The Public Services Health & Safety Association (“PSHSA“, “we“, “us” and “our“) is committed to maintaining the accuracy, security and privacy of personal information in accordance with applicable legislation. This Privacy Policy is a statement of principles and guidelines concerning the protection of personal information of our clients, service providers and other individuals (“you“).
Personal Information
The term “personal information” refers to any information about an identifiable individual or any information that allows an individual to be identified. Generally speaking, personal information does not include what is considered business contact information: your name, title or position, business address, telephone number, facsimile number or e-mail address. The types of personal information that PSHSA may collect about you includes your name, home address, telephone number, personal e-mail address, billing and account information, and other information incidental to providing products and services offered by PSHSA.
Consent
By submitting personal information to PSHSA or its agents, you agree that we may collect, use and disclose such personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy and as permitted or required by law. You may vary or withdraw your consent to the use and disclosure of your personal information, or opt-out of certain uses and disclosures, subject to legal and contractual restrictions. To vary or withdraw your consent, please contact the individual identified below.
If you refuse or withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide you or continue to provide you with certain products, services or information which may be of value to you. If you provide PSHSA or our agents with personal information of another individual, you represent that you have all necessary authority and/or have obtained all necessary consents from such person to enable us to collect, use and disclose such personal information for the purposes set forth in this Privacy Policy.
Why do we collect your personal information?
In general, PSHSA collects, uses and discloses personal information for the purposes identified at the time of collection, or as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law. More specifically, we collect, use and disclose your personal information for the following purposes:
- to establish and manage client relationships;
- to develop, enhance, market, sell or otherwise provide PSHSA’s products and services;
- to establish and maintain commercial relationships with clients, suppliers and other third parties, including to issue invoices, administer accounts, collect and process payments, and to fulfill contractual obligations;
- to establish, manage and terminate employment, contractual and partnership relationships;
- to understand and respond to client, supplier and other third party needs and preferences,
- including to contact and communicate with such parties and to conduct surveys, research and evaluations;
- to market, sell or otherwise provide products and services of third parties with whom PSHSA has a commercial relationship;
- to distribute newsletters and other informational e-mail communications, conference information and other material to individuals on our mail and e-mail lists, including via third party mailing houses and e-mail service providers;
- to develop and manage PSHSA’s business and operations;
- to detect and protect PSHSA and other third parties against error, negligence, breach of contract, fraud, theft and other illegal activity, and to audit compliance with PSHSA policies and contractual obligations;
- as permitted by, and to comply with, any legal or regulatory requirements or provisions; and for any other purpose to which you consent.
To whom do we disclose your personal information?
From time to time, PSHSA may disclose your personal information to:
- service providers, including an organization or individual retained by PSHSA to perform functions on its behalf, such as marketing, data processing, document management and office services;
- a person who, in the reasonable judgment of PSHSA, is providing or seeking the information as your agent;
- to our insurers and to regulatory agencies applicable to the operations of PSHSA;
- to personnel in PSHSA, government authorities, insurers, benefits providers, consultants or agents as reasonably required to establish, manage or terminate employment, contractual and partnership relationships; and
- any third party or parties, where you consent to such disclosure or where disclosure is required or permitted by law.
Where do we store your personal information?
Your personal information is stored in secured locations and on servers located either at our offices or at the offices of our service providers.
To the extent that PSHSA employs third-party service providers to store, handle or process personal information on our behalf (e.g., data storage and processing, cloud computing, application hosting or office services), we use contractual and other means to provide a comparable level of protection while the information is being stored, handled or processed by those service providers.
Our service providers are committed by contractual agreements with us to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, collection, use or disclosure. Our service providers are not permitted to disclose your information to others.
Some of our service providers may store your personal information in other countries. If it is required by law or court order, your personal information could be made accessible to legal authorities, including law enforcement and national security authorities of those countries.
How may you obtain access to your personal information?
Upon your written request, PSHSA will inform you of the existence, use and disclosure of your personal information and will give you access to that information. Access requests should be sent to the individual identified below.
How do we protect your personal information?
To help protect the confidentiality of your personal information, PSHSA employs administrative and technological safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of your personal information. Where personal information is sent to a third party for processing we ensure, through our contracts with them, that all personal information is kept secure. We operate secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems.
Privacy and our website
Cookies
When a visitor accesses the PSHSA website, 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 website from which the visitor came, date and duration of the visit, number of visits, average time spent on our website, 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 website is visited. Unless a visitor specifically informs us, 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 website, to improve the functionality and content of the website and to facilitate usage by a visitor. 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 website.
Online Communications
In order to provide our website visitors with a service or information, visitors may voluntarily submit personal information to us for purposes such as asking a question, obtaining information, reviewing or downloading a publication, subscribing to a newsletter or a mail or e-mail list, participating in an event, and participating in contests and surveys. If you are known to PSHSA as a registered user of an online service, we may combine and store personal information about your use of our website 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 the services of PSHSA and other third parties with whom we have a relationship. In this process, we may collect certain information such as the date/time you first opened our e-mail communications, the number of times you open our e-mail communications, the number of click-throughs per article, total click-through activity on the contents of our e-mail communications and compile generally the related statistics. We may combine and store any such information to manage and improve our e-mail communications to you. We will include instructions on how to unsubscribe and inform us of preferences if you decide you do not want to receive any future marketing or promotional e-mails from PSHSA.
Links
Our website may contain links to other websites which are provided as a convenience only. Visitors are advised that other third party websites may have different privacy policies and practices than PSHSA, and PSHSA has no responsibility for such third party websites.
Changes to the privacy policy
PSHSA reserves the right to modify or supplement this Privacy Policy at any time. If we make a change to this Privacy Policy, we will post such changes on our website and make such revised policy and changes available upon request to the individual identified below. However, PSHSA will obtain the necessary consents required under applicable privacy laws if it seeks to collect, use or disclose your personal information for purposes other than those to which consent has been obtained unless otherwise required or permitted by law.
Further Information
For information on PSHSA’s privacy practices, please contact:
privacyofficer@pshsa.ca