Thank you for your interest in this Privacy Policy! At EL Home Designs, we take the protection of your Personal Identifiable Information (“PII”) very seriously.
This Privacy Policy applies to our website and shop at www.EL-homedesigns.com and serves to inform you about the processing of your data when you use our Services. As such, this policy sets out how PII is managed and dealt with in order to ensure that the obligation to fulfil individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy is applied and followed and that the responsibilities established under applicable Data Protection Law are complied with.
General information and mandatory disclosures
What is PII?
PII is any information relating to personal or material circumstances that relates to an identified or identifiable individual. This includes, for example, your name, date of birth, e-mail address, postal address, or telephone number as well as online identifiers such as your IP address. In contrast, information of a general nature that cannot be used to determine your identity is not PII. This includes, for example, the number of users of a website.
Data Controller
The legal person responsible is:
EL Home Designs
Wicomico County, Maryland, USA
E-Mail: support@EL-Homedesigns.com
Scope of the processing of PII
As a matter of principle, we only collect and use PII from you insofar as this is necessary to provide a functional website and our content and services, e.g., when you register on our website or log in to an existing customer account or when you place an order with us.
Relevant legal bases
The following informs you about the legal basis of us processing your data and unless the legal basis is not specifically mentioned, the following applies:
- Consent – This is where we have asked you to provide explicit permission to process your data for a particular purpose.
- Contract – This is where we process your information to fulfil a contractual arrangement, we have made with you.
- Answering your business enquiries – This is where we process your information to reply to your messages, e-mails, posts, calls, etc.
- Legitimate Interests – This is where we rely on our interests as a reason for processing, generally this is to provide you with the best products and service in the most secure and appropriate way. Of course, before relying on any of those legitimate interests we balance them against your interests and make sure they are compelling enough and will not cause any unwarranted harm.
- Legal Obligation – This is where we have a statutory or other legal obligation to process the information, such as for the investigation of crime.
Your rights
You have the following rights:
- to confirmation as to whether data relating to them is being processed,
- to information about the data processed, to further information about the data processing and to copies of the data;
- to correction or completion of incorrect or incomplete data;
- to immediate erasure of the data concerning them;
- to receive the data concerning them and provided by them and to transfer this data to other providers/controllers.
- to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority if they are of the opinion that the data concerning them is being processed by the provider in breach of data protection provisions.
The above rights may be limited in some circumstances, for example, if fulfilling your request would reveal personal information about another person, if you ask us to delete information which we are required to have by law, or if we have compelling legitimate interests to keep it. We will let you know if that is the case and will then only use your information for these purposes. You may also be unable to continue using our services if you want us to stop processing your personal information. If you wish to exercise your right to object, simply contact us.
Data collection on our website
Log files
In principle, you can use our website for purely informational purposes without disclosing your identity. However, our website collects a series of general data and information with each visit and this data is temporarily stored in log file. A log file is created in the course of an automatic protocol of the processing computer system. The following can be recorded:
- browser type/browser version
- Operating system used
- language and version of the browser software
- host name of the accessing end device
- IP address
- Website from which the request comes
- Content of the request (specific page)
- Date and time of the server request
- Access status/HTTP status code
- Referrer URL (the previously visited page)
- Amount of data transferred
- Time sone difference to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
The temporary processing of the IP address by the system is necessary to technically enable delivery of the website to your computer. Processing your IP address for the duration of the session is necessary for this. The legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interest.
The access data is not used to identify individual users and is not merged with other data sources. The access data are deleted when they are no longer required to achieve the purpose of their processing. In the case of the collection of data for the provision of the website, this is the case when you end your visit to the website. The data is generally deleted after seven days at the latest; processing beyond this is possible in individual cases. In this case, the IP address is deleted or alienated in such a way that it is no longer possible to assign your device to it.
Use of cookies
We use so-called cookies on our web site. Cookies are small text files that are stored on your respective device (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.) and saved by your browser. The legal basis for the use of cookies is your consent as well as our legitimate interest.
Contacting us, registration or placing orders
a) Contacting us
When you contact us, the data you provide (e.g., Name, phone number, email address) will be stored by us based on your consent and the preparation or initiation of a contract, insofar as it is necessary to answer your questions. Your enquiry is logged in order to be able to prove the contact in accordance with the legal requirements. We delete the data accruing in this context when the respective conversation with you has ended and your inquiry has been conclusively clarified.
b) Order Processing
For the conclusion and processing of contracts, we require contact details, such as name, phone number, delivery and billing address and e-mail address, as well as information on the type of payment method you have chosen. In addition, we use your data to maintain our customer database so that only accurate data is stored by us. Following your order, you will receive a corresponding order confirmation as well as further documents, which we are obliged to provide in order to fulfil our legal information obligations for an effective conclusion of a contract with you.
e) Order confirmation/dispatch confirmation
In order to process the contract and provide you with our services, for example the web shop or to send you your order, we use your contact details to send you customer service information, order confirmations, contract documents or payment processing information. We are obliged to send you these documents in order to comply with our legal information obligations for an effective conclusion of a contract with you. The processing of your data is therefore necessary to fulfil our legal information obligations for an effective conclusion of a contract with you.
f) Payment Processing
To make a purchase, you may need to provide a valid payment method (e.g., credit card). Your payment information will be collected and processed by our authorized payment service provider Stripe. We do not directly collect or store credit or debit card numbers ourselves in the ordinary course of processing transactions.
g) Other
Based on our legal obligation and our legitimate interest, we use and store your PII and technical information to the extent necessary to prevent or prosecute misuse or other illegal behavior on our website, e.g., to maintain data security in the event of attacks on our IT systems. This also takes place insofar as we are legally obliged to do so, for example due to official or court orders, and for the exercise of our rights and claims as well as for legal defense.
Disclosure or transfer of PII
We do not transfer or disclose your information to third parties unless there is a legal basis for such disclosure. Example of such a basis is typically consent from you or a legal basis that requires us to disclose the data.
For the operation and optimization of our website and our services and for the processing of contracts, various service companies work for us, e.g., for the delivery of products, or order fulfilment, to whom we pass on the data required for the fulfilment of the task (e.g., name, address).
Some of these companies act for us by way of commissioned processing and may therefore use the data provided exclusively in accordance with our instructions. In this case, we are legally responsible for appropriate data protection measures at the companies we commission. We therefore agree on specific data security measures with these companies and monitor them regularly.
In contrast, order processing, in these cases we transmit data to third parties for their own use in order to process the contract:
- In the case of delivery of goods and the necessary logistics companies and the postal service provider specified when the order was placed.
If we use service providers in third countries, we take additional measures to ensure an adequate level of data protection for the transfer of PII and thus ensure that the transfer is generally permissible and that the special requirements for a transfer to a third country are met (e.g., by concluding standard contracts and additional guarantees, supplementary technical and organizational measures such as encryption or anonymization).
We will disclose your data to third parties or government agencies within the framework of existing data protection laws if we are legally obliged to do so, e.g., due to official or court orders, or if we are entitled to do so, e.g., because this is necessary for the prosecution of criminal offenses or for the exercise and enforcement of our rights and claims.
Advertising and Marketing
Insofar as you have also given us your separate consent to process your data for marketing and advertising purposes, we are entitled to contact you for these purposes via the communication channels you have given your consent to.
You may give us your consent in a number of ways including by selecting a box on a form where we seek your permission to send you marketing information, or sometimes your consent is implied from your interactions or contractual relationship with us. Where your consent is implied, it is on the basis that you would have a reasonable expectation of receiving a marketing communication based on your interactions or contractual relationship with us.
Direct Marketing generally takes the form of e-mail but may also include other less traditional or emerging channels. These forms of contact will be managed by us, or by our contracted service providers. Every directly addressed marketing sent or made by us or on our behalf will include a means by which you may unsubscribe or opt out.
Miscellaneous and closing
Updating your information
If you believe that the information, we hold about you is inaccurate or that we are no longer entitled to use it and want to request its rectification, deletion, or object to its processing, please do so within your account or by contacting us. For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer the above requests.
Keep in mind, we may reject requests for certain reasons, including if the request is unlawful or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy of another user. Also, we may not be able to accommodate certain requests to object to the processing of PII, notably where such requests would not allow us to provide our service to you anymore.
Links to other providers
Our website also contains – clearly recognizable – links to the websites of other companies. Insofar as there are links to websites of other providers, we have no influence on their contents. Therefore, no guarantee or liability can be assumed for these contents. The respective provider or operator of the pages is always responsible for the content of these pages.
The linked pages were checked for possible legal violations and recognizable infringements at the time of linking. Illegal contents were not recognizable at the time of linking. However, permanent monitoring of the content of the linked pages is not reasonable without concrete indications of a legal violation. Such links will be removed immediately if infringements of the law become known.
PII and children
Our services are aimed at people aged 18 and over. We will not knowingly collect, use or disclose PII from minors under the age of 18 without first obtaining consent from a legal guardian through direct offline contact.
Data Breaches/Notification
Databases or data sets that include PII may be breached inadvertently or through wrongful intrusion. Upon becoming aware of a data breach, we will notify all affected individuals whose PII may have been compromised, and the notice will be accompanied by a description of action being taken to reconcile any damage as a result of the data breach. Notices will be provided as expeditiously as possible after which the breach was discovered.
Controls For Do-Not-Track Features
Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track (‘DNT’) feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this privacy notice.
Changes
We reserve the right to adapt this Privacy Policy with effect for the future, in particular in the event of further development of the website, the use of new technologies or changes to the legal basis or the relevant case law.
Questions or Comments
If you have any questions or comments about our Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your rights under applicable laws, please contact us using the following contact details:
EL Home Designs
Wicomico County, Maryland, USA
E-Mail: support@EL-Homedesigns.com
This Privacy Policy was last updated on April 25, 2023.