Website Privacy Policy

The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (“the BC-CfE”) is committed to respecting your privacy and protecting your personal information. In this policy we explain how we handle your personal information when you use our website. As a service provider to a public body operating in British Columbia we comply with BC’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act [RSBC 1996] Chapter 165 (“FIPPA”).

 

With a mandate to:

  • improve the health of British Columbians with HIV through the development, ongoing monitoring, and dissemination of comprehensive research and treatment programs for HIV and related diseases;
  • develop rational and cost-effective research and therapeutic protocols and programs for the treatment of HIV and related diseases;
  • provide educational support programs to health care professionals; and
  • monitor the impact of HIV/AIDS and related diseases in British Columbia and conduct analyses of the effectiveness of programs related to the investigation and treatment of related diseases.

we operate our website to communicate about that mandate, news and events, career opportunities, provide information and services to physicians and care providers, edu-cation and training opportunities, send out forms, such as feedback forms, and as well as to provide sign up options for communications and otherwise further our mandate.

 

PLEASE NOTE that by interacting with and therefore submitting personal information to us via our website, you consent to our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information, in compliance with this policy and as permitted or required by law.

 

Details about how to ask questions about this policy or our collection of your personal information are included below. It is important to us to be transparent about our collection, use and disclosure of your information and we are happy to help if you want more information.

This policy and FIPPA apply to “personal information”, which is defined in FIPPA to mean recorded information about an identifiable individual other than contact information. This can be information that you provide that identifies you directly like your name, or indirectly because combined together with other information about you, a person could work out that the information is related to you. It also includes information about how you use our website, like cookies1 and other electronic data like the kind of browser you use.

Depending on how you interact with the website (for example just browsing, or signing up for communications), we may collect, use, and disclose the information below. Remember, the just browsing info applies when you’re signing up for communications, but the sign up info doesn’t apply if you’re just browsing.

 

Just browsing? We collect information about how you use our website and services, including but not limited to:

 

  • Your username or unique identifier;
  • Your IP address, browser type;
  • Other electronic information about how you interact with our website or email; and
  • Contact information when you use our website to send a message to us.
  • Emailing preferences (if subscribed to any of our mailing list(s))

Signing up for communications? We collect more detailed information about you, in-cluding but not limited to:

 

  • Your full name;
  • Your email address;
  • Your preferences about:
    • What you’d like to hear about through our email subscription form;
    • Education programs you want to participate in
  • Preferences for emails, newsletters, applications and receipt of other communications.

In addition, we use service providers that help us with insights and analytics that help improve our services. For example, we use:

 

  • Google Analytics to understand how visitors engage with our sites or apps, facilitates audience creation and segmentation and to measure our audience engagement. Within google analytics, we use demographics and interests reporting, which provides insight into the age, gender, and some interests of users, which we use to better target your advertisements. If you don’t want Google Analytics to be used in your browser, you can install the ‘Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-On’, provided by Google.
  • Cakemail to send out mailouts to previously consented users, such as event invitations, newsletters, important communications, etc. The information collected through Cakemail and is kept in a server located in Canada. We collect information such as email, full name, date of subscription, date of unsubscription, and other unidentifiable information.

Sometimes we collect and use personal information in at an aggregate level . In that case, the information is not personal information as it doesn’t tell us who you are. Although that means FIPPA doesn’t apply we still want you to know that we collect and use that aggregate data to learn more about how our website is performing, who is engaging with us and how, and more.

As described in greater detail above, we collect information about you directly using webforms, or indirectly when you browse by using Google Analytics, which uses cookies and collects information about how you use the website. We tell you more about why we collect the information below. Sometimes we also collect your information when you interact with our social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.c

Whether you’re just browsing or you’re providing your information to learn more about or access our services, we collect, use, and disclose your personal information to further our mandate. For example, we collect and use your personal information to:

 

  • Allow you to sign up to participate in events or training;
  • Receive and respond to your messages and inquiries;
  • Operate and maintain our online services, including website maintenance and data analysis (including to create statistics about how you use our website and how often);
  • Allow you to opt-in to receiving targeted communications*, updates, etc. regarding our activities, services and more; and
  • To provide more general information about our activities and service*s.

*All electronic messages are sent in compliance with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (“CASL”).

 

We may disclose your personal information for the same purposes we have listed above and as required or allowed by law. For example, when creating course certificates, feedback form results, etc. We will never provide more than email addresses to other parties except where required by law. Please let us know if you don’t want your email shared with other parties so we can make sure we don’t disclose that infor-mation. Our contact information for telling us your preferences is below.

Your personal information will be collected, stored, and processed in British Columbia and may be stored and processed in other countries, including the United States, where it is subject to the applicable laws of that country.

 

This is because we use providers like Google (Google Analytics), Cakemail (email mailout application), or web-forms and store it on their servers.

 

We keep your personal information only as long as we need to for the purposes for which we collected it, and for any legal, tax, or reporting obligations we might have related to the purpose for which we collected it.

 

We safeguard your personal information in our custody by taking reasonable measures to secure it from theft/loss, misuse, or unauthorized access or disclosure. We have put in place privacy, confidentiality and security policies, and we make sure that our staff with access to your personal information know about and follow these policies.

In Canada, and in BC, you have the right to:

 

  • ask us what information we have about you;
  • know how we are collecting, using and disclosing your information and why;
  • ask us for access to your personal information;
  • ask us to correct or update your personal information;
  • make a complaint about our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information; and
  • contact us to know more about all of the above.

You also have the right to opt-out of receiving communications from us whenever you wish.

 

These rights are all subject to our legal obligations under FIPPA.

You can get in touch with us privacy@bccfe.ca to learn more about:

 

  • your communications preferences
  • your rights as to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information
  • our privacy policy and this website policy
  • how to make a complaint

The BC-CfE reserves the right to change or add to this privacy policy at any time. If changes are made, we will let you know by putting the changed policy on the website.

 

1 https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/cookies

2 https://www.import.io/post/what-is-data-aggregation-industry-examples/#:~:text=Data%20aggregation%20is%20the%20process,a%20summary%20for%20data%20analysis.

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