PRIVACY POLICY

At AnnTheGran.com, a beacon funding company, your privacy is a top priority. Please read our Privacy Policy.

Overview
Our site allows you to buy digitized embroidery designs and products, enter contests, receive special discounts, fill out surveys, and receive e-newsletters, e-mails or other promotional information from us. We use the information that we collect about you to fulfill your product and service purchases and to create a more personalized online experience. This is just a brief overview, so please read on for more details about our Privacy Policy. This Policy may change from time to time, so please check back periodically. Except as limited below, we reserve the right to use or disclose your personally identifiable information for business reasons in whatever manner desired. All information collected from you may be shared with AnnTheGran.com and its affiliate companies.

Except as otherwise discussed in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you online. For some services, we either collect and transfer personal information to a product/service provider you have selected, or you may visit other merchants through links on our site who may collect and use your personal information. In those cases the third-party service provider or merchant's privacy policy will govern how your information is handled. We encourage you to ask questions and to be very cautious before you disclose your personal information to others.

Attn: Privacy Compliance Officer
AnnTheGran.COM, LLC.
3400 Dundee Road, Suite 180
Northbrook, IL 60062

This Privacy Policy will explain the following regarding use of our site:

1. What information does AnnTheGran.com collect from you?
In order to better provide you with numerous products and services, AnnTheGran.com may collect two types of information about its visitors: Personally Identifiable Information and Non-Personally Identifiable Information. Our primary goal in collecting information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience while using our site.

Personally Identifiable Information
This refers to information that lets us know the specifics of who you are. Personal information is requested when you register and set up an account, order a product or service, enter contests or sweepstakes, fill out surveys, and send us feedback. For example, this information might include your name, billing address, shipping address, telephone number, e-mail address, credit card or other payment information, and product details. With this information, AnnTheGran.com can fill your orders and better provide you with personalized services. For a few services, we may collect your personal information on behalf of other merchants and share it with them. If you visit a site available through a link on our site, they will independently collect, use and share your personal information in accordance with their own privacy policies. If you have questions about their information practices, please read their privacy policies.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information
This refers to information that does not by itself identify a specific individual. We gather certain information about you based upon where you shop on our site in several ways. This information is compiled and analyzed on both a personal and an aggregated basis. For example, this information may include the Web site's Uniform Resource Locator ("URL") that you just came from, which URL you next go to, what browser you are using, and your Internet Protocol ("IP") address. A URL is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. An IP address is an identifier for a computer or device on a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol ("TCP/IP") network, such as the World Wide Web. Networks like the Web use the TCP/IP protocol to route information based on the IP address of the destination. In other words, an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the web, allowing web servers to locate and identify your computer. Computers require IP addresses in order for users to communicate on the Internet, browse and shop.

On an aggregated basis, we collect anonymous data related to the pages, products, downloads and other content that is sampled, clicked on, streamed, searched for, transferred from and downloaded. Except as otherwise limited in this Policy, we may disclose, sell, trade, or rent Non-Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent.

2. Where do we collect information from you and how do we use it?
Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide AnnTheGran.com's visitors with a superior customized online experience. We use the customer contact information to fill orders, contact purchasers to inform them of their order status, to send promotional information, to enhance the operation of our site and administer our systems.

Demographic data also may be collected at our site from third party advertising servers, content servers, or web site analysis agents who provide us with the zip code and area code associated with a visitor's server, along with pages viewed on our site. We review the actions of the AnnTheGran.com visitors on an aggregate basis to determine customers' preferences. AnnTheGran.com also does research on our visitors' demographics, interests, and pages viewed based on the information provided to us during ordering, a promotion, from our server log files, from our web site analysis agents, or from contests, drawings or surveys. We will use this data to tailor the visitors' experience at our site, to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to statistically analyze site use, to improve our product offerings, and to customize our site's content, layout, and services. We receive reports from third party ad servers, content servers, or web site analysis agents that tell us how many ads were presented and clicked upon or what content was served or viewed.

We may also share your personally identifiable information with third parties who provide services to us, our customers and web site visitors. Those third parties include authorized contractors, temporary employees and consultants and other companies working with us (collectively, "agents"). Where we believe it to be appropriate (in our sole discretion), we will ask our agents not to disclose or use your personal information for purposes other than to provide services to you or AnnTheGran.com.

We gather information in the following ways:

Shopping
We collect IP addresses for the purposes of system administration, to gather broad demographic information, to enable ads to be served on our site, to report Non-Personally Identifiable Information to our advertisers, and to monitor the level of activity on our site. We collect information from visitors to our site regarding the URLs they came from, domain types (e.g., .com or .org), their IP addresses, the date and time of their visit or order, the number of visits and orders, the number of visits per browsing session, the server type, the operating system and browser type used to come to the site, the country, state and telephone area code where their servers are located, the pages and page titles of our site that visitors viewed during their visit, whether the visitor's computer is enabled for Java or cookies, browser language, applications and plug-ins, and any search terms entered on our site.

Ordering
When you order from us, we collect personally identifiable information from you. If you order one of our products or services, we will collect and maintain your name, e-mail address, billing address, shipping address, telephone number, product selections, credit card or other payment information, order number, referring URL, IP address, page you bought from and a password. We collect this, and other information, as disclosed in this Policy, in order to fill your order, to communicate with you about your order and to send you promotional materials. Before confirming your order, you will have the opportunity to review the product order form and make changes and additions to the information it contained and these changes will be automatically kept for future use.

Gift Cards
If you purchase a gift card from our site, you will be required to give us the recipient's name and e-mail address. The recipient information you give us will only be used to send the gift card and for no other purpose.

Digital Downloads
When you order a download or a product from us, we collect personally identifiable information from you. We collect and maintain your such personally identifiable information as your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping address, company name, company, home, facsimile and shipping contact telephone numbers, product selections, credit card or other payment information, order number, referring URL, IP address, page you bought from and a password. We collect this, and other information, as disclosed in this Policy, in order to deliver the download, ship products to you, to pay royalties and license fees, to administer our site and to send you promotional materials. When you download a digital file or other digital content, there are broad but necessary limits placed upon how you may copy, use and transfer that download to approved computers, electronic devices and media.

Online Surveys and Polling
In order to improve our services to you, we ask some of our customers to voluntarily complete surveys, which may be collected by an independent third party. Individual survey answers are confidential, although Non-Personally Identifiable Information is collected and disclosed to third parties. If you do not wish to participate in a survey, simply decline to participate when asked.

Contests and Sweepstakes
When you enter a contest or other promotion, we may ask you for contact information such as your name, address and e-mail address in order to administer the contest, to send you promotional e-mails, notify winners and make the winners' list publicly available pursuant to certain states' laws. Your consent to such promotional use and disclosure of this information is a condition of your participation. As a condition of receiving any prize, you will be required to submit an Affidavit of Eligibility, for us to ensure that you are eligible to receive the prize according to the Contest Rules.

Newsletters & Promotional E-mails
We offer free newsletters, such as our AnnTheGran.com magazine, and promotional e-mails as a service to our customers. We will send you newsletters and e-mails periodically listing current specials and deals. To stop receiving our newsletter, send an e-mail to us at [email protected]. Please Note: If you agree to receive e-mails from any of our third party service providers or any third party merchants on our site, you will receive e-mails separately from them, and information that you choose to disclose to them will be subject to their privacy policy. If you later decide that you no longer want to receive their e-mails, you will need to follow their own specific opt-out instructions, as opting out to "[email protected]" as described above will not opt you out of their promotional emails.

Contact Information and Third Party Data
If you contact AnnTheGran.com or our customer service representatives by telephone, e-mail or letter, we may keep a record of your correspondence or comments. If you report a problem with our site, we may collect such information in a file specific to you. If you contact us through our feedback area or by calling one of our customer service representatives, we may ask for your name, e-mail address and order information in order to send you a reply. If other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities or purchases on our site, we may keep the information in a file specific to you.

Advertising
We may display advertisements on our site. By knowing a little about you, AnnTheGran.com will be able to deliver more relevant advertisements and content to you in the form of targeted banners and promotions. For example, advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (e.g., buyers of Thread). AnnTheGran.com takes the advertisement and includes it in an AnnTheGran.com e-mail to prior customers meeting that criterion. We may also have third-party advertising servers display ads linked to certain search terms that you have entered, or to certain pages that you are viewing. In this process, advertisers never have access to individual account information. Additionally, AnnTheGran.com may share aggregated data with advertisers.

Web Site Use
We also track customers' traffic patterns throughout their online session, including which pages, information and advertisements a customer views while using the site and what items they place in their basket or purchase. We use your IP address to diagnose problems with our servers, software, to administer our site and to gather demographic information. We may share aggregated statistics about pages viewed on our site, sales and other shopping information with third parties.

Cookies
We use cookies and may allow others to use cookies in the operation of our site.

Action Tags/Web Beacons
We may use and allow others to use action tags or web beacons in the operation of our site.

3. Who is collecting your information?

Ad Servers and Content Servers
We may use third party ad servers or content servers to serve ads, product information, or other information both on and off our site. Those third parties may use "action tags" or web beacons throughout the site to count the number of visitors who click on a banner ad or other information and to track the number of customers who continue on to make a purchase. They may also place their own "cookie" on your computer to help those ads to run and analyze site usage. We do not provide them with any of your Personally Identifiable Information. For more information about the information they collect, please see the section "Use of Cookies and Action Tags" below.

Email Services
We may use a third party to send promotional e-mails to customers. Images contained in the email may be served by the third party. They collect certain information about you such as your IP address, browser type, your operating system, the country and server your computer is logged onto, where the servers that your computer is logged onto are located, the time and date that a particular email was viewed, the area code and zip code associated with your server, and whether you responded to a particular ad or email, products viewed and whether you continued on to make a purchase. They may use a "cookie" or "action tags."

Website Analysis Agent
We may contract with several online partners to help manage and optimize our internet business and marketing. We use the services of marketing companies to help us measure the effectiveness of our advertising and how visitors use our site. To do this, we use Action Tags and cookies provided by the marketing companies on this site. The type of information we collect includes things such as pages, information and advertisements viewed as well as what items are placed in a shopping basket or purchased, the order number, the amount of a purchase, the product number and the quantity purchased. By supplementing our records, this information helps us learn things like what kinds of customers our site attracts, which of our products most interest our customers, and what kinds of offers our customers like to see. Although the marketing companies log the information coming from our site on our behalf, we control how that data may and may not be used. For more information, please see the section "Use of Cookies and Action Tags" below.

Digital Downloads; Sampling and Streaming of Content
In addition to other disclosures as set forth in this Policy, we may make our customer records available to the licensor's of such digital content and their outside auditing agents on a confidential basis as part of periodic audits of our download sales. We may use a third party to allow you to sample/stream digital download samples on our site. That service collects your IP address, browser type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), platform type and a date/time stamp. They also use cookies.

General Order Fulfillment and Site Operations
We contract with third-party service providers to operate many of our website functions. We may provide such other third-party service providers with your other personal information as needed to fulfill any orders that you may place.

Marketing Partners, Co-Branded Services, Framing/Windows on Third-Party Sites
We may run promotions for merchants where you may visit the merchants' sites. In some of those promotions, a window or frame containing the merchant's site may appear. Any time you are in a window, you should assume that your personal information is being collected, used and disclosed in accordance with that merchant's policies. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information that you supply to those merchants. Any information that you share with them will be used and disclosed in accordance with that merchant's privacy policy. However, once you click on a return link to our site, you can expect that further information that you disclose will be treated in accordance with this Policy.

Links and Banner Ads to Third-Party Sites
Please be aware that our site may contain links to other sites on the Internet that are owned and operated by third parties. The information practices of those websites linking from or to our site are not covered by this Policy. These other sites may send their own cookies to users, collect data, or solicit personal information. Additionally, other companies or ad servers, which place advertising on our site may collect information about you through the use of cookies when you view or click on their advertising. We cannot control this collection of information. You should contact advertisers directly if you have any questions about their use of the information that they collect.

4. With whom do we share your information?

Fulfillment
The information collected by AnnTheGran.com is used for processing orders, keeping you informed about your order status, for statistical purposes, for improving our site and its performance, to serve ads, and to notify you of products or special offers that may be of interest to you. We will disclose your Personally Identifiable Information to third parties to charge your credit card, fill your order, deliver your order, provide customer service, provide you with credit and deliver promotional e-mails to you from AnnTheGran.com. For example, we must release your credit card information to the card-issuing bank to confirm payment; and release your address and telephone information to the delivery service to deliver products that you ordered. As mentioned previously, your Personally Identifiable Information is shared with third-party fulfillment and merchant partners and service providers.

Other Parties
Generally we may provide Non-Personally Identifiable Information about our customers' sales, traffic patterns, and related site information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any Personally Identifiable Information. We may release account information when we believe that such release is reasonably necessary to enforce or apply our Terms of Use or to protect the rights, property, and safety of AnnTheGran.com, our users, or others. If customers do not pay us for products ordered, we may submit their account information to a third party collection agency. We may also share your Personally Identifiable Information with third parties who provide services to us, our customers and web site visitors. Those third parties include authorized contractors, temporary employees and consultants and other companies working with us (collectively, "agents"). Where we believe it to be appropriate (in our sole discretion), we will ask our agents not to disclose or use your personal information for purposes other than to provide services to you or AnnTheGran.com.

Products Advertised on Our Site
Where you order or sign up for goods or services offered through our site, but sold directly to you by a third party or fulfilled by a third party, we give your personal information to that third party to facilitate the sale of such goods or services.

Data Analysis Agents
The information collected by or for AnnTheGran.com may be provided to an outside company for the purpose of analysis. That analysis is to help us to improve our site and product selection, and to notify you of special offers that may be of interest to you. That data analysis agent may not share any Personally Identifiable Information with others, or use it for any other purpose than to help AnnTheGran.com.

Ad & Content Servers, Advertisers, Image Servers and Website Analysis Agents
These third parties use their cookies' identification numbers and internal web site tracking features to serve ads on and off (including but not limited to across the internet) our site and to collect aggregated information to create statistics about our customers and visitors, traffic patterns, and related site information. This information collected by our cookies, or our partners third party cookies, is then used to inform, optimize, and serve ads based on a visitors past visits to our website. In the event that our ad servers collect any Personally Identifiable Information on our behalf, it will not be used by them or disclosed to any third parties.

Compliance with Service of Process or Law Enforcement
Occasionally AnnTheGran.com may be asked by law enforcement or judicial authorities to provide Personally Identifiable Information to the appropriate governmental authorities. We will disclose Personally Identifiable Information upon receipt of a court order, subpoena, or to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, without prior notice to you. AnnTheGran.com fully cooperates with law enforcement agencies in identifying those who use our services for illegal activities. We reserve the right to report to law enforcement agencies any activities that we believe to be unlawful.

Sweepstakes and Drawings
Where you enter a sweepstakes, drawing or other promotion, we may provide entry information, including name, address, email address and age to the company providing the prize or sponsoring the promotion. They may use your Personally Identifiable Information to send you marketing or promotional materials or other communications.

Sale of the Company
AnnTheGran.com and its affiliated companies each reserve the right to disclose your Personally Identifiable Information in the event that any such company is sold, in whole or in part, either as an entire corporate entity or through an asset sale that includes a customer information database. This right is reserved whether or not the customer database is sold independently of any continuing operations of such company.

5. How can you update or correct your Personally Identifiable Information?
We believe you should have the ability to access and edit the personal information that you have provided to us. During the online ordering process you can review, change, or delete the information that you have submitted. You may change any of your personal information in your account online at any time. We encourage you to promptly update your information if it changes. You may ask to have the information on your account deleted or removed; however, because we keep track of past purchases, you cannot delete information associated with past purchases. Also, as a security measure we "back up" the data stored on our systems, and such prior information cannot be completely removed from our databases. As a result, you should not expect that all of your Personally Identifiable Information will be completely removed from our backed-up databases.

6. What are your choices regarding collection, use, and distribution of your information?
Email: We may from time to time send you e-mail or other communications regarding current promotions, specials and new additions to the AnnTheGran.com site. You may "opt-out," or unsubscribe from our newsletters by following the unsubscribe instructions in any e-mail you receive from us, or by sending an e-mail to [email protected] . After doing so, AnnTheGran.com users will not receive future promotional emails unless they open a new account, enter a contest, or sign up to receive newsletters or emails. Please Note: If you agree to receive e-mails from any of our third party service providers or any third party merchants on our site, you will receive e-mails separately from them, and information that you choose to disclose to them will be subject to their privacy policy. If you later decide that you no longer want to receive their e-mails, you will need to follow their own specific opt-out instructions, as opting out to "[email protected]" as described above will not opt you out of their promotional emails.

Ad-servers and other Content Servers: You may also set your browser so that it will not accept "cookies" to prevent assignment from the ad server of a unique identifier; however, you may experience difficulty shopping on our site and performing other transactions if you do so.

7. What security precautions are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of your information?
In order to most efficiently serve you, credit card transactions and order fulfillment are handled by established third party banking, processing agents and distribution institutions. They receive the information needed to verify and authorize your credit card or other payment information and to process and ship your order.

Within AnnTheGran.com, your information is kept on password protected, limited access servers. Wherever possible and applicable, AnnTheGran.com servers reside behind a corporate firewall that maintains controls on access to the system from both our internal network and the Internet.

8. A special note about children's privacy
You must be at least 18 years of age to have our permission to use this site. Our policy is that we do not knowingly collect, use or disclose Personally Identifiable Information about visitors under 13 years of age. If you are the parent or guardian of a child under 13 years of age and believe that they have disclosed personally identifiable information to us, please contact us at [email protected] so that we may delete the child's information.

9. AnnTheGran.com and third-party use of "cookies" and "action tags."
AnnTheGran.com Cookies: When you use our site we will store cookies on your computer in order to facilitate and customize your use of our site. A cookie is a small data text file, which a Web site stores on your computer's hard drive (if your Web browser permits) that can later be retrieved to identify you to AnnTheGran.com. Our cookies store randomly assigned user identification numbers, the country where you are located, and your first name to welcome you back to our site. The cookies make your use of the site easier, allow you to retrieve an earlier shopping cart, make the site run more smoothly and help us to maintain a secure site. You may be unable to shop on our site without your browser set to accept cookies.

Ad Server and Content Server Cookies: We may use an outside ad serving company or content server to display banner advertisements and other information on our site or to serve promotional emails. As part of their service, they place a separate cookie on your computer. Except for the company that serves our promotional emails, AnnTheGran.com does not provide third-party ad servers with any of your Personally Identifiable Information. AnnTheGran.com and its third party ad servers do collect and use Non-Personally Identifiable Information about you, such as your IP address, browser type, the URLs from which you came, referring site's domain types, operating system, the country, the server your computer is logged onto, where the servers that your computer is logged onto is located, the pages of our site and products that visitors viewed during their visit, where an ad was placed on a specific web site page, the time and date particular ads were served, the area code and zip code associated with your server and whether you responded to a particular ad, and a receipt identifier.

Our third-party ad servers will occasionally use outside agents, whose computers will serve ads on our site in the same manner and under the same conditions as above. In addition, other ad serving companies or advertisers may place banner ads on our site in the same manner as above, but we do not disclose to them any Personally Identifiable Information.

Image Server Cookies: As part of the ad-serving process, a third party may serve graphics upon our site. In order to customize their service, they may also place a cookie upon your computer. While AnnTheGran.com does not control their use of that cookie, no Personally Identifiable or individual customers' product information is collected.

Website Analysis Agent Cookies: We may use a third party to analyze what our visitors find to be most interesting on our site. To do that, they will place a cookie on your computer with a randomly assigned unique number in order to track the pages you view on our site, along with other Non-Personally Identifiable Information.

Action Tags, Web Beacons and other Data Collection Methods: An action tag or a web-beacon (also known as a clear gif or a pixel tag) is a method used to track responses or actions by customers who view certain advertisements or other information on our site. Action tags are 1x1 pixel images embedded in a website page that are used to transparently collect information. Our ad server, content servers and website analysis agents may use action tags to count the number of times that visitors click on a particular banner ad or visit the pages of our site and to provide information about what products are viewed or purchased. Without collecting any personally identifiable information, they use that data to tell us (and other advertisers) which ads are the most effective on particular sites. Our ad server, content server and website analysis agents may use an action tag on our basket page, checkout page, and other pages, to keep anonymous track of the number of times that clicking on a banner ad or views other information on our site results in a purchase. They also collect the amount of the purchase, order confirmation number, stock keeping unit number, quantity and identity of product purchased.

E-mail Distributor's Use of Action Tags: A third-party e-mail distributor may also use action tags. They may, for example, keep track of when a promotional e-mail is opened and provide AnnTheGran.com with ongoing aggregated reports of how many customers have responded. We share with them web site usage information about visitors to our web site who have received a promotional e-mail or other targeted promotional campaign. They use the information for the purpose of targeting future campaigns and upgrading visitor information used in reporting statistics. For this purpose, we and our third-party e-mail distributor note some of the pages you visit on our web site through the use of action tags.

10. You should carefully review privacy policies of any third party sites accessible from AnnTheGran.com.
Other sites accessible through our web site have their own privacy policies and data collection, use and disclosure practices. Please consult each site's privacy policy. AnnTheGran.com is not responsible for the policies or practices of third parties. Please be aware that this site may contain links to other sites on the Internet that are owned and operated by third parties. The information practices of those web sites linked to AnnTheGran.com are not covered by this Privacy Policy. These other sites may send their own cookies to users, collect data, or solicit personal information. Additionally, other companies that place advertising on our site may collect information about you when you view or click on their advertising through the use of cookies. We cannot control this collection of information. You should contact these advertisers directly if you have any questions about their use of the information that they collect.

On behalf of various sponsors, AnnTheGran.com provides sponsored links to third-party web sites. If you click on a sponsored link or banner ad, a "window" or "frame" containing a third-party's web site may appear in the foreground with the AnnTheGran.com web site in the background. Unless you are on AnnTheGran.com's web site, any time that you have moved to a window, you should assume that your personal information is being collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the windowed site's privacy policy (if any). If you are unsure as to whose privacy policy applies, please contact us by sending a letter to the address below.

11. Contacting AnnTheGran.com about privacy questions or concerns
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this site, please contact AnnTheGran.com by sending a letter to:

Attn: Privacy Compliance Officer
AnnTheGran LLC.
3400 Dundee Road, Suite 180
Northbrook, IL 60062

12. Privacy Policy changes
If AnnTheGran.com makes changes to any terms or conditions of the Privacy Policy, the changes will be posted in this document so that you will always know what information we gather, how we might use that information and to whom we will disclose it. We may change, modify, add or remove portions of this Policy at any time, and any changes will become effective immediately upon being posted unless we tell you otherwise.