current version on the Sites. We encourage you to periodically review our Privacy Policy to stay informed about how we are using the information we collect.
Information We Collect and How We Use and Share It
For the 12-month period prior to the date of this Privacy Policy, we explain here what categories of personal information we have collected, where we got it from, and with whom we have shared it:
Contact information: Such as your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, telephone numbers, or other contact information. For you, the decision to provide this information is typically optional, however, if you choose not to provide the requested information, you may not be able to use some or all of the features of our Sites. To communicate with you, for product fulfillment and shipping, to send you information, newsletters, promotional materials and other offerings from Higher Grounds, to offer a contest or other promotion, when you contact us, when you request customer service or support, to complete your registration on our Sites, to administer your account(s) with us, and to provide you with offers that may be of interest to you.
Purchase and order information: Contact information, together with purchase details online and in store through e-receipts, delivery details, payment details, any communications we have received about your order or purchase. From you; to validate, confirm, verify, deliver, install, and track your order, including to arrange for shipping, handle returns and refunds, maintain a record of the purchases you make, to service products you purchased from us, to gather feedback on our stores, products and the Sites, and to provide you offers that may be of interest to you.
Other delivery information: Name and address of recipient for delivery, if different from customer’s. From you; to deliver to the person at the address which you have requested.
Payment information: Name, card issuer and card type, credit or debit card number, expiration date, CVV code and billing address. From you and your payment card issuer; to check that the right person is using the right card or account, meet the requirements of the card brands or account issuers, and to make sure we are paid for what you buy. Service providers who process payments for us; our card processor stores all credit card information. They conduct the entire credit card transaction using industry standard 128 bit SSL encryption; we only store a record that the transaction took place.
Information you provide about a third party: If you send someone else a communication from the Sites (such as sending a gift or virtual gift card), we may collect information such as that person's name, telephone number, email, and/or shipping address. From you; to deliver to or communicate with the person at the address which you have requested.
Social Media: Information about you, including Usage Data and personal information such as lists of your friends, "likes", comments you have shared, groups and location. From third parties, particularly social media platforms. To enhance your online shopping experience, including as a way to recognize you and welcome you to the Sites, to provide you with customized Sites content, targeted offers, promotions and advertising on the Sites, through other third party sites or apps, via email, text messages, or app push notifications that are offered by Higher Grounds or other marketing partners that might be of interest to you.
Legal information: Fraud checks or flags raised about your transactions, the payment card you want to use, payment card refusals, suspected crimes, complaints, claims and accidents. From you, the police, crime and fraud prevention agencies, payment card providers, the public, regulators, your and our professional advisors and representatives; to protect you, other customers and our business against criminal activities and risks, unauthorized use, and make sure we understand and can meet our legal obligations to you and others and can defend ourselves. Service providers who help us with fraud protection and credit risk reduction, law enforcement and other governmental authorities in accordance with applicable law may also access this information.
Preference information: Your marketing preferences, your account settings including any default preferences, any preferences you have indicated, the types of services/offers that interest you, or the areas of our Sites that you visit. From you, from our Sites technology interaction with your browser/Devices and cookies and other similar technologies tracking the pages you visit, the marketing messages you open and the links you follow, including your interactions with social media; to enhance your online shopping experience, including as a way to recognize you and welcome you to the Sites, to provide you with customized Sites content, targeted offers, promotions and advertising on the Sites, through other third party sites or app, via email, text messages, or push notifications that are offered by Higher Grounds or other marketing partners that might be of interest to you. Our service providers that perform website analytic services for us may also access this information.
Communications: Communications we have with you. Please note that we may record calls to our customer service team. From you; to handle your requests, to contact you when necessary or requested, including responding to your questions and comments and providing customer support, and to obtain customer feedback and improve our customer service and customer shopping experience.
Device information: IP address, internet provider, operating system and browser used, type of device, such as laptop or smartphone, device cookie settings and other device details, such as MAC address and geolocation, if you use our Sites and permit it to obtain your precise geolocation. From you and from our Sites technology’s interaction with your browser or Devices; to make sure our Sites, including app technology, works properly with your Device and make sure you can see and use our intended website and apps on the Device you are using, and for analytical and demographic purposes and to provide offers that may be of interest to you. We also will use this information to protect the security or integrity of the Sites and our business, such as by protecting against and preventing fraud, unauthorized transactions, and managing risk exposure, including by identifying potential hackers and other unauthorized users. Our third party vendors and other service providers that perform website analytic services for us may also access this information.
Usage Data: When you use the Sites, some data is automatically transferred from your browser to our server, including your browser type, operating system type or mobile device model, viewed webpages, links that are clicked, IP address, mobile device identifier or other unique identifier, sites or apps visited before coming to our Sites, the amount of time you spend viewing or using the Sites, the number of times you return, or other click-stream or site usage data, emails we send that you open, forward, or click through to our Sites. From you and from Sites technology’s interaction with your browser or devices, for more information see “Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies,” below. We will use this information in an aggregated non-specific format for analytical and demographic purposes. We also will use this information to protect the security or integrity of the Sites and our business, such as by protecting against and preventing fraud, unauthorized transactions, and managing risk exposure, including by identifying potential hackers and other unauthorized users. Our service providers that perform website analytic services for us may also access this information.
Accident information: Details about any accident or injury on our premises, or health incident. From you, witnesses or observed about you; to get you the help you need, deal with the emergency services, insurance and claims. Law enforcement and other governmental authorities in accordance with applicable law, and our professional advisors may also access this information.
Suspected crime information: Details of your identity, image, name and address, suspected or alleged thefts, fraud, assault or other criminal behavior. From crime and fraud prevention agencies, from you, witnesses, and from the police; to protect customers, the public and our business against risks and crime. Law enforcement and other governmental authorities in accordance with applicable law, and our professional advisors may also access this information.
In some jurisdictions, individuals may have the right to opt-in or withdraw consent for certain uses. If you reside in such jurisdictions, you may have additional rights which are detailed below, “Access, Correction and Deletion.”
In the event that our company or substantially all of its assets are acquired, your personal information may be one of the transferred assets. We may also disclose your personal information with your express consent. We may share aggregate, non-personally identifiable information about Site users with third parties.
Please note that if you voluntarily submit any personal information for posting on the Sites, such as a review or a blog post, the information becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others, so you should use care before posting information about yourself online.
Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies
Like many commercial websites, we analyze how visitors use our Sites through what is known as "cookie" technology. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your computer when you access the Sites and allows us to recognize you each time you visit the Sites. We may use cookies to: (1) allow you to use the Sites without having to re-enter your user name and password; (2) enhance or personalize your Site usage and shopping experience; (3) monitor Site usage; (4) manage the Sites; and (5) improve the Sites and our products and services, including providing you with interest-based ads. For more information on our advertising, see below: “Interest-Based Advertising.” If you choose, you can set your browser to reject cookies or you can manually delete individual cookies or all of the cookies on your computer by following your browser’s help file directions. However, if your browser is set to reject cookies or you manually delete cookies, you may have some trouble accessing and using some of the pages and features that are currently on our Sites, or that we may put on our Sites in the future. Note that browser-management tools for cookies are outside of our control and we cannot guarantee their effectiveness.
We may also use web beacons on the Sites, in our emails, and in our advertisements on other websites. Web beacons are tiny graphic images that are used to collect information about your visit to the Sites, such as the pages you view and the features you use, as well as information about whether you open and/or act upon one of our emails or advertisements. We may also collect the URL of the website you visited immediately before coming to the Sites. Web beacons help us analyze our Site visitors' behavior and measure the effectiveness of the Sites and our advertising. We may work with service providers that help us track, collect and analyze this information. We may combine the information we collect through cookies and web beacons with other information we have collected from you or information from other sources.
Interest-Based Advertising
We may use third-party advertising companies that use tracking technologies to serve our advertisements across the Internet. These companies may collect information about your visits to the Sites and other websites and your interaction with our advertising and other communications. These advertising companies serve ads on behalf of us and others on non-affiliated sites, and some of those ads may be personalized, meaning that they are intended to be relevant to you based on information collected about your visits to the Sites and elsewhere over time. Other companies may also use such technology to advertise on our Sites. You have the choice to tell us not to collect and use this information, and in some jurisdictions, we will only engage in interest-based advertising if you opt-in. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices concerning interest-based ads, visit:
http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/
Communications from Higher Grounds
If you sign up for our mailing list, we will send you informational emails and/or text messages about offers of services. At any time, you can ‘unsubscribe’ yourself from our email or phone list simply by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ button. If you do not wish to receive communications from us about special offers and promotions, you can opt-out of receiving these communications by following the instructions contained in the messages you receive. Even if you opt-out of receiving these messages, we reserve the right to send you certain communications relating to the services we provide, and we may send you service announcements and administrative messages. We do not offer you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving those communications. For more information about interest-based advertising, including how you can manage advertising, please see below “Interest-Based Advertising.”
Access, Correction, & Deletion
We respect your right to access and correct your personal information. You may access your personal information by signing into your account. From there, you can correct or modify your information. You may also exercise your rights, subject to applicable laws, to request that we delete or restrict access to your personal data. We may need to retain it for legally permitted purposes and this will be explained to you if necessary.
If you need assistance correcting or updating your personal information, or would like to request that we delete your personal information, please contact us using the contact information detailed in the “Contact Us” section below.
Retention of Personal Information
Personal information that we collect, access or process will be retained only as long as necessary for the fulfilment of the purposes for which it was collected, unless otherwise provided in agreements between you and Higher Grounds or as required or authorized by law.
Personal information that is no longer required to fulfill the identified purposes will be destroyed, erased or made de-identified.
Security
We maintain reasonable and appropriate measures designed to maintain information we collect in a secure manner. We have taken certain physical, electronic, and administrative steps to safeguard and secure the information we collect from visitors to the Sites. Even though we follow reasonable procedures to try to protect the information in our possession, no security system is perfect and we cannot promise, and you should not expect, that your information will be secure in all circumstances.
Children
The Sites are not directed to children, nor do we knowingly collect any personal information from children under the age of thirteen without verifiable parental consent. If you believe that a child has provided personal information to us, please contact us promptly as described below, and we will endeavor to investigate and delete such information from our systems.
Third Party Websites
The Sites may contain links to third-party websites, such as social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, which may have privacy policies that differ from our own. We are not responsible for the activities and practices that take place on these websites. Accordingly, we recommend that you review the privacy policy posted on any external site before disclosing any personal information. Please contact those websites directly if you have any questions about their privacy policies.
Changes to This Privacy Policy
We may change this privacy policy from time to time, including as required to keep current with rules and regulations, new technologies and security standards. When we do, we will post the change(s) on our Sites. If we change the policy in a material and retroactive manner, we will provide appropriate notice to you.
Your Right to Information
If you submit a request to us, we will verify your identity by asking for information about your relationship with Higher Grounds, such as email address on file, loyalty/customer number, recent order number, or the last four digits of your credit or debit card. Your exercise of these rights will have no adverse effect on the price and quality of our goods or services.
For the 12-month period prior to the date of this Privacy Policy, Higher Grounds has not sold any Personal Information about its customers; nor does it have any plans to do so in the future.
Visitors from Outside the United States—Cross-Border Transfer
The Sites are hosted in the United States. If you are visiting the Sites from outside the United States, your information may be transferred to, stored and processed in the United States or other countries in accordance with this Privacy Policy. The data protection and other applicable laws of the United States or other countries may not be as comprehensive as those laws or regulations in your country or may otherwise differ from the data protection or consumer protection laws in your country. Your information may be available to government authorities under lawful orders and law applicable in such jurisdictions. By using the Sites and/or providing personal information to us, you consent to transfer of your information to our facilities as described in this Privacy Policy.
Right to Lodge Complaints
We are transparent about the ways in which we collect and use personal information, and welcome your questions and concerns. If you have any concern or complaint about the way we handle your personal information, please contact us as described below. To the extent you believe we have not addressed your concerns or otherwise choose to do so, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority in the country where you reside and/or the United States. You may contact the US Federal Trade Commission regarding your concerns. For more information, please see https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/submit-consumer-complaint-ftc.
Contact Us
If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or how we collect and use the information of our customers, you can contact us by emailing us at hello@highergroundstrading.com, or by postal address at Higher Grounds Trading Company; 806 Red Drive Ste. 150, Traverse City, MI 49684; ATTN: Privacy Request, or by telephone at (231) 922-9009.
If we need, or are required, to contact you concerning any event that involves your information, we may do so by email, telephone, or mail. If you make a purchase, we will send you a confirmation email.