PRIVACY POLICY
Last updated: July 27, 2023
Privacy Policy
The Community Energy Association and its subsidiaries (collectively, “Association”, “we”, and “us”) is committed to respecting your privacy. The purpose of this Privacy Policy is to explain how we handle personal information to ensure its confidentiality, security, and accuracy.
This Privacy Policy was last updated on the date noted at the top of this webpage and may be updated from time to time in the future. If we make material changes, we will post the updated Privacy Policy on this page and change the date at the top of this webpage. Such changes will be effective immediately.
What is “Personal Information”?
We only collect, use, store, or disclose your personally identifiable information (“personal information”) in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We recognize every individual’s right to privacy and acknowledge our obligation to preserve the confidentiality of personal information. Personal information is information about an identifiable individual. It can include contact information such as your name, mailing address, email address, phone number, Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, user name or other similar identifier, and financial information.
Consent
When you provide the Association with your personal information, you understand and agree to the Association’s collection, use, storage, disclosure, and retention of your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy or as otherwise permitted by law. Except in limited circumstances, you may withdraw your consent to our use of your personal information at any time.
Collecting Personal Information
Currently, the primary purpose for which the Association obtains personal information is to administer the Retrofit Assist program, a concierge-style program for homeowners seeking to do energy upgrades on their homes. We administer the Retrofit Assist program on behalf of a number of local governments. We collect personal information to conduct intake and communicate with homeowners and contractors – either hired directly by us or by the homeowner – who perform the energy upgrades on homeowners’ homes.
We also collect personal information when we provide support for completing rebate applications from utility companies.
We also obtain other information that you choose to give us. You may do so in a variety of ways, including direct interactions with you when you provide it to us, such as by filling in forms or surveys in person, on our website(s), or via social media; or by corresponding with us by phone, email, or otherwise.
The information we collect may include:
Contact and identification information, such as your name, address, telephone number(s), email address(es), and social media contacts.
Financial information (e.g., payment methods, billing, and banking information such as credit card number and expiry date).
Applicable Privacy Legislation
The Association is a private sector non-profit incorporated under the laws of British Columbia, and primarily operating in that province with certain limited operations in other provinces, including Alberta. As such, all or parts of each of the Personal Information Protection Act (British Columbia), the Personal Information Protection Act (Alberta) and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Canada) may apply to our collection, storage, use and disclosure of your personal information.
Usage of Personal Information
The purposes for which we use your personal information include:
· Providing you with information, products, or services that you request from us.
· Communicating with you about the Association and its activities, as well as to provide you with news and information.
· Information reasonably required in order for the Association to complete rebate, grant or other funding applications on your behalf, transfer funds to you or receive funds from you, or other financial information we require in order to carry on our operations and fulfill our agreements and the Association’s purposes.
· To carry out our obligations and enforce our rights arising from any contracts with you, including for billing and collection or to comply with legal requirements.
· For any other purpose with your consent.
The Association may engage third party providers to perform tasks on our behalf, such as processing your financial transaction, and providing technical services to our website and information technology systems. When information is shared with third parties for these purposes, we include privacy protective clauses in written contracts to help safeguard personal information.
Disclosure of Personal Information
We may disclose your information in the following circumstances:
To our subsidiaries and affiliates for proper management, analysis, and decision making, including decisions regarding the fulfillment, expansion, and promotion of our service offerings, and for use by those companies for the other purposes described in this Privacy Policy.
To contractors, service providers, and other third parties we use to support our operations, including analytics and search engine providers that assist us with website improvement and optimization. Such entities are contractually obligated to keep personal information disclosed to them by us confidential, use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them, and to process the personal information with the same standards set out in this policy.
When required or authorized by law; when necessary to enforce our agreements or policies; or when needed to help us protect the rights, property, or safety of the Association, our customers, or our partners.
To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide it.
When you give us permission or direct us to share the information.
When we process the information in a way that does not directly identify you. For example, for research and evaluation purposes, we may anonymize information about you and combine it with anonymized information about other people, and then share the combined information in a way that does not link your information to you.
When you post on our website(s) and social media platforms. If you post information on one of our social media platforms or websites, the information that you post may be seen by other visitors, including your post information and your username. This material may be accessible to the general public and is disclosed by you on these social media platforms at your own risk.
Storing and Processing Your Information
We may transfer personal information that we collect or that you provide as described in this policy to contractors, service providers, and other third parties we use to support our business (e.g., analytics and search engine providers that assist us with website improvement and optimization) and who are contractually obligated to keep personal information confidential, use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them, and to process the personal information with the same standards set out in this policy.
These storage services include the websites for the Association (https://www.communityenergy.ca/), Retrofit Assist (https://www.retrofitassist.ca/), Kootenay Clean Energy Transition (https://shiftshappening.ca), Climate Friendly Homes Tour (https://climatefriendlyhomestour.ca), Zoho (https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html), Microsoft 365 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-365), Sage Online Accounting (https://www.sage.com/en-ca/sage-business-cloud/accounting/), Harvest (https://www.getharvest.com/), Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.ca/), Zoom (https://zoom.us/), MailChimp (https://mailchimp.com/en-ca/?currency=CAD), and Survey Monkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/). Each of these organizations will have their own privacy policies available on their websites.
We may process, store, and transfer your personal information in and to a foreign country, with different privacy laws that may or may not be as comprehensive as Canadian law. In these circumstances, the governments, courts, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies of that country may be able to obtain access to your personal information through the laws of the foreign country. Whenever we engage a service provider, we require that its privacy and security standards adhere to this policy and applicable Canadian privacy legislation.
You are welcome to contact Robbert Visscher at info@communityenergy.ca to obtain further information about Company policies regarding service providers outside of Canada.
Retention of Personal Information
Except as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law or regulation, we will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
Under some circumstances we may anonymize your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you. We reserve the right to use such anonymous and de-identified data for any legitimate business purpose without further notice to you or your consent.
When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.
Managing Your Preferences
By using the Services or submitting information to us in connection with using the Services, you are providing your consent to the collection, use, storage, disclosure, and retention of personal information as set out in this Privacy Policy. Consent may be withdrawn at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. However, without such consent, the Association may limit the Services it is able to provide you.
Protecting Your Personal Information
The security of your personal information is important to us. The Association makes reasonable efforts to ensure that any personal information you provide is maintained in a secure environment.
The Association has implemented and maintains reasonable and appropriate security measures, procedures, and practices – including physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards – to protect against and prevent the loss and unauthorized access, use, retrieval, modification, destruction, or disclosure of your personal information while it is in our custody or under our control. For example, we use SSL encryption, firewalls, anti-virus, and system security monitoring. Our servers are located in a locked and secure environment. Our security practices are continually evolving to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of our systems and the information in our possession. We use up-to-date security safeguards to protect our networks and websites.
We apply several different access levels to data within our systems – employees, contractors, volunteers, and other agents only gain access to information as needed for the tasks and functions we have engaged them to help us with. Our employees and relevant contractors, volunteers, and other agents are required to complete training on the Association’s privacy policy, including policies regarding the collection and use of personal information and procedures for safeguarding this information.
The safety and security of your information also depends on you. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password for access to certain parts of our website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone. We also urge you to be careful about giving out information in public areas of the website like message boards, which any website visitor may be able to view.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the Internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information transmitted to our website. Any transmission of personal information is at your own risk. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the website.
Accuracy of Personal Information
It is important that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal information changes. By law you have the right to request access to and to correct the personal information that we hold about you.
You may update or correct the information in our possession by emailing us at info@communityenergy.ca, or by writing to us at the address below. Any such access request may be subject to a small statutory fee to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you, as permitted by applicable law.
We may request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and your right to access, and to provide you with the personal information that we hold about you or make your requested changes. Applicable law may allow or require us to refuse to provide you with access to some or all of the personal information that we hold about you, or we may have destroyed, erased, or made your personal information anonymous in accordance with our record retention obligations and practices. If we cannot provide you with access to your personal information, we will inform you of the reasons why, subject to any legal or regulatory restrictions.
Withdrawing Your Consent
Under Canadian law, where an individual has consented to the collection or use of their personal information, they can withdraw consent at any time by providing reasonable notice to the organization, subject to any legal or contractual restrictions on withdrawing consent. Upon receiving a consent withdrawal, the organization must inform the individual of the consequences of the withdrawal.
IP Addresses
We log IP addresses, or the location of your computer network on the Internet, for systems administration and troubleshooting purposes. We may also use IP addresses to track which pages people visit in order to improve the quality of our website.
Cookies
When an individual visitor accesses the 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 (e.g. by registering for an event or sending us correspondence from the website), we will not know who the individual visitors are. Similarly, we may use other technologies such as pixel tags, locally shared objects, clear GIFs and web beacons, to track what you view and interact with on our website. In addition to the identified purposes described herein, 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.
Links to Third-Party Websites
Our websites may contain links to a limited number of other websites, plug-ins, and applications. These third-party websites may contain cookies or other tracking technologies. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. The Association neither owns nor controls these third-party websites and is not responsible for the information practices of those websites. You should inform yourself about the privacy policies (if any) of those third-party websites. Many of these third-party sites are listed above, though we may adopt additional third-party services or include additional third-party websites from time to time.
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 our newsletter or a mail or e-mail list, participating in a seminar or other event, and participating in contests and surveys. If you are known to The Association 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 The Association 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 The Association.
Contact Us
We welcome your questions, comments, and questions about this Privacy Policy and our privacy practices. If you have any questions about our privacy policy or the personal information in our possession, please contact our Privacy Officer:
Attention: Privacy Officer, info@communityenergy.ca
Community Energy Association
Office Location
638 West 7th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1B5
Mailing Address
PO Box 20129, Fairview PO
Vancouver, British Columbia V5Z 1E0