Privacy Policy
Protecting Personal Information
Canadian Dog Walkers Association (CDWA) is a values-based organization, seeking to elevate the standards and practices of the Walking industry nationally, better the life experience of dogs, and advance humane animal welfare goals.
To carry out our mission, it’s important to communicate with you. And we’re committed to respecting our relationship with you, whether close or distant. CDWA nurtures federal privacy laws which enshrine the public’s fundamental right to privacy. We value our supporters’ trust and recognize that maintaining this trust requires that we be open and accountable in our treatment of the personal information that you choose to share with us. We do not rent or sell any of the personal data of our valued supporters, or any other information that is intended to be held in confidence.
This privacy policy reflects our best efforts to maintain this respect, while ensuring we can communicate broadly, personally and accurately in the most cost-effective way possible. It explains how we collect, use and safeguard your personal information.
Information we collect and how we use it
Personal information can be used to identify, distinguish or contact a specific individual; including opinions, beliefs, birth date and other identifying data. This information includes individuals who are vetted and endorsed by CDWA, members who support CDWA, how much has been paid in fees or donated and an individual’s contact information. Business contact information and certain publicly available information, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers that are published in telephone directories are not considered private information because it is in the public realm already. That said, we do not rent or sell this information to any third party.
We may ask you for personal information in a variety of ways, including website forms, surveys, mail-in forms, over email or social media. That information will not be rented or sold.
There are a range of reasons why we may ask you for this information, including: to process a donation, membership or registration; to fulfill your subscription to an e-newsletter; to allow you to send letters or to participate in a cause via online action forms; to invite you to events; or to provide other information about CDWA which might interest you. We may also contact you by mail, email or phone about opportunities to donate in support of our work.
Your choice to provide us with your personal information is at your discretion. You can always elect to withhold information. We keep the personal information that you provide to us in strict confidence. Only employees who need to perform a specific job (for example, our supporter services staff) are granted access to personally identifiable information. We also take measures to ensure the integrity of this information is maintained and to prevent its being lost, shared or destroyed. Individuals may access their personal information at any time to ensure it is correct and current.
What you need to know about consent
By providing personal information to us, you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your information in accordance with this policy.
When you provide contact information to us for one purpose, we may contact you using that information for other parts of our work. For example, if you become a member, we may email you about opportunities to support a cause. Or, if you make a donation and provide us with your mailing address, we may also send a member package or newsletter to your email or mail address in order to keep you up-to-date with work you’ve helped make happen.
Ways to prevent us from collecting “anonymous” data
Our websites use cookies and JavaScript-based tracking scripts to collect anonymous data. To stop this from happening, adjust your web browser’s “cookie”, “cache” and JavaScript settings. Please note that doing so may affect the performance of our web properties, and in some cases may completely prevent you from using some of our pages and forms.
Updating your consent
If you would like to stop receiving email from us at any time, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails or email human@cdwa.org using “unsubscribe” as the subject line.
If you would like to stop receiving mail of any print materials from us, please email human@cdwa.ca.
Upon reasonable request and notice, you may view and have corrections made to the personal information we hold about you, subject to any legal or contractual restrictions. If you are aware of any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold in confidence about you or to remove all of your information from our databases, please contact our privacy officer at human@cdwa.ca.
We only disclose your information to certain service providers to conduct activities on our behalf, or with your consent. Where we choose to have certain service providers conduct activities on our behalf (such as some fundraising and processing services), we select the service providers very carefully and take all reasonable precautions to ensure that the service provider protects your personal information.
Cookies
We use cookies and other technology on our websites to make them easier to use, and so that we can learn about how you use them. Information collected this way may include (but is not limited to) your IP address and internet service provider, the type of web browser and operating system you used, and which of our website pages you visited. We use links in our emails to track open and click-through rates to help us learn what emails appeal to you most.
Change your cookies preferences
Most web browsers allow some control over cookies through browser settings (e.g.notifications of new cookies, disabling cookies and deleting cookies). Click your browser type below to go directly to the browser user guide to learn how to disable or erase cookies.
Blocking all cookies will, however, have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.
Social network, targeted advertising and web-analytics
We show social networking sharing buttons and widgets from social media services such as Facebook and Twitter on our website to enable you to easily share CDWA’s articles and news with friends. These social networking sharing buttons and widgets come from web servers which may track your behaviour on our website and may combine this with other information about you originating from other websites. You can install a browser add-on like “Disconnect” for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to disable them.
CDWA uses Facebook and other social media services to keep supporters and others who are interested in the organization and its activities up to date.
We may also share anonymized versions of your data with partners such as social media providers for the purposes of helping achieve our campaigning and fundraising aims, by delivering personalized content to existing supporters and identifying similar audiences. You may opt out of such data sharing at any time by contacting us using the details at the bottom of this policy.
We may also use Facebook and Google remarketing codes to log when users of those services view our web pages. This allows us to provide targeted advertising. CDWA does not disclose your personal information to access these services. The services are instead based on information collected autonomously by Facebook and Google. However, if you do not wish to receive this type of advertising from us in the future you can opt out using the Website Custom Audiences opt-out page for Facebook and Ad Settings for Google.
We also gather information automatically about visits to our website to help us maintain and improve its design, and to evaluate traffic statistics, such as the times of day and days of week at which we see peak traffic, and to assess the relative popularity of different subjects and areas of the site. We use Google Analytics to gather this data and analyze it. Google Analytics collects information about the date and time in which our web site was accessed, and may also track a visitor’s movement within the site, but does not collect personal information about the visitor. You can install the “Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on” to prevent information about your visits to our website being sent to Google Analytics. Our web statistics software (Google Analytics) collects information about the date and time in which our website was accessed, and we may also track a user’s movement within the site. We use this data to improve our website performance.
How we store personal information
Some of the servers on which CDWA’s information is stored are located outside of Canada. By providing us with personal information, you consent to CDWA transferring information across national borders for processing and storage purposes in accordance with this policy. All such transfers are conducted in compliance with applicable laws of both countries. Your rights to access, correct and delete your personal information are not affected by it being stored on servers located in other countries. CDWA uses extensive effective security implements and softwares on our servers to protect our websites and all data.
Aggregate Data
In some cases, we may aggregate your information with others peoples’ in order to report on campaigns. For example, we may count the number of people who donate or join based on their postal code. That way, we can show where Canadians are most engaged — with the number (e.g., “516 people from Toronto have donated to this campaign”) or by indicating the total on a map. We do not display your actual postal code.
Use of third parties
In many cases, we don’t actually collect and store personal information in our systems, but instead may use a third-party. For example, we may use Survey Monkey to send out a survey or a third-party fundraising service to provide an online registration form.
Such services have resources dedicated to maintaining security and confidentiality, and we ensure that any third-party partner has written policies about never sharing your information with anyone.
Payment information and PCI compliance
Our transactional pages and main website pages are secured using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a security protocol that provides communications and transactional privacy over the internet.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) define industry best practices for handling and protecting credit card details. All storage and transferal of your financial details by CDWA and our payment processor, Stripe, is PCI compliant.
A word on fundraising
As a non profit organization, we cannot do our work without the financial support of members and generous donors. We do our best to reach out to as many possible individual supporters as we can. Our donors allow us to maintain our independence.
We may use information you provide (such as your postal code) to find more complete contact information from other sources (like Canada Post) so that we can reach out to you, and we may use third-party providers to help. The opportunity to send you a letter or give you a phone call helps us see if we’re a good fit for you when it comes to membership and causal donations. You may opt out of these communications at any time by contacting human@cdwa.ca.
Links to other websites
Our websites contain links to websites owned and operated by other organizations. They may have their own privacy policies and terms and conditions and are not governed by this policy. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policy and terms of use of each additional website you issue your personal information to, for your safety and security.
Information we share
General
In order to communicate with you, we may work with external organizations and have them contact you on our behalf. We require them to take measures to properly safeguard your information and only use it for the purpose specified by us, in a manner consistent with this policy.
For example, we may work with a mailing company that sends out our fundraising letters. We would be required to give them a list of names and mailing addresses of people we want to contact. They sort the lists, print the letters, stuff the envelopes and drop the mail off at Canada Post, who delivers it to your door.
We may sometimes send personal information to outside organizations who help us communicate with you. We only work with organizations that have comprehensive security and confidentiality policies, including written policies that do not allow them to use or share your information with anyone other than CDWA.
Email addresses
We do not rent, sell or exchange email addresses with other organizations.
In some instances, we may promote actions or feature forms on our websites in partnership with other organizations. In these cases, we give you the clear option of whether you want us to share your email with them.
Mailing addresses
Trading information is common among non-profits, as a way to reach new people who may wish to fund important work. CDWA will not participate in this activity, but rather may contact you to inquire into whether you would wish to participate in the initiatives of another non-profit.
How we keep your information secure
We endeavour to maintain appropriate physical, procedural and technical safeguards for your personal information. Some information we collect may be stored and processed on servers located outside your jurisdiction of residence, including outside your country. As a result, this information may be subject to disclosure to governments, courts or law enforcement agencies in those areas, according to their laws, without notice to us or you. Where we are given notice of such disclosure, we will communicate the information to you.
Policy updates and changes
We may change this policy from time to time without notice, and in accordance with law. Changes will be reflected on this page.
Need more information?
For further information, please contact our privacy officer by email.
This document is made available to the public to explain how we collect, use and disclose information, in accordance with this policy, the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act, the Personal Information Protection Act, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation and other relevant legislation.
