Privacy Policy

This is the privacy policy (‘policy”) for shopscientificamerican.com which is operated by The Wildflower Group LLC under a valid license with Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc.  Throughout this website (“Site”), the terms “we”, “us” and “our” refer to The Wildflower Group.  The Wildflower Group is located at 1422 Grand Street, Unit 4D, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030.  We can also be contacted at ecommerce@thewildflowergroup.com.   

Please read our privacy policy carefully to get a clear understanding of how we collect, use, protect or otherwise handle your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Non-Personally Identifiable Information (NPII) in accordance with our Site. By using this Site, you consent to the terms and conditions of this policy and to our processing of PII and NPII for the purposes stated below. If you do not agree to the terms and conditions of this policy, please do not use the Site.

1.  Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”)
 
“Personally Identifiable Information” is information that identifies you personally, such as your name, address, telephone number, email address, or company name. We collect and store the PII that you have provided to us and here are some examples of manners in which we may collect your PII on the Site:

• We may collect your email address if you contact us with a question;
• We may collect your first and last name, date of birth and email address if you choose to participate in a contest or sweepstakes; and
• We may collect your first and last name, your address, and your credit card and billing information if you make a purchase of a product on www.shopscientificamerican.com.
• We may collect your email address, place of residence and other information from your public profile if you register on our Site through a social media site such as Facebook.

If you do not want us to collect your PII, please do not provide it to us.

2.  Non-Personally Identifiable Information (“NPII”)

“Non-Personally Identifiable Information” can be technical information or it can be demographic information, such as your age, gender or interests. NPII does NOT identify you personally. Here are some examples of the NPII that is collected via the Site and a description of how this information is used:

• Internet Protocol (IP) address – Your IP address is a number that lets computers attached to the Internet know where to send you data – such as the webpages you view. We use this information to deliver our webpages to you upon request, to tailor our Site to the interests of our users and to measure traffic within our Site.
• Cookie – A “cookie” is a small text file that may be used to collect information about your activity on the Site. For example, when someone visits a page within the Site, a cookie is placed on the user’s machine (if the user accepts cookies) or is read if the user has visited the Site previously. You may set most browsers to notify you if you receive a cookie, or you may choose to block cookies with your browser, but if you do, you may not be able to take advantage of the personalized features enjoyed by other users to our Site.

3. Use of Information Collected Via the Site

We use your PII and NPII that is collected on the Site primarily for the following purposes:

• To alert you to special offers and updated information;
• To complete a transaction or service requested by you;
• To fulfill the terms of a promotion;
• To ensure the Site is relevant to your needs;
• To notify you about a material change to this policy, if necessary;
• To allow you access to limited-entry areas of the Site; and
• To contact you in response to sign up forms such as Contact Us or Order Inquiry 

4.  Sharing and Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information and Non-Personally Identifiable Information

We may share or disclose your PII and/or NPII in the following instances: 

(i) To fulfill a service to you. For example, if you choose to provide us with your email for a coupon code, we may share your PII in order to provide the code to you. In addition, if you email us a question, we may use your email address to process your request and respond to your question. Also, if you are entering a sweepstakes or contest, we may use your PII in order to fulfill the terms of that promotion. This means that we may share the information for prize fulfillment purposes or with mail carriers. We also may share your information with the co-sponsor of that promotion:

(ii) To unaffiliated third-party service providers, agents or independent contractors who help us maintain our Site and provide other administrative services to us (including, but not limited to, order processing and fulfillment, providing customer service, maintaining and analyzing data, sending customer communications on our behalf, and entry collection, winner selection and prize fulfillment for contests, sweepstakes and other promotions). We seek to ensure that these unaffiliated third parties will not use the personally identifiable information for any other purpose than to provide the administrative services for which they are responsible. Because such unaffiliated third-party service providers that help us administer our Site will have access to users' PII, if you do not wish for our unaffiliated third-party service providers to have access to your information, please do not submit any personally identifiable information to us.

(iii) To complete your purchase. If you choose to make a purchase on the Site, we may collect from you your credit card number, billing address and other information related to such purchase, and we may use such collected information in order to fulfill your purchase. We may also provide such information, or other personally identifiable information provided by you, to unaffiliated third parties as necessary to complete your purchase (for example, to process your credit card). 

(iv) To comply with the law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary in order to conform to the requirements of law or comply with legal process served on us, protect and defend our rights or property, including circumstances to protect the personal safety of our end users. 

(v) To third parties as part of any corporate reorganization process including, but not limited to, mergers, acquisitions, and sales of all or substantially all of our assets.

(vi) To track and analyze NPII and aggregate usage and volume statistical information from our visitors and customers and provide such information to third parties. 

(vii) To protect against potential fraud, we may verify with third parties the information collected from the Site. In the course of such verification, we may receive PII about you from such services. In particular, if you use a credit card or debit card to purchase merchandise from us, we may use card authorization and fraud screening services to verify that your card information and address matches the information that you supplied to us, and that the card has not been reported as lost or stolen.

Except as described in this Privacy Policy or at the time we request the information, we do not otherwise use, share or otherwise disclose your personally identifiable information to any third parties.

5.  International Transfer of Information

If you choose to provide us with PII, we may transfer that information to third parties, across borders, and from your country or jurisdiction to other countries or jurisdictions around the world.

6.  Opt-Out

We communicate with users who subscribe to our services on a regular basis via email. For example, we may use your email address to confirm an order, to send you notice of payments, to send you information about changes to our products and services, and to send notices and other disclosures as required by law. Generally, users cannot opt-out of these communications, but they will be primarily informational in nature rather than promotional.

However, we provide you the opportunity to opt-out if you do not want to receive other types of communication from us, such as emails or updates from us regarding new services and products offered on the Site or if you do not want us to share your PII with third parties. The opt-out choice may be exercised by ticking or un-ticking the appropriate box if such checkbox is available at the points where PII is collected or by contacting us. We will process your unsubscribe as soon as possible, but please be aware that in some circumstances you may receive a few more messages until the unsubscribe is processed. You also may opt-out of receiving such emails by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link within the text of the email.

7.  Third-Party Web Sites

This policy applies solely to information collected on the Site. The Site may contain links to other websites. We are not responsible for the content and the data collection on respective third-party websites; please check the privacy practices of respective websites for information of respective websites’ data processing activities. 

Social Media plugins 

Our Site may use social media plugins to enable you to easily share information with others.  When you visit our Site, the operator of the social media plugin that is on our Site can place a cookie on your computer that lets that operator recognize individuals on their website who have previously visited our Site.  If you have previously logged into the social media website while browsing on our Site, social media plugins may allow that social media website to receive identifiable information about you directly that shows you have visited our Site.  The social media plugin may collect this information for visitors who have logged into social networks, whether or not they specifically interact with the plugin on our Site.  Social media plugins also allow the social media website to share information about your activities on our Site with other uses of their social media website.  We do not control any of the content from social media plugins.  For more information about social media plugins from social media websites, you should refer to those websites’ privacy and data sharing statements.

8.  Security

We have reasonable state of the art security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of personal data under our control. For example, our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorized personnel have access to personal data. While we cannot ensure or guarantee that loss, misuse or alteration of information will never occur, we use all reasonable efforts to prevent it.

You should bear in mind that submission of information over the internet is never entirely secure. We cannot guarantee the security of information you submit via our Site while it is in transit over the internet and any such submission is at your own risk.

9.  Age Screening

Some parts of the Site require that PII be submitted in order to participate. For example, if you want to receive more information about us, you must give us your email address. Our Site is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect any personal data from children under 13 years old.  However, if the parent or guardian of a child under 13 believes that the child has provided us with personal data, the parent or guardian of that child should contact us at ecommerce@thewildflowergroup.com to request the deletion of this data from our files.   

10.  Assignment

In the event that all or part of our assets are sold or acquired by another company, or in the event of a merger, you grant us the right to assign the PII and NPII collected via the Site.

11.  Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager

We use Google Analytics, a web analytics serviced provided by Google LLC, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA (“Google”). On our behalf, Google will use the information generated by a cookie for the purpose of evaluating your use of the Site, compiling reports on Site activity and providing other services relating to Site activity and internet activity in connection with the use of the Site.

12.  Your Rights

Under the legislation applicable to you, you may be entitled to exercise some or all of the following rights:

1. require (i) information as to whether your personal data is retained and (ii) access to and/or duplicates of your personal data retained, including the purposes of the processing, the categories of personal data concerned, and the data recipients as well as potential retention periods;
2. request rectification, removal or restriction of your personal data, e.g. because (i) it is incomplete or inaccurate, (ii) it is no longer needed for the purposes for which it was collected, or (iii) the consent on which the processing was based has been withdrawn;
3. refuse to provide and – without impact to data processing activities that have taken place before such withdrawal – withdraw your consent to processing of your personal data at any time;
4. object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, that your personal data shall be subject to a processing. In this case, please provide us with information about your particular situation. After the assessment of the facts presented by you we will either stop processing your personal data or present you our compelling legitimate grounds for an ongoing processing;
5. take legal actions in relation to any potential breach of your rights regarding the processing of your personal data, as well as to lodge complaints before the competent data protection regulators;
6. require (i) to receive the personal data concerning you, which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and (ii) to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from our side; where technically feasible you shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from us to another controller; and/or
7. not to be subject to any automated decision making, including profiling (automatic decisions based on data processing by automatic means, for the purpose of assessing several personal aspects) which produce legal effects on you or affects you with similar significance.

13.  California Online Privacy Protection Act

Under California law, our customers who are California residents may request Under California law, our customers who are California residents may request certain information regarding the types of information shared by us with third parties for their direct marketing purposes, and the identities of those third parties.  If you are a California resident, you may make such a request by sending an email to ecommerce@thewildflowergroup.com.   

14.  Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to change this privacy policy from time to time by updating our Site respectively. Please visit the Site regularly and check our respective current privacy policy. This policy was last updated on October 3, 2019.

15.  Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at ecommerce@thewildflowergroup.com. All information you provide in any written communication will also be covered by this policy.

16.  Use of this Site

The Site is controlled, operated and administered in the United States and governed by United States law.

1. the Site is not available to residents of the EU.
2. The Products on the Site are not available for sale to residents of the EU and the Site prevents shipping of products to any address within the EU or within Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Lebanon, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
3. If you visit the site from outside the United States, any of your PII or NPII will be automatically collected and processed and your information may be transferred to, stored and processed in the United States where our databases are operated. The data protection and other laws of the United States and other countries might not be as comprehensive or protective of certain rights as those in your country. Under United States law, your information may be subject to access requests from governments, courts, or law enforcement in the United States.

By using the Site, you consent to your information being transferred to our facilities and to the facilities of those third parties with whom we share it as described in our Privacy Policy and processed in those facilities. If you do not wish for the Site to collect your PII or NPII, please do not use this Site.

If you are from the EU and DO NOT want your PII or NPII information automatically collected and processed, please do not use this Site.