Privacy
1. Introduction
Welcome to Guilt-Free. This website (guiltfreestore.com) and our online store are operated by Guiltless Indulgence (ABN 75 489 159 691), trading as Guilt-Free (“we”, “us” and “our”). We are an Australian family business making premium, clean-label food products, and we treat your personal information the way we treat our ingredient list: nothing hidden, nothing you wouldn’t expect.
This policy explains how we collect, use, store, protect and share your personal information when you visit our website, create an account, subscribe to our emails or buy from our store. We handle personal information in line with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles and, for our New Zealand customers, the Privacy Act 2020 (NZ).
Purchases made on Amazon are handled by Amazon under its own privacy policy. This policy covers our website and our direct communications.
2. What We Collect
Information you give us:
- Name, email address and phone number
- Billing and delivery address
- Order details and purchase history
- Account login details if you create an account (passwords are stored in encrypted form)
- Payment details, which are collected and processed by our payment providers; we never see or store your full card number
- Anything you send us through our contact form, emails or product reviews. Reviews you post are published on the relevant product page with the display name you provide.
Information collected automatically:
- IP address and approximate location
- Browser type, device type and operating system
- Pages visited, time on site and referring source
- Cookie and pixel identifiers used for analytics and advertising (see section 6)
We only collect what we need to run the store, deliver your order and communicate with you.
3. How We Collect It
- Directly from you at checkout, account creation, our subscription form and our contact form
- Automatically through cookies and similar technologies when you browse
- From our service providers, for example delivery and engagement data from our email platform, and payment confirmations from our payment providers
4. Why We Collect It
- To process, pack, ship and deliver your orders, including preparing customs and import documentation for international orders
- To take payment and help prevent fraud
- To respond to enquiries, returns and support requests
- To send our newsletter, product news, recipes and subscriber offers, in line with section 5
- To improve our website, products and customer experience
- To meet our legal obligations, including tax, consumer law and food traceability requirements
We will not use your information for an unrelated purpose without your consent.
5. Email Marketing
We comply with the Spam Act 2003 for Australian recipients and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 for New Zealand recipients. We send marketing emails only with your consent, either express (for example, subscribing to our newsletter or ticking the box at checkout) or reasonably inferred from an existing customer relationship. If you buy from us, we may send you news and offers about our products, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Every marketing email includes a working unsubscribe link, and unsubscribe requests take effect within 5 business days. Order confirmations, shipping updates and other service messages are not marketing and are sent to everyone who buys.
6. Cookies, Analytics and Advertising
Our website uses cookies and similar technologies for three purposes:
- Essential: cart, checkout, login and account functions
- Analytics: Google Analytics 4 (Google) and WooCommerce’s built-in store analytics help us understand traffic and improve the site
- Advertising: we use the Meta Pixel (Facebook and Instagram) to measure our advertising and show relevant ads to people who have visited our site. This shares limited technical and event data with Meta, such as pages viewed and actions taken. We may also share hashed email addresses with Meta so it can match our subscribers for advertising; hashing means Meta cannot read an address unless it already holds it.
You can control cookies through your browser settings, adjust your ad preferences in your Meta account, and opt out of Google Analytics using Google’s opt-out browser add-on. Disabling cookies may affect parts of the site, including the cart. Our website does not currently respond to Do Not Track browser signals.
7. Who We Share It With
We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information. We share it only with the providers and authorities needed to run the store:
- Website hosting and infrastructure: Hostinger
- Email marketing platform: Hostinger Reach
- E-commerce platform: WordPress with WooCommerce
- Payment processing: WooPayments and PayPal
- Analytics and advertising: Google and Meta, as described in section 6
- Delivery: Australia Post and its delivery partners
- Professional advisers and regulators, where required or authorised by law
Each provider receives only the information it needs to do its job.
8. Overseas Disclosure
We take reasonable steps to ensure overseas recipients handle your information consistently with Australian privacy standards and, for New Zealand customers, with safeguards comparable to the NZ Privacy Act. By using our website, you acknowledge that your information may be handled in these locations.
9. Storage, Security and Retention
Your information is stored on the secured servers of our service providers. Our website uses SSL encryption, and access to personal information within our business is limited to those who need it for their role. We retain information only as long as necessary for the purposes above, except that transaction records are kept for at least five years to meet Australian tax and business record laws. When information is no longer needed, we take reasonable steps to securely destroy or de-identify it.
10. Data Breaches
If a data breach occurs that is likely to cause serious harm, we will notify affected individuals and the relevant regulator (the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in Australia, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand) as required, and tell you what happened and what we are doing about it.
11. Access, Correction and Deletion
You can ask us to:
- Show you the personal information we hold about you
- Correct anything inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading
- Delete your information, which we will do unless the law requires us to keep it (for example, tax records)
Contact us using section 14. We respond within 30 days and may need to verify your identity first. There is no charge for making a request or for corrections. A reasonable fee may apply only to unusually large access requests, and we will tell you before any fee applies.
12. New Zealand customers
The Privacy Act 2020 (NZ) applies to our handling of your information. You have rights of access and correction, and if you are unhappy with our response to a privacy concern, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
13. Children
Our website and marketing are directed at adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.
14. Contact and complaints
The fastest way to reach us is the form on our Contact Us page, or by email at hello@guiltfreestore.com
If you believe we have mishandled your personal information, please contact us first. We will acknowledge your complaint within 5 business days and aim to resolve it within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner: oaic.gov.au, 1300 363 992, GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001. New Zealand customers can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (section 12).
15. Updates to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time and will change the date at the top when we do. For significant changes, we will email subscribers or post a prominent notice on the website. Your continued use of the site after changes are posted means the current version applies.