What we do with your information.

The Balloon Shoppe is a small balloon-art business run by Elijah Green in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been trading since 2019. It is a sole trader, not a company. In this notice, “we”, “us” and “the shop” mean that business, and “you” means whoever is reading, browsing, ordering or booking.

This notice covers the shop’s website at balloonshoppe.org and everything that happens through it: browsing, the basket, the games, the newsletter sign-up, enquiries, orders, party bookings and Balloon Club memberships. It does not cover other websites we link to, or our Facebook page. Facebook’s own rules and privacy policy apply to anything you post or send there.

The shop decides what information is collected here and what happens to it, so the shop is responsible for it. If you want to talk to someone about any of this, that someone is Elijah. See section 16.

The law on personal information in Bangladesh is still developing, and we do not use that as an excuse for a lower standard. We apply the commitments in this notice to everyone, wherever they live. If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, section 10 sets out the rights you are used to. We honour them as policy, and wherever they apply by law. We make no claim to any certification, seal or audit.

There is no account to open and no profile. You do not have to tell us anything to look around the shop. We collect information only when you fill in one of the forms below, and each form asks only for what that job needs. Every form also asks you to confirm you are 18 or over.

Each form is delivered to us by Web3Forms, a form service that emails every submission to our inbox. Web3Forms may keep a copy for a limited period under its own privacy policy (see section 5). If that service is ever switched off or a delivery fails, forms go instead to our account with Netlify, the company that hosts the site, which stores the entries for us and filters spam. Elijah is the only person who reads them, and neither company uses them for its own purposes.

We do not ask for anything sensitive: no health details, no identity documents, nothing religious or political. Please do not send us any. The one exception is a latex allergy. If you tell us about one so that we can keep someone safe, we use it for that booking and nothing else.

Where the law asks for a reason (a “lawful basis”), these are ours. Section 2 shows which one applies to each form.

This site sets no cookies. It has no analytics, no advertising tags, no tracking pixels (Facebook or anyone else’s), no session replay or recording, and no third-party script that follows you between sites. If we ever add anything of that kind, we will update this notice first and add a consent banner before it runs.

What the site does use is your browser’s localStorage: a small storage area on your own device. It is not a cookie. It is not sent to us or to anyone else automatically, and we cannot read it from here. It keeps the things you asked the site to remember, such as your basket. These are the keys, which is every key the site uses:

Why there is no consent banner

Consent banners are for storage that is not needed to give you what you asked for, such as analytics or advertising. Everything in the table is either strictly necessary for something you asked to do (keep a basket, check out) or a preference you set yourself (currency, sound, saved items). None of it is used to track you or shared with anyone, so the site does not ask for consent before using it. We will add a consent banner before any analytics or tracking is ever introduced.

PayPal’s own cookies

If you choose PayPal at checkout, PayPal’s payment button is loaded from paypal.com at that moment, and not before. PayPal may then set its own cookies and collect device information under its own privacy statement (opens in a new tab). Stripe’s checkout page does the same under Stripe’s privacy policy (opens in a new tab), but only once you have left our site for it. If you do not choose either, neither company’s code runs.

Clearing it

Press the button to remove everything this site has stored in this browser. It cannot be undone, and it does not affect anything already sent to us, such as an order. You can also clear “site data” for balloonshoppe.org in your browser’s settings.

A shop this size does not run its own servers or process its own card payments. These companies do parts of the job for us. Each gets only what its job needs.

Fonts. The site’s two typefaces, Young Serif and Figtree, are served from our own site, so loading a page sends no request to Google Fonts or any other font service.

We do not sell, rent or trade your information, or hand it over for anyone’s advertising. We would pass it on only if a court or authority with the power to require it did so, or if we needed it to make or defend a legal claim. In either case we would give only what was necessary.

This is a commitment about how we work, not a claim of any certification or audit:

• Before we start using a company that will handle your information, we read its privacy and security terms and check that it limits what it does with that information to the service it provides.
• We review each company in section 5 against its current terms at least once a year, and again whenever it tells us its terms have changed.
• No new company is given your information until this notice has been updated to name it.
• If a company’s terms stop meeting that standard, we will stop using it and say so here.

We are in Dhaka. Netlify, Stripe and PayPal are based in the United States and run their systems in several countries. So when you send a form or pay online, your details leave Bangladesh. If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, they leave there too.

Each of those companies publishes the arrangements it uses for moving personal data across borders. For EU and UK data these include the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses and, where relevant, the EU–US and UK–US data-transfer frameworks. Their policies, linked in section 5, set out the current position.

If you would rather your details were not handled outside Bangladesh, email or message us to order, and pay cash on delivery inside Dhaka.

These periods are the shop’s own policy. The law does not set them to the month.

When a period runs out, the record is deleted. If it cannot be deleted at once, for example from a backup or an email thread, we stop using it and remove it in the ordinary course.

There are no accounts on this site, so there is no account to close. Your information is in one of two places.

• On your device. Use the “Clear data stored on this device” button in section 4, or clear site data for balloonshoppe.org in your browser’s settings. This takes effect immediately and we do not need to be involved.
• With us. Form entries in Netlify, order and booking records, membership records and emails: email ceo@balloonshoppe.org with the subject “Delete my data”, and include the email address or order reference you used so we can find it. We will confirm that we have it within 7 days and complete the deletion within 30 days. We will ask Stripe or PayPal to delete their copy where they allow it.

The only things we may keep are records we still need for an order you have not yet received, or that a tax or accounting rule requires us to keep. If so, we will tell you exactly what is staying and why.

These are the rights people in the European Union and the United Kingdom have by law. We give the same rights to everybody.

To use any of these rights, email ceo@balloonshoppe.org with “Privacy request” in the subject, or use the contact form. Tell us what you want and give us enough to find your records, such as the email address or order reference you used.

We reply within 30 days, free of charge. If a request is unusually large we may ask you to narrow it. If we cannot be reasonably sure who you are, we may ask one follow-up question, so that we do not send your details to the wrong person.

If you sign up with your email address and tick the box confirming you are 18 or over, we will write to you occasionally about seasonal makes, party dates and the odd discount. We do not add people to the list just because they ordered something.

Every letter has an unsubscribe link. You can also reply “stop” or email ceo@balloonshoppe.org, and we will take you off the list.

Order confirmations, delivery updates, booking confirmations and Balloon Club billing notices are not marketing. You will get them whether or not you take the letters, because they are about your own order.

We make balloon animals and have games in the back room, so children will read this site. We built it on that assumption.

A separate and more important point about balloons and small children is safety: uninflated and broken latex balloons are a choking and suffocation hazard for children under 8. Please read the safety section of our terms.

What we do:

• The site is served over HTTPS, so what passes between your browser and the site is encrypted in transit.
• Card details never reach us. Stripe and PayPal collect them on their own systems. The secret key that lets our checkout talk to Stripe is kept as a server-side setting, never in the pages you download.
• Prices, delivery fees and discounts are recalculated on the server when a card payment is created, so editing the page in a browser cannot change what is charged.
• Form entries and order records sit in our Netlify account, protected by a password and two-factor sign-in, and one person reads them.
• We ask for little, so there is little to lose.

What we will not pretend:

• No website is perfectly secure. We cannot guarantee that information sent over the internet is safe from everything.
• We rely on Netlify, Stripe and PayPal for the parts they run. Their security is their responsibility, and we review them as described in section 6.
• Email is not a secure channel. Please do not email us card numbers, passwords or identity documents. We will never ask for them.
• Anything kept in your browser is only as safe as the device it is on.

If information about you is lost, exposed or taken, we will look into it as soon as we know, stop what is causing it, and work out who is affected.

If there is a real risk to you, we will tell you directly by email: what happened, what was involved, what we have done, and what you might do yourself, such as watching your card statement. Where the law requires us to report a breach to an authority, we will do so within the deadline that applies. For people covered by EU or UK rules, that is 72 hours from becoming aware of it.

If the problem happened at Netlify, Stripe or PayPal, they have their own duty to notify, and we will pass on what we are told.

When the shop changes, this notice will change with it, and we will update the date at the top of the page.

If a change matters to you (a new company handling your details, a new use of your information, or anything that needs your consent), we will say so on this page and, for people on the newsletter list, in a letter. We will not quietly widen what we do with information we already hold.

If something here is unclear or looks wrong, please tell us.

If you think we have handled your information badly, tell us first and give us a chance to put it right. Email ceo@balloonshoppe.org with “Privacy complaint” in the subject, and we will reply within 30 days with what we found and what we are doing about it.

If you are not satisfied, you can take it further. In the European Union or the United Kingdom you can complain to your national data protection authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office), and you do not have to come to us first. Nothing in this notice takes away a right you have under the law where you live.