Powershift Communications Inc. is committed to maintaining the privacy, security and accuracy of the personal information we collect, use and disclose in accordance with applicable legislation. This privacy policy is a statement of principles and guidelines concerning the protection of personal information of our individual clients, individual service providers and other individuals (with the exception of our personnel, whose personal information is collected, used and disclosed in accordance with our Personnel Privacy Policy).
CONSENT
BY SUBMITTING PERSONAL INFORMATION TO POWERSHIFT COMMUNICATIONS AND ITS THIRD PARTY AGENTS (as defined herein), YOU AGREE THAT WE MAY COLLECT, USE AND DISCLOSE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION IN ACCORDANCE WITH THIS PRIVACY POLICY, THE PRIVACY PREFERENCES YOU HAVE MADE KNOWN TO US, AND AS PERMITTED OR REQUIRED BY LAW.
Subject to legal and contractual requirements, you may refuse or withdraw your consent to certain of the identified purposes at any time by contacting us. If you refuse your consent or withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide you, or continue to provide you, with certain services or information that may be of value to you.
Canadian privacy legislation defines “personal information” broadly as information about “an identifiable individual” or as information that allows an individual to be identified. The types of personal information that we may collect from you include your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, previous address(es), payment information (for billing purposes), delivery instructions, and individual customer service preferences.
We might also obtain a photograph or video of you if you attend or present at one of our special events, but if you have any objection to its use in our editorial content or promotional material please tell us at the event.
In addition, from time to time, we may ask you to provide us with more detailed information regarding your interests, occupation, and background. For example, we sometimes ask our customers to complete surveys in order to get a better sense of who they are and what issues, products or services may be of interest to them and our readership.
Finally, from time to time, we may acquire demographic and other information about you from a third party, but only if you have previously agreed to allow that organization to disclose the information to companies such as Powershift Communications Inc.
We collect your personal information for several reasons.
To provide the product, service or information you requested – If you are a customer of one of our publications, we use your name and address (postal and/or e-mail) in order to deliver the product, service or information you requested and to follow up with you about the transaction (send a bill, notify you that your subscription is expiring, etc.). If you enter into a contest offered through one of our websites or printed publications, we use your personal information to administer the contest on our own behalf or on behalf of our sponsors.
To process payment – Your credit card number, debit card number, or banking information for pre-authorized payments is used only for processing payments and for presenting you with payment options – not for marketing purposes.
To send you information – From time to time, we may send you further information about the publication, its offers, or other products produced under its name.
Other purposes – In addition, we may use your personal information for the following purposes:
- to detect and protect Powershift Communications Inc. and other third parties against error, fraud, theft and other illegal activity, and to audit compliance with our policies and contractual obligations;
- to understand your needs and preferences, including to contact and communicate with you and to conduct surveys, research and evaluations;
- to obtain audited statements regarding numbers of subscribers per publication;
- to engage in a corporate reorganization or like business transactions, including the purchase, sale, lease, merger, amalgamation or any other type of acquisition, disposal, securitization or financing involving us;
- for any other purpose we may indicate to you from time to time.
We may disclose your personal information to the following Third Parties in the following circumstances:
- i) Disclosure to Service Providers – We may disclose your personal information to other companies that provide services on our behalf, including label printers, invoice printers, fulfillment contractors, auditors, software developers (including website developers and hosts), data processing, document management and office services. In addition, we may disclose your personal information to an organization or individual retained by us to evaluate your creditworthiness or to collect debts outstanding on an account or to our auditors. We will only provide those companies the information they need to deliver the service and they are prohibited from using that information for any other purpose.
- ii) Disclosure to Trading Partners – From time to time our magazines or websites may make their list of customers available to other carefully screened organizations (such as other magazines, book publishers, banks or charities) that want to let you know about a product or service that might interest you, or to solicit a donation from you. The material to be sent to you is reviewed by us before the names and addresses (including e-mail addresses) are released to ensure the organization is reputable.
iii) Disclosure in Business Transfers – We may be involved in a corporate reorganization or the sale or transfer of some or all of our business. As part of that sale or transfer, we may disclose your personal information to the acquiring organization, but will require the acquiring organization to agree to protect the privacy of your personal information in a manner that is consistent with this Privacy Policy.
If you would prefer for us NOT to share your information as described in (i), (ii) or (iii) above please contact us.
- iv) Law Enforcement and Legal Disclosure –We may disclose your personal information to a government institution that has asserted its lawful authority to obtain your information or to comply with a subpoena or warrant or an order made by a court, person or body with jurisdiction to compel the production of your information, or to comply with court rules regarding the production of records and information, or to our legal counsel.
At Powershift Communications Inc., we want you to be able to maintain control over how we use your personal information. In particular:
- You may have the right to “opt out” of some or all of the identified purposes, uses and disclosures listed above.
- You always have the option to instruct us not to use your name, address, e-mail address, etc. beyond providing you with the product, service or information you requested. Please contact us with these instructions.
- E-mail communications will always include an identification of the sender and an “Unsubscribe” option.
- If you receive a mailing from any of our magazines and you wish to know the source of your name (i.e. what list it came from), we will make every reasonable effort to determine the source and provide you with the information. For this request, or to confirm that any personal information we may have is correct, please contact us.
Please remember, we may not be able to provide you with our services if you withdraw your consent to our use of your personal information.
Storage of Personal Information
Your personal information is stored in secured locations and on servers controlled by Powershift Communications, located either at our offices or at the offices of our service providers. For access to your personal information, please contact us.
Accessing your Personal Information
Upon written request from you, subject to certain exceptions, we will inform you of the existence, use, and disclosure of your personal information and will give you access to that information.
Protection of Personal Information
We make every reasonable effort to protect against the loss, misuse, and alteration of personal information under our control. Our security policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary.
Only authorized employees and suppliers have access to your personal information. Where information is sent to a third party for processing, we make sure, through our contracts with them, that all your information is kept securely and confidentially. We keep your information for the time we are providing you with a product or service, and for a reasonable time thereafter in the event that you wish to resume service.
We operate secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Credit card information is processed using industry-standard encryption and security. We do not collect personal information from bulletin boards or forums. However, we cannot guarantee that personal information voluntarily disclosed in chat rooms or discussion boards will not be collected and used by others, which may result in unsolicited messages to you from other parties.
Privacy and our Websites
We sometimes collect personal information through our various websites. In this section, we provide you with additional information regarding such collection.
- Cookies – When an individual visitor accesses our websites, we may use a browser feature called a “cookie” to collect information such as the type of Internet browser and operating system the visitor uses, the domain name of the websites from which the visitor came, date and duration of the visit, number of visits, average time spent on our websites, pages viewed and number of cookies accumulated. A “cookie” is a small text file containing a unique identification number that identifies the visitor’s browser, but not necessarily the visitor, to our computers each time our websites are visited. Unless a visitor specifically informs us (by enrolling for our services or sending us correspondence from the websites), we will not know who the individual visitors are. In addition to the identified purposes described in our Privacy Policy, we may use this website information and share it with other organizations with whom we have a commercial relationship to measure the use of our websites and to improve the functionality and content of the websites. Visitors can reset their browsers either to notify them when they have received a cookie or refuse to accept cookies. However, if a visitor refuses to accept cookies, he or she may not be able to use some of the features available on our websites.
- Online Communications – In order to provide our website visitors with a product, service or information, visitors may voluntarily submit personal information to us for purposes such as asking a question, obtaining information, subscribing to, reviewing or downloading a publication, participating in contests and surveys. If you are known to us as a registered user of an online service, we may combine and store personal information about your use of our websites and the online information you have provided with certain other online and offline information we may have collected.
- E-Mail Communications – Occasionally, we may send marketing or promotional e-mail communications to you with information that may be useful, including information about our products and services and of other Third Parties with whom we have a relationship. We will include instructions on how to unsubscribe and inform us of preferences if recipients decide they do not want to receive any future marketing or promotional e-mails from us.\
Also, if you send us an e-mail message, we may retain that message and your e-mail address, as well as any response we send you.
- Advertisers – If you submit some of your personal information on any of our websites via a link to a Third Party’s website to request information from a third party (such as an advertiser), we are not responsible for any use of your personal information by such third party. Hence, we suggest that you first learn more about such third party’s privacy policies prior to submitting your personal information by visiting its website or contacting it by postal mail or telephone.
- Opinion Polls – Opinion polls on our websites are anonymous. We do not correlate votes submitted via such polls with names or individual e-mail addresses, unless otherwise disclosed at the point of collection.
- Chat Rooms and Bulletin Boards – Some of our websites may offer chat rooms and bulletin boards. Only individuals 19 years of age or older may participate in our chat rooms and bulletin boards. The voluntary disclosure of personal information in a chat room or on a bulletin board is not governed by this Privacy Policy. Any communications which are part of chat rooms or discussion boards are public and not private and you provide such information at your own risk. Although it is prohibited to use our forums as a source of e-mail addresses for sending unfounded or unsolicited messages or spamming, others may still capture your e-mail address and send you e-mail messages if you post your e-mail address and we cannot control such actions by others. We advise you to remain prudent and attentive at all times when you are on line on the Internet.
- Searches – For your convenience, search functions are sometimes provided on our websites. We keep logs of the words searched to learn more about what kind of information our visitors are seeking, and thus improve our services.
- Hyperlinks – For your convenience, our websites sometimes contain hyperlinks to websites managed by third parties. By activating these hyperlinks, you will leave our websites for those of the third parties, which may have different privacy policies and practices than we do. We are not liable for the use of such third party websites.
- Advertising to Children – We believe that none of our websites appeal directly to children of 13 years old or less. We do not knowingly direct our advertising at children under the age of 13, except as permitted by law.
- Individuals Under 19 – No personal information should be submitted or posted on our websites by individuals under 19 years of age without their parent’s or guardian’s permission. We may request name, address, phone number, e-mail address and date of birth from an individual under 19 years of age for contest participation so that we may notify him or her if selected as a winner. In the event we do so, we will request their parent’s or guardian’s consent prior to collection.
No information collected from online guests under 19 years of age is used for any marketing or promotional purposes whatsoever by us. Unless otherwise disclosed at collection, we do not provide any personal information collected through any of our website from individuals under 19 years old, regardless of its source, to any third party for any purpose whatsoever.
Changes to the Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to modify or supplement this Privacy Policy at any time. If we make a change to this Privacy Policy, we will post the change on our websites and make the change available upon request to us.
We will obtain the necessary consents required under applicable Privacy Laws if it seeks to collect, use or disclose an individual’s personal information for purposes other than those to which consent is obtained unless otherwise required or permitted by law.
Contact Us
You can contact us at:
Powershift Communications Inc.
245 Fairview Mall Dr., Ste. 501
Toronto, ON M2J 4T1 Canada
Attn: Cathy McKerchar, Privacy Officer
Email: cathy@powershift.ca
Phone: (416) 494-1066
Fax: (416) 494-2536