Common Tides LLC, doing business as Common Tides Coffee, runs a mobile coffee trailer serving Wilmington, North Carolina and the surrounding coast. This policy explains what information we collect, why we collect it, and what we do with it.
It covers four websites:
- www.commontides.com, our main site
- book.commontides.com, where you request event coffee catering
- find.commontides.com, the live map of where the trailer is parked
- blog.commontides.com, our journal
We are a small business. We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, and we do not trade it. We collect what we need to answer your inquiry and serve your event, and nothing beyond that.
What we collect
When you request a booking
The booking form at book.commontides.com asks for details about your event and how to reach you. Depending on what you fill in, that includes:
- Your name and email address, which are required, and your phone number, which is optional
- Event type, date, start time, duration, and how flexible the date is
- Event location, indoor or outdoor setting, guest count, whether power is available, and whether the venue is booked
- Drink preferences, who is paying (host or guests), your budget range, and any details you choose to write in
- How you heard about us
The event form on our main site collects a smaller version of the same thing: name, email, phone, and your message.
When you use the live map
find.commontides.com works without any account or sign in. If you tap the Near Me button, your browser asks your permission to share your location, and we use it to sort the stops by distance and drop a dot on the map. Those coordinates stay in your browser. They are never sent to our servers and we never store them. If you decline the permission, the rest of the map works normally.
The map saves a small amount of data on your own device to keep it fast: cached map coordinates for our stop addresses and a cached weather forecast. This lives in your browser storage, not on our servers, and clearing your browser data removes it.
When you buy a drink
Payments at the trailer and for events are processed by Square. Square handles your card details directly. We never see or store your full card number. We see the transaction record: amount, date, the last four digits, and any receipt email or phone number you give Square.
Automatically, when you visit
Our hosting providers keep standard server logs, which include IP address, browser type, the page requested, and the time of the request. These are used for security and to keep the sites running.
Our main site, www.commontides.com, uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read. Google sets cookies to do this. Our booking site, live map, and journal do not run analytics and do not set any cookies.
How we use it
- To reply to your inquiry and send you a quote
- To plan and staff your event, and to write up an event agreement if you book
- To take payment and keep the accounting records the law requires us to keep
- To keep the sites secure and working
- To understand, on the main site only, which pages are useful
We do not send marketing email to people who fill out the booking form. Email from us is a reply to something you started, or a message about an event you booked.
Who else sees it
We use a handful of outside services to run the business. Each one only receives what it needs to do its job, and none of them are permitted to use your information for their own marketing.
- Google: booking form submissions are emailed to us through Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. Google Analytics runs on the main site only.
- Vercel and DreamHost: website hosting.
- Neon: the database behind our internal operations tools, where booking requests and event agreements are stored.
- Square: payment processing.
- Intuit QuickBooks: bookkeeping and tax records.
- LocationIQ and OpenWeatherMap: turning our stop addresses into map pins, and the forecast shown on the map. These receive the addresses of our own stops, not anything about you.
We will also share information when the law requires it, such as a subpoena or a tax audit, or if it is needed to protect someone from harm. If the business is ever sold or transferred, customer records may transfer with it.
How long we keep it
- Booking inquiries that do not turn into events: kept while we may still be talking, then cleared out.
- Booked events, signed agreements, and payment records: kept as long as tax and accounting rules require, which in North Carolina generally means several years.
- Server logs: kept for a short period by our hosts and then rotated out.
You can ask us to delete your information sooner. See below.
Your choices
Email hello@commontides.com and we will:
- Tell you what information we hold about you
- Correct anything that is wrong
- Delete your information, unless we are required to keep a record for tax or accounting
You can also turn off the Google Analytics on our main site with Google's browser opt out add on, block cookies in your browser settings, clear the live map's stored data by clearing your browser data, and deny or revoke the location permission at any time in your browser settings.
Some browsers send a Do Not Track signal. There is still no agreed standard for what a site should do with it, so we do not respond to it. The controls above work regardless.
Children
Our sites are meant for adults booking coffee service. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child has sent us information, email us and we will delete it.
Security
Every one of our sites is served over HTTPS. Our internal operations tool is password protected and limited to staff. Sensitive employee records held there, such as tax identification and bank details for direct deposit, are encrypted in the database with AES-256. No system is perfect, and we will not pretend otherwise, but we do not hold card numbers and we keep the sensitive fields we do hold encrypted.
Employees and applicants
If you work for Common Tides, we hold the records employment requires: your contact details, tax and direct deposit information, scheduled and worked hours, and pay history. Our time clock records the location of your phone at the moment you punch in or out, to confirm the punch happened at the truck. It does not track you at any other time. This information is used for payroll and scheduling only.
Other sites we link to
Our sites link out to places like Instagram, Facebook, and Google Maps. Once you follow one of those links, that company's privacy policy governs, not ours.
Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle information, we will update this page and change the effective date at the top. The version here is always the current one.
Contact us
Questions about this policy, or about information we hold, go to hello@commontides.com.
Common Tides LLC, doing business as Common Tides Coffee
Wilmington, North Carolina