Last Updated: 10/30/2023

NOTE: For ease of readability, in the below policies Carrie Stephens of InspirationalZest.com will be referred to as ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’.

Hey there! Carrie here. I care about personal data online, including how yours is used. I know you do too. To ensure transparency and create an honest and trusting relationship between myself and you, I openly provide my policies regarding your right to privacy.

Our privacy policies and disclosures are subject to change. We will notify you of any changes only by posting the modified version here.

By continuing to use our website and services, you will be bound by the most recent site policies, as such you are encouraged to check the privacy policies of InspirationalZest.com whenever you access our website or services.

Privacy Policy

A Privacy Policy is a critical document for any website, as it informs users about how their personal information is collected, used, and protected when they interact with a site. This policy applies to visitors, customers & subscribers of InspirationalZest.com

What Information Is Collected?

Inspirational Zest collects information about your visit, such as name, email address, data and any other information you submit to us. As well as analytics information such as browsing behavior and IP.

How Is My Information Collected?

Information may be collected through the use of:

• Cookies (Read more about our cookies policy below!)
• Facebook Pixel
• Pinterest Tag
• Comments or form submissions when submitting a contact form
• Newsletter sign up 
• Interacting with any content on our website or services

How Is My Information Used?

We only collect information about your visit to our website and services for the purpose of analyzing content performance and providing personalized ads and services.

• We do not sell or trade your personal information —We may share your personalized information only with third-parties that are explicitly mentioned in these policies. For the purposes of analyzing content and providing personalized ads and services.
• Personalized Responses — If you provide an email or any other details through our comments system these will only be used to respond to your comment.
• Newsletter & Site Updates– If you sign up to receive emails from us, we promise not to spam you and only provide emails that contain honest and transparent information.
• Affiliate and ads marketing. Any individual posts that include these will be clearly identified and labeled. These may collect information about your visit to personalize advertisements that may be of interest to you. Read my disclosures here!

Will My Information Be Shared?

We believe your information deserves to be treated with care and integrity. We want you to have a pleasant experience browsing our blog and the peace of mind that your information is safe with us. We promise you that your information will not be sold, rented or leased to third parties. We may share collected information with select third parties for analytics, security and to provide services.

Such as:

• Google Analytics to analyze our content performance.
• Cloudflare services for security to keep the website secure for you and others.
• Flo Desk to provide email subscription services.
• For a full list see our Third Party Cookies & Services section.

There may be some rare circumstances where we may be compelled by law to release certain information to authorities for legal reasons, the safety of viewers or to prevent harm to others.

Can I Stop My Information From Being Collected?

Most information is collected through cookies. You will be notified of this when you first visit the site or after you clear your cookie cache. By continuing to use our website and services you consent to our use of cookies and data collection.

If you do not wish to use cookies, you can turn off cookies using your web browsers settings, so no information is collected. You should consult your browser’s user guide for specific instructions on how to do this. If you want more details about cookies and how we use them. Then you should check our Cookies Policy.

What Rights Do I Have Over My Data?

European residents legally have the right to access personal information we hold about you and to ask that your personal information be corrected, updated, or deleted. If you would like to exercise this right, please contact Carrie Stephens | Hello@InspirationalZest.com 

✨* If you are not a European resident you can still request your personal information to be deleted too!

Users Rights:

• The right to access your data.
• The right to rectify inaccurate data.
• The right to withdraw consent.
• The right to data deletion (the right to be forgotten).
• The right to data portability.
• The right to object to data processing.

Is my Information Secure?

We endeavor to make our website and services as secure as possible. To keep your information as secure as possible we do the following:

• We have HTTPS protocols and SSL certification
• Data such as those collected from Google Analytics are stored on their secure servers.
• The same is true for email subscriptions – any details are stored on FloDesk's secure servers.
• Our emails are directly verified with our host to help prevent phishing, spam and fraud.
• We do not store any information we collect about you locally.
• Any devices used to access stored data, or the back-end of our website or services are installed with up-to-date antivirus software and browsers.
• We use WordPress’ inbuilt security; best practices and we ensure everything is kept up to date.
• We use Askimet to prevent and block spam.

Email Subscription

We use FloDesk as our email list management system. This means your email subscriptions and preferences are stored and handled on FloDesk’s secure servers. See their Privacy Policy for more details.

What You Can Expect From Our Emails

If you sign up to our email list (or opt-in to receive a bonus content upgrade) you agree to receive email communications from us. This is including but not limited to newsletters, site updates, promotion resources, and other announcements and correspondence.

Responsibility Of Receipt

You are responsible for ensuring that your email address is not blocked or impaired in any way, including by ensuring ‘white-listing’ of our email address.  You can whitelist our email address by adding hello@inspirationalzest.com to your list of approved senders.

How To Opt-Out Of Email Subscriptions

You can stop our emails at any time. 🛑To opt-out of any of our email correspondences you can let us know via our contact form or by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email so we can remove you from our list.

If you unsubscribe from receiving our emails, you acknowledge and understand that you may no longer receive information or updates from us.

If you have any problems unsubscribing, please contact Carrie Stephens | Hello@InspirationalZest.com, anytime!

Comment Policy

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.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. (These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment.)

Cookies will last for one year while 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.

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

When you leave a comment, please BE KIND and genuine.   Respect other commenters, regardless of what skill level they are at.  We always appreciate other comments that are helpful and offer another perspective, but the comment section here at Inspirational Zest is not the place for criticisms or negativity.  

Age Restrictions

You must be at least 18 years old to use our website and services. We do not knowingly collect or use personal information about visitors under 18 years of age. If you are under 18 years of age, you can use the services offered only in conjunction with your parents or guardians consent.

✅By providing us with your data, you warrant to us that you are over 18 years of age.

Cookies Policy

Cookies Disclosure: We use cookies to provide functionality, personalize content and ads, provide social media features and to analyze our traffic. Your information about how you use our website or services may be shared with our social media, advertising, and analytics partners to provide services and features on our website. These partners may combine it with other information that you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services.

Cookie Consent — The law states that we can store cookies on your device if they are strictly necessary for the operation of this site. For all other types of cookies, we need your permission.

✅You consent to our cookies if you agree and continue to use our website.

NOTE: You can at any time change or withdraw your consent to the use of cookies.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are downloaded to your device when you access certain websites. They can be used by websites to make a user’s experience more efficient. Whilst cookies can be involved with advertising this is not always what they are used for.

Cookies do not contain any information that, in itself, personally identifies you and do not provide us with access to the rest of your device. They typically contain the name of the server the cookie was sent from, the lifetime of the cookie and a randomly generated unique number. Cookies can only be read by the service or website that created it.

Types Of Cookies

This site uses several different types of cookies. Some cookies are placed by third party services that appear on our pages.

• Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.
• Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
• Statistic cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.
• Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third-party advertisers.

Prevent & Delete Cookies

If you wish to withdraw your consent for the use of cookies, then you can configure most browsers to alert and prevent certain browser-based cookies.

Some special types of cookies (such as flash cookies) used by Third parties often cannot be disabled by configuring browsers. (These cookies are not controlled by us.) If you wish to disable these then you should seek out an alternative method of preventing or managing such cookies via the relevant third-party settings panel.

You can also delete cookies already stored on your device — To reject or delete cookies, you should consult the “Help” function of your browser or, for a smart device such as a mobile phone, the device’s manual.

Please note: If you decide to disable or delete any cookies, some parts or features of our website and services may not display or work properly. Disabling or deleting cookies may also affect your ability to use online or mobile sites not provided by us.

Our Third-Party Cookies & Services

Please note: Our partners’ or other sites that may be accessed via our website or service (such as web traffic analyzers and advertising networks) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. (These are likely to be analytical cookies and/or targeting cookies.)

You should check the privacy and cookies policies posted on the relevant third-party sites for further information on such cookies (including details of how to reject or delete such cookies).

Google Analytics

Our website and services use Google Analytics, as a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses cookies to help us analyze how users use our website and services. Information generated (including your IP address) is anonymous and will be sent to Google and held on Google’s servers in the USA in accordance with Google’s Privacy Policy.

Please note that Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf. Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

Google Ads

We use Google Ads network on our website and services. They use cookies to serve ads to you based on your visit to us and other websites on the Internet. You can learn more, manage and opt out of Google’s Ad cookies by visiting here.

Askimet

Our website and services use Askimet to help block spam comments. It’s a WordPress plugin that blocks suspicious comments (including suspicious IP addresses) so that we can focus on spending time responding to legit messages. As well as keep our site clean from potentially malicious URLs or content. Please see their Terms of Service for more details.

FloDesk

We use FloDesk to provide our email services. Our website and services contain forms created by FloDesk to capture new subscribers. As such they may store cookies to remember which forms you use. This helps us distinguish the performance of forms as well as personalize them visually for users. Their Privacy Policy can be viewed here.

WordPress

Our website and services are built on WordPress. As such WordPress may set and store cookies.

For example. If you have an account and you log in to this site, they will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, they will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed. See the WordPress Policies for more details.

Pinterest Tag

The Pinterest Tag is installed and is used to track your actions on this website. Such as clicks and opting in for email subscriptions. This tag is used for the purposes of promotional retargeting via Pinterest ads.

The information collected is processed by Pinterest. We do not have direct access to this information. You can read more here on how Pinterest handles this data.

You may opt-out of behavioral advertising with the Pinterest Tag here.

Gravatar

When adding a comment 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. This is how Gravatar finds your profile picture to display next to your comment once approved. For more information on Gravatars, privacy policy see here.

Governing Law

These disclosures and any separate agreements whereby we provide you services shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of, Canada.