Data Privacy & Protection Policy

Who we are

This Data Privacy and Protection Policy is for the online service called Thingy Farm.

Thingy Farm is an online space of collaborative exploration and learning. Thingy Farm is filled with thoughts and events that we offer to help grow fresh culture among engineers, makers, and other creatives.

Thingy Farm’s target audience is adult engineers, makers, and other creatives who accept the challenge to be confident and self-managed… the sort of folks who understand stuff or learn quickly on their own about things like their own local Privacy Laws, what cookies are, and such. Thingy Farm’s audience is not people who need us to explain things that can already be found somewhere else. Thingy Farm’s target audience is not lawyers. And although lawyers are welcome in Thingy Farm, this policy is crafted to be read and understood by creative non-lawyers.

If you belong to a region or country that doesn’t believe you can think for yourself, Thingy Farm may not be the place for you. This policy may not meet their needs nor yours.

Thingy Farm is a service of the Thingy Factory LLC — a Limited Liability Company registered and operating in California U.S.A.

The Thingy Farm name is a Trade Mark of Thingy Factory LLC.

The Thingy Farm website is https://thingyfarm.com

The Thingy Factory LLC website is https://thingyfactory.com

And so this Privacy Policy (whether we say Thingy Farm or Thingy Factory LLC in this page) is Thingy Factory LLC’s Privacy Policy related to it’s Thingy Farm services.

Your Local Privacy Laws

It is indeed difficult to keep up with all the local regulations around the USA and around the world. We couldn’t hope to list them all here let alone make heads-or-tails of every detailed aspect of them all.

Please use your favorite search engine to search for the online privacy laws of your locale. Try searching “<my locality> data privacy laws” or something like that till you find the official site for data privacy laws for your region or country. Then read your region’s laws to come up to speed on your rights and our obligations for your locale. Then learn here about Thingy Farm’s privacy policy. And then you can make wise decisions about your use of Thingy Farm.

We try to keep things lean and simple around Thingy Farm. We believe that our basic way of operating covers the spirit of privacy expectations of all locales that we’re aware of. If you discover a privacy expectation in your locale that is important to you which you think we are not covering, please let us know. We’ll do our best to look into privacy policy issues that impact you and attempt to accommodate as necessary.

As you go through this Privacy Policy, please use the online privacy laws of your locale (and use your search engine) to help yourself understand the various topics. If there are concepts or terminology you don’t understand within the law or within this policy, use your favorite search engine to fill in the gaps. For instance, if you want to learn about “essential cookies”, please use your favorite search engine to lookup something like “what are essential cookies”.

Cookies

All of Thingy Farm cookies are essential cookies to make the various core features of our site work.

We DON’T use cookies for things for which you would need to “opt out” or for which we need your explicit permission (beyond a few “I Agree” buttons in the appropriate flow of things.) For example:

• No targeted ad tracking cookies. (because no advertisements on Thingy Farm!)
• No usage tracking cookies. (Not now. We’ll update this policy if we ever do)
• No 3rd party cookies while on thingyfarm.com or thingyfactory.com (aside from potential 3rd party handling of payments, which is covered in the flow of payments.)
• No other non-essential stuff for which the many, many, many laws were created to protect you.

What do we use cookies for? We use cookies for essential functional things like this:

• Checking whether your browser allows cookies or not.
• Checking whether you’re logged in or not, and who is logged in
  • So we can show you the right stuff as a logged-in member.
  • So we can keep you logged in from page to page.
• Status and contents of your “Cart”, if you are attempting to execute a contribution or such.
• Any cookies needed and stored by the 3rd party payment processor to execute your contribution transaction and to remember your choices with them. (These 3rd party payment processor cookies are never exposed to Thingy Farm… they are between you and them.)

If you’re using a shared computer or otherwise want these essential cookies to disappear after you’re done using Thingy Farm in your browser, you might consider using your browser’s privacy mode such as “Incognito” or “InPrivate” modes. Then close your browser after completing your session on Thingy Farm.

If you don’t want cookies at all while on Thingy Farm (even these essential cookies), your browser provides a way to turn off cookies while on our site. If you do that, you won’t be able to login (or register for events, which requires logging in), and you won’t be able to put things (such as contributions) in a shopping cart. But at least you have a choice to disable cookies for this site in your browser. Also, though your browser will let you disable 3rd party cookies while browsing Thingy Farm, that won’t affect your experience on Thingy Farm because we don’t use 3rd party cookies. (We believe that setting doesn’t affect the 3rd party payment processing.)

Data We Collect, Save, and Use

Accounts — If you create an account, we may collect (and allow your editing of) the following:

• Your name (used internally and in event registrations, not shared with others)
• A nickname you would like used in events and posting comments, to be seen by others. (see “Events” below)
• An email, (not shared with others), to be used for:
  • your unique identification internally for Thingy Farm
  • your login id when logging in
  • two-factor login authentication email (potentially)
  • communication between you and Thingy Farm / Thingy Factory LLC
  • automatic delivery of information and notices from Thingy Farm / Thingy Factory LLC to which you subscribe
  • your email for event registrations, login for some event
  • your default email for contributions and gift/reward shipments
• A password for login (not stored directly, but as something like a secure hash)
• Your choices for opt-in / opt-out of certain things like newsletter lists, announcements, and such.

Purchases — Currently we don’t sell anything

Contributions — If you contribute money to the Thingy Farm effort, we’ll collect and store the minimum info needed to associate your successful money transaction with your Thingy Farm account. We’ll use that very minimum info to remember your contribution so we can keep track of special access and gifts we may offer you as a contributor.

NOTE: 3rd Party payment processors that we use will independently collect payment information and will store whatever info they must for their purposes. The payment processor may also offer to save card info for your use in future Thingy Farm transactions. However, that collection and storage of card info is not handled by us as we do not directly collect nor store payment account info.

Shipping of Gifts — Sometimes Thingy Farm will offer promotional gifts to participants and contributors (think “SWAG” mostly as “thanks”, “reward”, “recognition”, and shameless self-promotion.) These are gifts that have no payment — and when appropriate, we’ve already paid for them and have also paid sales tax local to Thingy Farm as items taken from our promotional item inventory. Some of the gifts and rewards are virtual (e.g. access to special activities, early access to content, etc.) However, if the gift is physical SWAG, we may need to ask for choices of items, colors, and size choices and shipping info such as:

• Shipping Info
  • Name
  • Company (optional)
  • Country/Region
  • Address (fields dependent on Country/Region)
  • Phone
  • Email
• The above info will be stored only for each delivery. Our intention is to eventually avoid storing this info online beyond the time it is needed for processing the shipment. However, until we get our gift processing system fully rolling, this info may be stored for an undefined time period but will not be used for any purpose beyond shipping your gift or reward. Eventually once the system is fully implemented, legacy shipping info will be purged.
• NOTE: Currently we’re normally not shipping SWAG outside the USA.

Events — If you register to attend one of our online events, you need to be logged in. The event registration will use the name, nickname, and email stored as your account info (see “Accounts” section above.) So each event registration will use the following current info from your account information.

• Your name (used internally by us. Not shared with others)
• Your nickname (for display within the event and seen by others in the event)
• Your email (used by us to communicate with you about the event, used possibly for event login and possibly for two-factor authentication for the event. Not shared with others.)

Those with whom we share your data

Generally, we don’t share your data with others.

Notably, we never sell your data to anyone. Hence no need to bother you with an opt-out prompt about that.

However, there are some cases where we must interact with 3rd parties to accomplish your purposes on Thingy Farm.

• We’ll share your event nickname with folks like you who are participating in an event with you, including potentially via 3rd party meeting tools like Zoom and Gather. Additionally, your email may be used by via 3rd party meeting tools as an id to validate your authorized access to an event — never to be available to those 3rd parties to store beyond that temporary purpose nor in a way that they could contact you beyond access authentication.

• When you contribute money, during online checkout there will be interaction between our website and the payment processor. Thingy Farm (Thingy Factory LLC) does NOT collect your payment information directly — credit card, PayPal login, etc. So you are only sharing that payment information directly with the payment processor. The payment processor does not share your payment information with Thingy Farm beyond confirming the status of the transaction and such.

• We process member status and benefits and gift shipments in-house. Therefore, we don’t share your contribution information nor shipment info with anyone except the shipping label info used by postal services.

• We will share data with governmental authorities who have appropriately executed legal purposes through legal means (e.g. actual bona fide warrants and such.)

How long we retain your data

For contribution payments, all of the information that Thingy Farm collects is kept as a potentially permanent part of our financial records for standard administrative, accounting, and legal purposes.

For shipment info of gifts and rewards, we will keep your shipping info at least long enough to ship the SWAG. Though eventually we intend to delete your shipping info immediately after processing the shipment. However, we’re still working on the processing system. Therefore your shipping data may be incidentally stored until we purge it when our improved system goes live. No promises on when that will be, but we’ll update this policy when that happens.

If you create an account, we may keep your account information until you ask us to delete the account information. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

We may occasionally create system backups that contain your data. We don’t have a specific schedule yet on when we will create backups or when legacy backups will be deleted. We’ll update this policy as our backup regimen evolves. Either way, there is no way to separately delete individual records from a system backup, so any request for deletion (see below) will not include data that is within a backup until that backup itself is deleted. If a backup is restored that contains your data that you requested to be deleted, we will delete your data again from the newly restored data. Eventually, backups with your data that should be deleted will “fall off” the collection of retained backups.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Your Privacy Responsibilities

• You should read, understand, and be OK with the things in this privacy policy before you commit yourself to participating further in Thingy Farm.
• Protect your own personal information while interacting with Thingy Farm and its participants:
  • Consider using an alternate email address when registering on Thingy Farm rather than using your primary personal email address — should we ever have a breech (which nobody expects), it will be easier for you to clean up afterward and to head-off resulting spam and other negative effects. Totally up to you.
  • Chose your public “nickname” thoughtfully if privacy is a concern. For instance, consider avoiding including your family name within your nickname. Depends on your purposes and your need. Totally up to you.
  • Avoid sharing much personal information during workshops, discussions, or within comments on postings. Shared personal private info is out of scope for Thingy Farm purposes, and not possible to control once something gets shared in a public or semi-public context. Share what you choose, but be warned.
  • Try pointing folks to connect with you on other platforms if you want to exchange private personal information.
• Protect confidential, proprietary, and personal into of others:
  • Don’t share or use confidential or proprietary info of other people or companies in workshops, discussions, or in comment postings. So, don’t bring things into Thingy Farm collaborative efforts that we don’t have a full legal right to see, to freely use, or to pass forward.
  • Don’t share other people’s personal info within a Thingy Farm event or comment.
  • Don’t share other people’s private personal info that you discover within a Thingy Farm event. e.g.
  • Try pointing folks to connect with you on other platforms if you want them to exchange private personal information with you.

The “Bob Loblaw Law Blog” Theory

Our theory is that many people don’t actually read privacy statements, including this one. So, regardless of how many hoops governments force companies to jump through… well… governments and companies seem to try to make each other seem important or compliant in an effort to appear to be your humble protectors or servants. But are they really? And despite requirements for policies to be in “clear and plain language” (and specifically to aim at your target audience), these polices often read like CYA legal treatises. And don’t get us started on those annoying and ineffective “Agree/Opt-in/Opt-out” popups that don’t actually help to protect users. This is a serious paragraph (as is every section of this policy), although this one paragraph is purposely crafted to SEEM tongue-in-cheek. With all that in mind, please continue to check THIS Thingy Farm Privacy Policy for future updates which MAY some day hide rewarding Easter Eggs. Are there already hints? Ahhh…

Where your data is sent

Our servers and services are hosted by us in the U.S.A., possibly via a “virtual server” service in the U.S.A.

Payment processing is handled by trusted 3rd parties with whom you will transact directly via portals on our website.

When you register for a Thingy Farm events online, we may use your registration info as part of connecting you to online meeting services like Zoom or Gather or other services.

Security Practices with your Data

We endeavor to collect as little personal data as necessary to enable the services we offer. We follow good industry practices to protect your personal data to the best of our ability.

You can get some benefit from Thingy Farm without even creating an account — so we wouldn’t need any info from you in that case.

For those benefits that require an account, we only need a few basic pieces of relatively common info — which we treat carefully just the same. To limit exposure, we only use your account data for limited purposes to accomplish goals that are essential and mutually beneficial.

When transacting any sort of payment, you will be providing the most sensitive data — but it is provided through our 3rd party processors who handle that data the most careful of all your data. The entire sensitive payment process is handled by trusted 3rd party payment processor portals.

We strictly limit who has access to member, event, transaction, and shipment data.

Access to your data is restricted to “only when necessary” and “only who needs it for the task”.

We use enforced internal practices like strong password policy and two-factor authentication for those who access member data.

We use encryption and hashing of sensitive stored data as appropriate.

Contact for Privacy Policy reasons

For Privacy Policy related feedback, questions, personal data export requests, personal data deletion requests, heads up on something we missed, compliance notices God forbid, legal stuff, or any other privacy policy communications:

Email to:

Thingy Farm Privacy Policy <privacystuff@thingyfarm.com>