Privacy statement

The Alzheimer Society of B.C. (the “Society”) is committed to protecting the privacy of people whose personal information is collected and held by the Society. We recognize our responsibility to be transparent and accountable in how we use the personal information we have on our donors, the people we serve and various other stakeholders.

During the course of various Society activities, we collect, use and disclose a variety of personal information. We have established this policy in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act (British Columbia) so that the personal information of our stakeholders is protected.

Accountability

Alzheimer Society of B.C. is responsible for personal information in its custody or under its control. Alzheimer Society of B.C. has designated Privacy Officers who are responsible for our compliance with this policy. 

John Tonks & Tiffany Jung, Joint Chief Privacy Officer; Chris Vaz, Privacy Officer; Tanya Young, Privacy Officer

#300 - 828 West 8th Avenue
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1E2
privacy@alzheimerbc.org 
604-681-6530 or toll-free 1-800-667-3742

Transparency and notice

You will find a version of this statement on many of our publications:

The Alzheimer Society of B.C. is committed to protecting your privacy and your personal information. The information you provide will be used to keep you informed of Alzheimer Society of B.C. activities including programs, services, special events, funding needs, opportunities to volunteer or to donate and to issue a tax receipt where applicable. Please visit our website at www.alzheimerbc.org for more information about our privacy practices. If at any time you wish to be removed from any of these contacts, please let us know by calling 604-681-6530, toll-free 1-800-667-3742 or email privacy@alzheimerbc.org

What is personal information?

Personal information is any information that can be used to distinguish, identify or contact a specific individual. Exceptions to this are business contact information and publicly available information. Personal information does not include the name, title, business, address, telephone number or other contact information of an individual at a place of business, which can be collected, used or disclosed without consent.

Why does the Society collect, use or disclose personal information?

We collect, use or disclose personal information to issue tax receipts to donors, deliver services to clients and members of the public, to keep you informed and up-to-date on our activities including programs, services, special events, funding needs, opportunities to volunteer or to give. We do not rent, sell or trade our mailing lists.

The Alzheimer Society of B.C. is affiliated with the Alzheimer Society of Canada (“ASC”). Some of our programs are operated in conjunction with ASC, and may involve sharing of information with ASC. The privacy policy of ASC can be found here on their website.

Some of the Society’s programs are operated in collaboration with the British Columbia Ministry of Health Services, and various regional health authorities. Some information relating to those programs may be shared with those public bodies as may be necessary or appropriate under the service provider arrangements.

In general, the Society restricts its collection of personal information, the internal distribution of personal information, and its external sharing of personal information, to the limited extent reasonably necessary for its purposes and programs. The Society is also entitled to collect, use and disclose personal information as required or permitted by applicable law, including the Personal Information Protection Act.

Consent

Generally, your knowledge and consent are required before we collect or disclose your personal information. This consent may be implicit or explicit, depending on the sensitivity of the circumstances.

Implicit and “deemed” consent

Implicit consent exists when the information is provided voluntarily and the purpose would be obvious to a reasonable person. For example, when you make a donation to us, you provide identifiable information in order to receive a tax receipt. We will assume you have “deemed” consent for us to use your personal information, and we will issue you a tax receipt.

In addition to issuing tax receipts, this information may be used to keep you informed about Society activities including programs, services, special events, funding needs, opportunities to volunteer or to give. We routinely offer you the opportunity to opt not to have your information used for these purposes, and you will always be given the option to withdraw your consent and opt not to receive this type of material from us.

Explicit consent

Explicit consent means that the Society will obtain written or oral consent from you before collecting, using or disclosing the information. This is usually in the case of more sensitive information. For example, we will obtain written consent from people who attend our support groups. To provide quality support services, sensitive information including personal health information may be asked. This may include diagnosis, relevant health history and physician’s name. Subject to PIPA, this information is kept confidential, will not be shared with anyone and will only be used for the stated purpose of providing quality support services. We will destroy, erase or make anonymous personal information that we no longer need.

What about spam?

You will not receive marketing e-mail from us unless you have consented to receive it. From time to time we may use e-mail as a way to keep in touch with you. However, we do not send unsolicited marketing e-mail except in compliance with applicable law.

If you agree to receive e-mail communications from us, every e-mail message we send to you will include an e-mail address to which you can respond. If at any time you decide you do not want to receive e-mail from us, simply let us know and we will remove your name and e-mail address from our database. We will do the same with your mailing address and telephone number on request.

How does the Society protect your personal information?

We are committed to protecting personal information by ensuring appropriate security safeguards are in place. Safeguards will vary depending on the sensitivity of the information and may include measures such as password-protecting electronic documents, locking paper files and ensuring only authorized personnel have access to certain documents.

We will strive to keep your personal information as accurate and up-to-date as necessary.

We will retain for one year personal information about an individual that we use to make a decision that directly affects the individual.

We will destroy documents (including electronic documents) containing personal information when retention of the personal information no longer serves the purpose for which it was collected and is no longer necessary for legal or business purposes.

Privacy and our website

Our website’s operating system may automatically record some general information about your visit, such as:

• The Internet domain for your Internet service provider, and the IP address of the computer accessing the website.
• The type of browser (such as ‘Safari’ or ‘Internet Explorer’) you are using.
• The date and time you visit our site and the web pages that you visit on our site.
• The web address of the previous website you were visiting, if you linked to us from another website.

We may also use cookies to determine the usefulness of our website information to our users and in helping you find the information you need.

We use this information for statistical analysis only, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors. We may disclose this non-personal information to third parties such as sponsors or clients and/or use it for auditing purposes. This tracking does not record personal information about individuals or link this information to any personal data collected.

If you prefer not to receive cookies while browsing our website, you can set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies and refuse the cookie when your browser alerts you to its presence. You can also refuse all cookies by turning them off in your browser but you may not be able to take full advantage of our website if you do so.

When you leave our website

This policy discloses the privacy practices in use for the Society website. However, our site contains links to other sites. Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy and security policies of the new site. The Society is not responsible for the contents of any linked website, any link contained in a linked website or any changes or updates to such websites. The inclusion of any link does not mean that the Society endorses that website.

We encourage you to read the privacy statements of all websites you visit, especially if they request any personal information from you.

Your right to access your personal information

Upon written request, you have a right to see and ask for corrections to your personal information that we have on file. We will normally respond to your request within 30 days. You can make a request by contacting our Chief Privacy Officer. The contact information is listed above.

Complaint process

We are committed to having an accessible and responsible complaint-handling process in place to provide individuals with an opportunity to express concerns about the Society's compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act.

If you have questions, concerns or complaints relating to our treatment of personal information, please contact our Chief Privacy Officer.

If we are not able to resolve your privacy concerns, you may contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia:

PO Box 9038, Stn. Prov. Govt.
Victoria, BC V8W 9A4
Telephone 250-387-5629 or 1-800-663-7867
Email: info@oipc.bc.ca
Web site: www.oipc.bc.ca