Privacy Policy
The Bottom Line
The short story is simple. We take your privacy very seriously, and we will not share your personal information with anyone outside of Rocketry Works for any purpose not directly related to fulfilling your order. We're consumers, too, and we treat your data with the same care and consideration we would want our own data to be treated. We are happy to share with you what information we have about you if you personally request it. We respond to genuine personal requests from humans, but we disregard automated bot requests. We do use cookies and other technologies to work with some marketing partners, including Google and Facebook, but personal information is not released to partners without your consent. So, if you're interested in the nitty gritty details of Rocketry Works' privacy policy, you can read on, but the bottom line is that we treat you like we would want to be treated.
Effective Date: January 25, 2023
This privacy notice discloses the privacy practices for Rocketry Works and our website; https://www.rocketryworks.com. This privacy notice applies solely to information collected by this website, except where stated otherwise. It will notify you of the following:
- What information we collect;
- With whom it is shared;
- How it can be corrected;
- How it is secured;
- How policy changes will be communicated; and
- How to address concerns over misuse of personal data.
Information Collection, Use, and Sharing
We are the sole owners of the information collected on this site. We only have access to/collect information that you voluntarily give us via the Rocketry Works website, email or other direct contact from you. We will not sell or rent this information to anyone, and we only use your information to fulfill your orders.
We will use your information to respond to you, regarding the reason you contacted us. We will not share your information with any third party outside of our organization, other than as necessary to fulfill your request, e.g., to ship an order.
Unless you ask us not to, we may contact you via email in the future to tell you about specials, new products or services, or changes to this privacy policy.
Information we collect:
- Email address
- Shipping and billing addresses
- Name
- Phone number
- Payment information
We pass payment information directly to the payment processor, and have no access to your payment specifics. As such, we can not bill you for subsequent order changes, nor can we look up your identifiable credit card information after the fact.
Your Access to and Control Over Information
You may opt out of any future contacts from us at any time. You can do the following at any time by contacting us via the email address or phone number provided on our website:
- Ask to see what data we have about you, if any.
- Ask us to change or correct any data we have about you.
- Ask us to delete any data we have about you.
- Express any concern you have about our use of your data
As required bylaw, and to the best of our ability, we will take appropriate action to comply with your request, because we believe it is the right thing to do. However, at present, none of the established data privacy laws in effect apply to Rocketry Works, because we are out of the geographical jurisdiction of GDPR (European Union), CDPA (California), or VCDPA (Virginia), and because we are exempted from each of these laws because our revenue or number of customers within the jurisdiction or number of employees are below the applicable thresholds.
Automated Data Deletion Requests
Some companies are now marketing "privacy protection" or "digital footprint removal" or "data deletion" services. We support the idea that consumers should be able to minimize the information available about them on the Internet. But before you let these companies read through your email and automatically spam every company they find in your email with a data deletion request, think about what you are doing.
- You are allowing a software company access to your email; even if they claim they are only analyzing the subjects, can you trust them? How does that impact your privacy?
- Through minimal effort, you are using a bot to request hundreds of companies to consider your data deletion request. Some of those companies are small businesses. While we may support your efforts to minimize your footprint, you are imposing a burden on small businesses that is not scalable.
- Do you really want a company to be unable to contact you to support your purchase like for product recalls?
- Think about the message you are sending by using a data privacy service to automate your data deletion request. You are showing that you've invested very little effort to deploy a bot to request that many businesses take action to remove your data. That shows a lack of consideration for the business you've attacked with a bot.
- Consumer privacy laws typically set exemption criteria of geography, revenue, or number of customers within the jurisdiction that exempt small businesses, so your request will have no legal standing with small businesses like Rocketry Works that do not have the resources to handle many requests.
- The only winner from these data deletion services is the service provider, because they make a buck off of you, and they are marketing to businesses to subscribe to their data deletion service to manage all the consumer data deletion requests their bots generate. Frankly, it's a scam that won't actually remove your data, but it creates a lot of busywork.
As a general policy, Rocketry Works will not respond to automated data deletion requests, because it is simply unsupportable with the limited resources we have to handle such requests, and because no current data privacy laws apply to Rocketry Works. If you demonstrate genuine understanding of our data privacy policies, say, by reading this privacy policy and personally requesting to review your data, or requesting that we correct or delete your data, or if you have sincere concerns about our use of your data, we will gladly have that conversation with you and will likely do as you ask. But please take the time to think about your request before you ask us to invest time implementing your request.
Data Retention
Rocketry Works' policy is to collect only necessary information, and to retain that information for only as long as is necessary. Typically, that is 2 years from the data of the most recent customer order.
Registration
In order to use this website, a user must first complete the registration form. During registration a user is required to give certain information (such as name and email address). This information is used to contact you about the products/services on our site in which you have expressed interest. At your option, you may also provide demographic information (such as gender or age) about yourself, but it is not required.
Orders
We request information from you on our order form. To buy from us, you must provide contact information (like name and shipping address) and financial information (like credit card number, expiration date, etc.). This information is used for billing purposes and to fulfill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we'll use this information to contact you.
Sharing
We may share aggregated demographic information with our partners and advertisers. This is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.
We use an outside shipping company to ship orders, and a credit card processing company to bill users for goods and services. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes beyond filling your order.
We partner with Google Analytics for purposes of tracking website visitor traffic. If you do not want Google Analytics to track your activity on the Rocketry Works website and others that implement Google Analytics, see Google Analytics' Opt Out Page.
We may from time-to-time partner with another party to provide specific services. When the user signs up for these services, we will share names, or other contact information that is necessary for the third party to provide these services. These parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services.
Security
We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and offline.
Wherever we collect sensitive information (such as credit card data), that information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a closed lock icon at the bottom of your web browser, or looking for "https" at the beginning of the address of the web page.
While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (e.g. billing or customer service) are granted access to personally identifiable information. The computers/servers on which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.
Cookies
We use "cookies" on this site. A cookie is a piece of data stored on a site visitor's hard drive to help us improve your access to our site and identify repeat visitors to our site. Cookies can enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance their experience on our site. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information on our site.
Some of our business partners may use cookies on our site (e.g., advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies.
Links
This web site may contain links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personally identifiable information.
Surveys & Contests
From time-to-time our site may request information via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and you may choose whether or not to participate and therefore disclose this information. Information requested may include contact information (such as name and shipping address), and demographic information (such as zip code, age level). Contact information will be used to notify the winners and award prizes. Survey information will be used for purposes of monitoring or improving the use and satisfaction of this site.
Notification of Changes
Whenever material changes are made to the privacy notice, we will post the changes to the Rocketry Works website and notify customers by email.
Remedies
If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately via email at privacy@rocketryworks.com. We take your privacy seriously, and our goal is to serve our customers well. We won't play games with your privacy.
Revision History
July 3, 2018: Original Version
January 25, 2023: Added Automated Data Deletion Requests section and updated intro paragraph accordingly.