Privacy Notice

Effective date: June 5, 2021

 

OUR COMMITMENT

At Privacy HQ we understand the importance of privacy and the sensitivity of personal information. We collect, use and disclose very little personal information, mostly limited to business contact information, to provide you with legal or consulting services. We are committed to protecting and maintaining the confidentiality of your personal information. We hold ourselves accountable to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) as well as the Rules of Professional Conduct of the Law Society of Ontario.

This Privacy Notice outlines how we manage personal information and safeguard privacy.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions or concerns about the collection, use or disclosure of personal information by Privacy HQ or about accessing your personal information, please contact us at advisor@privacyhq.ca

WHAT IS PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Personal information is information that identifies you or could be combined with other information to identify you. This information includes your personal e-mail address, your home address, your home telephone number, your personal cellphone number, your image, and may include your age, your income and other similar information when associated with you. Personal information may also be information containing details as to whether you have opened our promotional e-mails or how you have used our website if we can associate that personal information with you. If you are a client or prospective client, personal information does not include your title, business address, and business telephone number when we use that information to contact you in your business capacity.

 

PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Privacy HQ provide services to a wide range of clients and will generally collect personal information directly from them. Such collection may be done at the start of our relationship or during the engagement. While we collect mostly business information, we may collect personal information about you, such as your address, phone number, and email address if you send it to us.

 

OUR WEBSITE

Our website may contain links to other websites, which are not governed by this policy.

On our website, like most other commercial websites, we may monitor traffic patterns, site usage and related site information to optimize our web service. We may provide aggregated information to third parties, but these statistics do not include any identifiable personal information. We do not use cookies or any electronic means to automatically collect personal information from you or your computer; however, web servers used by Privacy HQ will automatically collect IP addresses and we may view our web server IP log from time to time to prevent fraudulent acts and possible network attacks.

HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We may use information that we collect about you to:

• to provide you with our services;
• to respond to your requests for further information about our services;
• to meet legal and regulatory requirements;
• to inform you of our programs, products or services that may be of interest to you; and
• to provide you with our newsletter service. If you no longer wish to receive information about developments in the law or our services, you can ask us not to send any further material.

 

CONSENT AND WITHDRAWAL OF CONSENT

We ask for consent to collect, use or disclose your personal information, except in specific circumstances where collection, use or disclosure without consent is authorized or required by law. We may assume your consent in cases where you volunteer information for an obvious purpose.

We may ask for your express consent for some purposes and may not be able to provide certain services if you are unwilling to provide consent to the collection, use or disclosure of certain personal information. Where express consent is needed, we will normally ask you to provide your consent in writing, by checking a box on a form, or electronically (by clicking a button or responding to a registered email).

You can withdraw consent for us to use or disclose your personal information for a particular purpose at any time by contacting us at advisor@privacyhq.ca. Should you withdraw your consent for us to collect, use or disclose your personal information, it may affect our ability to serve you and to maintain our relationship.

SECURING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We take administrative, technical and physical measures to safeguard your personal information against unauthorized access, unauthorized disclosure, theft and misuse. This includes limiting access of employees to, and the use of, your personal information through the use of role based access control.

We take physical precautions to ensure that the computer servers on which your personal information is stored and archived are secure and that access to such servers is protected. We educate our employees on their obligations to protect your personal information and we require our affiliates and any third-party service providers to take comparable steps to ensure the protection of any of your personal information that is shared with them.

Although we take precautions against possible data breaches of our systems, no company can fully eliminate the risks of unauthorized access to your personal information. We cannot guarantee that unauthorized access, hacking, data loss or breaches of our systems will never occur.

 

ACCESSING AND UPDATING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We understand that your personal information is yours and we respect that. We make every reasonable effort to ensure that your personal information is accurate and complete. We rely on you to notify us if there is a change to your personal information that may affect your relationship with us. If you are aware of an error in our information about you, please let us know and we will correct it on request wherever possible. In some cases, we may ask for a written request for correction.

If you wish to have access or update your personal information, please contact us at advisor@privacyhq.ca

 

DISCLOSURE AND RETENTION OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We may share your personal information with our service providers that help us with our business operations.  Your personal information may be used or stored by us or our service providers outside of Canada. We require that our service providers safeguard your personal information. However, if your personal information is used or stored outside of Canada, it will also be subject to the laws of the country in which it is used or stored.

We require our service providers to keep your personal information secure and not use or disclose personal information for any purpose other than providing the services on our behalf unless we or they have obtained your consent.

We may transfer any information we have about you in connection with a merger or sale (including transfers made as part of insolvency or bankruptcy proceedings) involving all or part of our business or as part of a corporate reorganization or stock sale or other change in corporate control.

We may also disclose your personal information if it is necessary for us to collect a debt from you or where we have reason to believe that it is relevant to the investigation or decision to investigate a breach of the laws of Canada, a province or territory of Canada, or a foreign jurisdiction, and we are legally permitted to do so.

We retain client personal information only as long as is reasonable to fulfil the purposes for which the information was collected or for legal or business purposes.

CHILDREN’S INFORMATION

Our website and the services offered are not directed to children under the age of 13 years. If you learn that your minor child has provided us with personal information without your consent, please contact us.

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY NOTICE

As we grow and adjust to the changes in the environment we operate in so will our privacy notice. We will keep you updated on our new privacy practices by revising our privacy notice and posting it to our website. Be sure to check it for updates.

QUESTIONS AND COMPLAINTS

If after contacting us at advisor@privacyhq.ca you are not satisfied with our response about an access request or to the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information you may contact the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario through this link https://www.ipc.on.ca/about-us/contact-us/

Or if your commercial interaction with Privacy HQ occurred in a province or territory other than Ontario, you may contact the Privacy Commissioner of Canada through this link https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/contact-the-opc/