Privacy Policy

What this policy covers

In Its Places is a professional organizing business owned and run by Leanna Mortenson, serving Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, and the San Fernando Valley. In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean In Its Places, and "you" means anyone who visits this website or contacts us through it.

This policy explains what information we collect through initsplaces.com, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can ask us to do with it. It also covers the information you give us when you call, text or email us, or when you hire us to organize your home.

We're a small business. One person does the organizing, and the same person reads the inquiry form. There's no marketing department here, no advertising network, and nothing on this site that follows you around the web.

Information we collect

Information you give us

When you fill in the inquiry form, or call, text or email us, you choose what to tell us. Usually that's your name, your email address, your phone number, the town you live in, which rooms you'd like help with, and whatever else you want us to know before we talk. If you hire us, we'll also have your address so we can come to the job, and a record of what was quoted, scheduled and paid.

Please don't send us information you'd rather nobody had. The form is for arranging a conversation about your home, and it doesn't need your Social Security number, your account numbers, your health history or anything similar. We don't ask for that, and we don't want it on file.

Information collected automatically

Like almost every website, ours is served by a web server that keeps short-lived logs. Those logs record the address of the request, your IP address, your browser's user agent string, and the time. They exist so that outages and abuse can be diagnosed, and they aren't used to build a profile of you.

We also count page views in aggregate. How that works, and why it sets no cookie, is in Cookies and analytics.

Categories, in the words California uses

California law asks businesses to describe personal information by category. In the twelve months before the date at the top of this page, we've collected:

• Identifiers. Your name, email address, phone number, mailing address if you become a client, and the IP address your browser sends when it loads a page.
• Customer records. The billing details connected to a paid invoice, held by our payment provider rather than by us.
• Commercial information. What you asked about, what you hired us to do, and what you paid for it.
• Internet activity. Aggregate counts of which pages were viewed, and the server logs described above.
• Visual information. Photographs taken during a job, which are only ever published with your permission. See Photographs of your home.
• Anything else you write to us. The contents of your message, your emails and your texts.

We don't collect what California calls sensitive personal information: no government identification numbers, no financial account credentials, no precise geolocation, no biometric data, and nothing about your race, religion, health, sex life or union membership. We don't use any information to infer a profile about your characteristics.

How we use it

We use your information to:

• answer your question and set up a free consultation;
• write your estimate, schedule the work and do the job;
• send invoices and take payment;
• keep the records a business is required to keep, including for tax;
• keep this site working, secure and reasonably fast;
• reply to you if you write to us about this policy.

We'll email you about your own project. We don't run a newsletter, and we don't add you to a mailing list because you asked for a quote. If that ever changes, it will be something you opt into, and every message will have an unsubscribe link.

Forms and payments

The inquiry form on our contact section is provided by HoneyBook, the client management service this business runs on. The form is embedded from HoneyBook's own servers, which means that what you type into it goes to HoneyBook directly. It doesn't pass through this website, and this website never stores it. HoneyBook handles it as a service provider on our behalf, under their own privacy policy, at honeybook.com/privacy.

If you'd rather not use the form at all, call or text (805) 205-3198 or email leanna@initsplaces.com. Everything the form does can be done in a conversation.

We accept electronic payments, and we never store your card details. Invoices are sent and paid through HoneyBook, and the card or bank information you enter goes to HoneyBook and the payment processors they use. It isn't held on this website's servers, and it isn't held on our own computers or phones. What we can see is what any business can see about an invoice: that it was paid, when, and by which method, along with the last few digits of a card. If you pay by check or cash, we keep only the record of the payment.

Cookies and analytics

This site sets a small number of cookies that are strictly necessary for it to work: one that keeps track of your browsing session, and one that protects forms against cross-site request forgery. They carry no advertising identifier, and they're deleted when your session ends.

For visitor numbers we use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless by design. It reports totals: how many people opened a page, roughly where in the world they were, and what referred them. It doesn't fingerprint your device and it doesn't follow you to any other site. That's the whole reason it was chosen, and it's why this site has no cookie consent banner.

The HoneyBook form runs in its own frame, and HoneyBook may set cookies of its own within that frame in order to operate the form. We don't run advertising pixels, retargeting tags or social media trackers anywhere on this site.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. Browsers can send a Do Not Track signal, but there's still no agreed standard for what a site should do about it, so we don't respond to it. We also don't sell or share your personal information, so there's nothing for a Global Privacy Control signal to switch off. If that ever changes, we'll treat a Global Privacy Control signal as a valid request to opt out.

Photographs of your home

Organizing work is shown in before and after photographs, and those photographs are taken inside people's homes. That deserves its own rules, so here they are.

• We ask before we photograph anything, and we'll stop the moment you say so.
• Nothing is published without your permission. Photographs taken for our own records stay in our records.
• Before anything is published we remove what identifies you: no street addresses, no house numbers, no mail, no prescriptions, no documents, no photographs of your family on the wall. Projects are described by a town at most.
• If you change your mind, tell us and we'll take the photograph off this site and off our social media. Copies already downloaded or reshared by other people are outside our control, which is worth knowing before you agree.

Who we share it with

We share your information with the companies that help us run the business, and only so they can do that work. They are:

• HoneyBook, for the inquiry form, proposals, contracts, invoices and payments;
• our web host and its infrastructure providers, who serve this site and keep its server logs;
• Cloudflare, for the aggregate page counts described above;
• our email provider, which carries the messages between us;
• Dropbox, where a nightly encrypted backup of this site's database and photographs is stored in a folder scoped to this application.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, if we're responding to a valid legal process, or if it's necessary to protect someone's safety or our legal rights. If the business is ever sold or transferred, client records would transfer with it, and this policy would continue to apply to them until you're told otherwise.

That's the complete list. Nobody else gets your information.

We do not sell your information

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. We also don't "share" it in the specific sense California's law uses, which means handing it to somebody else for cross-context behavioral advertising. We haven't done either in the twelve months before the date at the top of this page, and we don't have plans to. We don't sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

Giving information to a service provider so they can send an invoice on our behalf is not a sale, and the companies listed above are contractually limited to doing what we've asked them to do.

How long we keep it

Inquiries that don't turn into a job are kept while there's still a chance you'll get back in touch, and then deleted. Client records, including estimates, contracts and invoices, are kept for as long as the law requires records of a transaction to be kept, which for tax purposes is several years. Server logs are short-lived. Aggregate analytics carry nothing that identifies you and are kept indefinitely.

You can ask us to delete what we hold sooner, and the limits on that are described below.

How we protect it

This site is served over HTTPS, so what passes between your browser and it is encrypted. Administrative access to the site requires a password and a code sent by email, so a stolen password alone isn't enough to get in. Backups are encrypted in transit and stored in an account that only this business controls. Payment details never reach our systems at all.

No website or business can promise perfect security, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we can say is that we collect little, we keep it in few places, and we don't hold the category of information that makes a small business worth attacking.

Your California privacy rights

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, gives you the following rights. Exercising any of them is free.

• The right to know. You can ask what personal information we collected about you, where we got it, why we collected it, who we disclosed it to, and you can ask for a copy of it.
• The right to delete. You can ask us to delete the personal information we hold about you. We have to keep some of it, and where we do we'll tell you which exception applies: usually completing a transaction you asked for, or a record we're legally required to keep.
• The right to correct. If what we hold about you is wrong, you can ask us to fix it.
• The right to opt out of sale or sharing. We don't do either, so there's nothing to opt out of. There's no "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link on this site because that link is only required of businesses that sell or share, and we don't.
• The right to limit the use of sensitive personal information. We don't collect any, so this one has nothing to act on either.
• The right not to be treated differently for asking. We won't refuse you service, charge you a different price or give you a worse result because you exercised a privacy right.

How to make a request

Email leanna@initsplaces.com or call (805) 205-3198 and say what you'd like. Plain words are fine, and you don't need to cite the statute.

Before we act on a request we have to be reasonably sure it's really you, so we'll ask you to confirm a couple of things we already have on file, such as the email address or phone number your inquiry came from. We won't collect anything new in order to verify you, and if we can't verify you we'll tell you why.

We'll confirm we got your request within 10 business days and answer it within 45 calendar days. If it's genuinely complicated we may take another 45 days, and we'll tell you before we do. You can use an authorized agent, in which case we'll need your written permission for them to act for you and we'll still need to verify you.

If you live outside California

We work in Southern California and nearly everyone who contacts us lives there. If you live somewhere with a comparable privacy law and it gives you rights we haven't listed, write to us anyway. We'd rather answer the request than argue about which statute applies.

California Shine the Light

California's Shine the Light law lets residents ask a business once a year whether it gave personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing. We don't, so the answer is already no. If you'd like it in writing, ask at leanna@initsplaces.com.

Children's privacy

This site and this business are for adults hiring a service. We don't direct any of it at children, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we'll delete it. Organizing a child's bedroom is a job we take on for a parent, and it involves no information about the child beyond what the parent chooses to mention.

Links to other sites

This site links to our profiles on Instagram and Facebook, to HoneyBook, and to our client portal. Once you follow a link you're on somebody else's site, under their privacy policy, and this one stops applying. We don't control what they collect.

Changes to this policy

If we change how this site handles your information, we'll change this page in the same breath and move the date at the top of it. There's no archive of old versions, so if a change matters to you, save a copy. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the current version.

How to reach us

In Its Places
Leanna Mortenson, owner
Email: leanna@initsplaces.com
Phone: (805) 205-3198
Serving Ventura County, Santa Barbara County, and the San Fernando Valley

We work out of a home rather than a storefront, so there's no public street address to write to. Email and phone both reach the owner directly.