Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how Hot Sauce Pod (the "Site", "we", "us", or "our") collects, uses, and discloses your personal information when you visit, use our services, or make a purchase from hotsaucepod.com (the "Site") or otherwise communicate with us regarding the Site (collectively, the "Services"). For purposes of this Privacy Policy, "you" and "your" means you as the user of the Services, whether you are a customer, website visitor, or another individual whose information we have collected pursuant to this Privacy Policy.

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. By using and accessing any of the Services, you agree to the collection, use, and disclosure of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, please do not use or access any of the Services.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time, including to reflect changes to our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. We will post the revised Privacy Policy on the Site, update the "Last updated" date and take any other steps required by applicable law.

How We Collect and Use Your Personal Information

To provide the Services, we collect and have collected over the past 12 months personal information about you from a variety of sources, as set out below. The information that we collect and use varies depending on how you interact with us.

In addition to the specific uses set out below, we may use information we collect about you to communicate with you, provide or improve the Services, comply with any applicable legal obligations, enforce any applicable terms of service, and to protect or defend the Services, our rights, and the rights of our users or others.

What Personal Information We Collect

The types of personal information we obtain about you depends on how you interact with our Site and use our Services. When we use the term "personal information", we are referring to information that identifies, relates to, describes or can be associated with you. The following sections describe the categories and specific types of personal information we collect.

Information We Collect Directly from You

Information that you directly submit to us through our Services may include:

• Contact details including your name, address, phone number, and email.
• Order information including your name, billing address, shipping address, payment confirmation, email address, and phone number.
• Account information including your username, password, security questions and other information used for account security purposes.
• Shopping information including the items you view, put in your cart, saved into your account like loyalty points, reviews, referrals or gift cards, or purchases.
• Customer support information including the information you choose to include in communications with us, for example, when sending a message through the Services.

Some features of the Services may require you to directly provide us with certain information about yourself. You may elect not to provide this information, but doing so may prevent you from using or accessing these features.

Information We Collect about Your Usage

We may also automatically collect certain information about your interaction with the Services ("Usage Data"). To do this, we may use cookies, pixels and similar technologies ("Cookies"). Usage Data may include information about how you access and use our Site and your account, including device information, browser information, information about your network connection, your IP address and other information regarding your interaction with the Services.

Live-Site Monitoring and Live Chat Support

To provide responsive customer support and improve the shopping experience, we operate a live-visitor monitoring system that collects and briefly stores the following information while you are actively browsing the Site:

• An anonymous session identifier stored in a first-party cookie (hsp_sid), which expires after 24 hours.
• The page you are currently viewing on our Site, including the page title and the website (if any) that referred you to our Site.
• The contents of your shopping cart while a purchase is in progress, including product names, selected variants, and quantities, together with an estimated subtotal.
• Approximate geographic location (city, region, and country) derived from your IP address, together with the IP address itself.
• Your browser's user agent string.

This information is retained only for the duration of your active visit. Records are automatically deleted approximately 75–90 seconds after your last activity on the Site, and the session cookie itself expires within 24 hours.

If you are signed in to a customer account during your visit, the information above is associated with your account email so that our customer support team can recognize you. If you are not signed in, the data is associated only with the anonymous session cookie described above.

The same context (your current page, cart contents, approximate location, and, where applicable, your email) is also shared with our live-chat provider so that a support agent who responds to a chat message can see what you are viewing and assist you without asking you to repeat yourself. The live-visitor data is stored on our behalf by Upstash, a third-party Redis hosting provider that processes this information solely to provide storage services to us.

How You Found Us

When you arrive at the Site, we record which website, search engine, advertisement, or link referred you, using two first-party cookies (hsp_attr_first and hsp_attr_last). These store only the referring source — for example the search engine or advertising platform, the campaign name, and the advertising platform's own click identifier where one is present in the link you followed. They contain no name, email address, or other information that identifies you personally.

If you place an order, this source information is attached to that order so we can understand which of our marketing efforts led to it. The first cookie is retained for up to 180 days and the second for up to 30 days. We use this only for our own internal reporting on marketing performance; it is not shared with advertising platforms and is not used to build a profile of you.

Session Replay

As part of the live-visitor monitoring described above, and to help us understand how visitors use the Site and improve it, we use a first-party session-replay tool that records a visual reconstruction of your interactions with a page — the structure and layout of the page, mouse movement, clicks, and scrolling. This lets our support team see what you are looking at in real time and lets us diagnose usability problems.

We have configured this tool to protect your privacy:

• We do not record what you type. All form fields are masked automatically, including passwords, email addresses, and phone numbers, so the actual characters you enter never leave your browser. We capture only the shape of the page, not its private contents.
• Live-chat content is excluded entirely — the chat widget is blocked from recording.
• It is first-party and short-lived. The recording is tied to the same anonymous session identifier described above, is stored on our behalf by Upstash (not sold or shared with advertisers), and is automatically deleted approximately two minutes after your last activity on the page. We do not retain a persistent library of session recordings.

Opting out: If your browser sends a "Do Not Track" signal, we do not record your session at all. You can enable Do Not Track in your browser settings, or block cookies, to opt out of session replay.

Information We Obtain from Third Parties

Finally, we may obtain information about you from third parties, including from vendors and service providers who may collect information on our behalf, such as:

• Companies who support our Site and Services, such as Shopify.
• Our payment processors, who collect payment information (e.g., bank account, credit or debit card information, billing address) to process your payment in order to fulfill your orders and provide you with products or services you have requested, in order to perform our contract with you.
• When you visit our Site, open or click on emails we send you, or interact with our Services or advertisements, we, or third parties we work with, may automatically collect certain information using online tracking technologies such as pixels, web beacons, software developer kits, third-party libraries, and cookies.

Any information we obtain from third parties will be treated in accordance with this Privacy Policy. Also see the section below, Third Party Websites and Links.

How We Use Your Personal Information

• Providing Products and Services. We use your personal information to provide you with the Services in order to perform our contract with you, including to process your payments, fulfill your orders, to send notifications to you related to your account, purchases, returns, exchanges or other transactions, to create, maintain and otherwise manage your account, to arrange for shipping, facilitate any returns and exchanges and other features and functionalities related to your account. We may also enhance your shopping experience by enabling Shopify to match your account with other Shopify services that you may choose to use. In this case, Shopify will process your information as set forth in its Privacy Policy and Consumer Privacy Policy.
• Marketing and Advertising. We may use your personal information for marketing and promotional purposes, such as to send marketing, advertising and promotional communications by email, text message or postal mail, and to show you advertisements for products or services. This may include using your personal information to better tailor the Services and advertising on our Site and other websites.
• Security and Fraud Prevention. We use your personal information to detect, investigate or take action regarding possible fraudulent, illegal or malicious activity. If you choose to use the Services and register an account, you are responsible for keeping your account credentials safe. We highly recommend that you do not share your username, password, or other access details with anyone else. If you believe your account has been compromised, please contact us immediately.
• Communicating with You and Service Improvement. We use your personal information to provide you with customer support and improve our Services. This is in our legitimate interests in order to be responsive to you, to provide effective services to you, and to maintain our business relationship with you.

Cookies

Like many websites, we use Cookies on our Site. For specific information about the Cookies that we use related to powering our store with Shopify, see https://www.shopify.com/legal/cookies. We use Cookies to power and improve our Site and our Services (including to remember your actions and preferences), to run analytics and better understand user interaction with the Services (in our legitimate interests to administer, improve and optimize the Services). We may also permit third parties and services providers to use Cookies on our Site to better tailor the services, products and advertising on our Site and other websites.

Managing your cookie choices on our Site. When you first visit, we show a cookie banner that lets you reject non-essential cookies. You can change your choice at any time by opening Cookie Preferences, linked in the footer of every page. Cookies that are strictly necessary to operate the Site — keeping your cart, your signed-in session, and your privacy choices — cannot be switched off, because the Site does not work without them. See Your Choices About Advertising Cookies below for how this interacts with your right to opt out of sale or sharing.

Most browsers automatically accept Cookies by default, but you can choose to set your browser to remove or reject Cookies through your browser controls. Please keep in mind that removing or blocking Cookies can negatively impact your user experience and may cause some of the Services, including certain features and general functionality, to work incorrectly or no longer be available. Additionally, blocking Cookies may not completely prevent how we share information with third parties such as our advertising partners.

Your browser may allow you to transmit a "do not track" signal. Our session-replay tool (described above under Session Replay) honors this signal and will not record your session when it is enabled. Other cookies and tracking technologies on the Site, including those provided by Shopify and our analytics and advertising partners, are generally not designed to respond to "do not track" signals. To learn more about "do not track" signals, you can visit http://www.allaboutdnt.com/.

How We Disclose Personal Information

In certain circumstances, we may disclose your personal information to third parties for contract fulfillment purposes, legitimate purposes and other reasons subject to this Privacy Policy. Such circumstances may include:

• With vendors or other third parties who perform services on our behalf (e.g., IT management, payment processing, data analytics, customer support, cloud storage, fulfillment and shipping).
• With business and marketing partners to provide services and advertise to you. Our business and marketing partners will use your information in accordance with their own privacy notices.
• When you direct, request us or otherwise consent to our disclosure of certain information to third parties, such as to ship you products or through your use of social media widgets or login integrations, with your consent.
• With our affiliates or otherwise within our corporate group, in our legitimate interests to run a successful business.
• In connection with a business transaction such as a merger or bankruptcy, to comply with any applicable legal obligations (including to respond to subpoenas, search warrants and similar requests), to enforce any applicable terms of service, and to protect or defend the Services, our rights, and the rights of our users or others.

We have in the past 12 months disclosed the following categories of personal information and sensitive personal information about users for the purposes set out above in "How we Collect and Use your Personal Information" and "How we Disclose Personal Information":

Category	Categories of Recipients
Identifiers such as basic contact details and certain order and account information	Vendors and third parties who perform services on our behalf (such as Internet service providers, payment processors, fulfillment partners, customer support partners and data analytics providers)
Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute such as basic contact details and certain order and account information	Business and marketing partners
Commercial information such as order information, shopping information and customer support information	Affiliates
Internet or other similar network activity, such as Usage Data	Vendors who provide analytics, site-monitoring, and live-chat services on our behalf (such as Shopify, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, Microsoft Clarity, Tawk.to, and Upstash)
Geolocation data such as locations determined by an IP address or other technical measures	Vendors who provide site-monitoring and live-chat services on our behalf

We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information without your consent or for the purposes of inferring characteristics about you.

User Generated Content

The Services may enable you to post product reviews and other user-generated content. If you choose to submit user generated content to any public area of the Services, this content will be public and accessible by anyone.

We do not control who will have access to the information that you choose to make available to others, and cannot ensure that parties who have access to such information will respect your privacy or keep it secure. We are not responsible for the privacy or security of any information that you make publicly available, or for the accuracy, use or misuse of any information that you disclose or receive from third parties.

Third Party Websites and Links

Our Site may provide links to websites or other online platforms operated by third parties. If you follow links to sites not affiliated or controlled by us, you should review their privacy and security policies and other terms and conditions. We do not guarantee and are not responsible for the privacy or security of such sites, including the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of information found on these sites. Information you provide on public or semi-public venues, including information you share on third-party social networking platforms may also be viewable by other users of the Services and/or users of those third-party platforms without limitation as to its use by us or by a third party. Our inclusion of such links does not, by itself, imply any endorsement of the content on such platforms or of their owners or operators, except as disclosed on the Services.

Children's Data

The Services are not intended to be used by children, and we do not knowingly collect any personal information about children. If you are the parent or guardian of a child who has provided us with their personal information, you may contact us using the contact details set out below to request that it be deleted.

As of the Effective Date of this Privacy Policy, we do not have actual knowledge that we "share" or "sell" (as those terms are defined in applicable law) personal information of individuals under 16 years of age.

Security and Retention of Your Information

Please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable, and we cannot guarantee "perfect security." In addition, any information you send to us may not be secure while in transit. We recommend that you do not use insecure channels to communicate sensitive or confidential information to us.

How long we retain your personal information depends on different factors, such as whether we need the information to maintain your account, to provide the Services, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes or enforce other applicable contracts and policies.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the rights listed below in relation to your personal information. However, these rights are not absolute, may apply only in certain circumstances and, in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law.

• Right to Access / Know: You may have a right to request access to personal information that we hold about you, including details relating to the ways in which we use and share your information.
• Right to Delete: You may have a right to request that we delete personal information we maintain about you.
• Right to Correct: You may have a right to request that we correct inaccurate personal information we maintain about you.
• Right of Portability: You may have a right to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to request that we transfer it to a third party, in certain circumstances and with certain exceptions.
• Restriction of Processing: You may have the right to ask us to stop or restrict our processing of personal information.
• Withdrawal of Consent: Where we rely on consent to process your personal information, you may have the right to withdraw this consent.
• Appeal: You may have a right to appeal our decision if we decline to process your request. You can do so by replying directly to our denial.
• Managing Communication Preferences: We may send you promotional emails, and you may opt out of receiving these at any time by using the unsubscribe option displayed in our emails to you. If you opt out, we may still send you non-promotional emails, such as those about your account or orders that you have made.

You may exercise any of these rights where indicated on our Site or by contacting us using the contact details provided below.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights. We may need to collect information from you to verify your identity, such as your email address or account information, before providing a substantive response to the request. In accordance with applicable laws, you may designate an authorized agent to make requests on your behalf to exercise your rights. Before accepting such a request from an agent, we will require that the agent provide proof you have authorized them to act on your behalf, and we may need you to verify your identity directly with us. We will respond to your request in a timely manner as required under applicable law.

Your Choices About Advertising Cookies — "Do Not Sell or Share"

We use advertising and analytics technologies on the Site, including the Meta (Facebook) Pixel and Google Analytics / Google Ads tags. Under California law and several other state privacy laws, our use of these technologies to show you advertising on other websites may be considered "selling" or "sharing" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, even though we do not receive money for it. We do not sell personal information in the ordinary sense of the term, and we have never sold customer lists or contact information.

You have the right to opt out. You can do this in any of these ways:

• Use our cookie banner. Choose "Reject non-essential" when it appears, or open Cookie Preferences at any time to change your choice. This is the fastest way and it applies to this browser immediately.
• Use a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal. If your browser or extension sends a GPC signal, we treat it as a valid opt-out request for that browser automatically — you do not need to do anything else.
• Email us at support@hotsaucepod.com with the subject line "Do Not Sell or Share."

Opting out of advertising cookies does not affect your ability to shop with us, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising this right. Because these choices are stored in a cookie on your device, you will need to make the choice again if you switch browsers or devices or clear your cookies.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16 years of age.

Complaints

If you have complaints about how we process your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided below. If you are not satisfied with our response to your complaint, depending on where you live you may have the right to appeal our decision by contacting us using the contact details set out below, or lodge your complaint with your local data protection authority.

International Users

Please note that we may transfer, store and process your personal information outside the country you live in. Your personal information is also processed by staff and third party service providers and partners in these countries.

If we transfer your personal information out of Europe, we will rely on recognized transfer mechanisms like the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, or any equivalent contracts issued by the relevant competent authority of the UK, as relevant, unless the data transfer is to a country that has been determined to provide an adequate level of protection.

Contact

Should you have any questions about our privacy practices or this Privacy Policy, or if you would like to exercise any of the rights available to you, please call or email us at support@hotsaucepod.com or contact us at 1 Hardy Rd, PMB 143, Bedford, NH, 03110, US.