Privacy Policy

Our Commitment to Privacy

The Kidney Foundation of Canada (“The Kidney Foundation”) is committed to protecting the privacy of its employees, members, stakeholders and those we serve. We value the trust placed in us by the Canadian public and recognize that maintaining this trust requires that we be transparent and accountable in how we treat the information that has been given to us.

This Privacy Policy explains how the Kidney Foundation collects, uses, and discloses your personal information when you use this site (the “Site”), our products and our services, including but not limited to, any tools, eTools, apps, forums, event and registration pages, electronic publications, surveys, newsletters, announcements, contest entries, purchases and/or donations online or by mail (collectively, the Site and services are the “Services”).

This Privacy Policy forms part of our Terms of Use, which outline the terms and conditions you agree to when using our Services. We will only collect, use and disclose your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. By using the Services, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy, and you agree and consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Services or supply your personal information to us.

1. What Personal Information Do We Collect?

Personal information means any information about an identifiable individual. The types of personal information that we may collect include, but is not limited to, your:

name;
age, gender;
phone number;
residential address;
e-mail address;
IP address (including device/location); credit card information, or cheque;
banking information for donors that give monthly through chequing/saving account withdrawals;
responses to program-specific registration questions;
Your volunteer involvement;
health information, including but not limited to, your chronic illness situation (and treatment modality), and/or your family history of chronic illness, and/or your connection to kidney disease/chronic illness, and/or whether or not you are a living organ donor, and/or whether you are a recipient of a living organ donation, and/or your relationship to a person with a chronic illness;
personal information you give us that we did not request (such as personal information you voluntarily put into an email to us, in a comments box on our Site or through your use of the Services).

2. Purposes for Collecting Your Personal Information

The Kidney Foundation may use your personal information for the following purposes:

to provide you with our Services;
to manage our relationship with you;
to identify you in our system;
to manage our business and operations;
to respond to your questions that you send through the Site, by email or by phone;
to contact you for fundraising purposes;
to facilitate and process your registration for certain events and services;
to authenticate you when you sign in to your account;
if you have consented, to send you e-mails with mission-related content or about our programs and events;
to grant you access to special features or areas of the Site (including without limitation, to any Kidney Foundation forums, tools, information sessions or webinars) where you have applied for access or have posted information to those special features or areas of the Site;
to administer and provide you with eTools (through which we can provide you with a Risk Awareness Program)
to deliver and evaluate programs for which you are registered;
to manage your online item purchases;
to issue tax receipts where applicable;
to track communications with you;
to track the location of IP addresses to provide provincial content for users;
to improve the Site and help us develop new services, tools and Site features that meet your needs;
for marketing segmentation to identify target populations;
to process donations; and
as otherwise permitted or required by law.

3. When Do We Collect Personal Information?

We may collect your personal information when you voluntarily provide it to us by using the Services. For example, we may ask you to provide personal information if you:

use our Services;
register for user accounts;
sign into your account;
make a donation to the Kidney Foundation;
purchase an item from the Site;
use our eTools features;
send a question or comment to the Kidney Foundation by email, phone, fax or through our Site;
communicate with Kidney Foundation representatives by phone or in-person;
participate in an event organized by or associated with the Kidney Foundation;
post comments, messages or other content on our Site, including but not limited to, on our eTools, blog, “contact us” page or other features of the Site that permit you to provide your own comments, messages and content;
register to receive electronic communications, such as our e-newsletter; and
otherwise voluntarily participate in features of our Site that ask for personal information.

Any personal information posted, used or disclosed on a Twitter page, Facebook page or other social networking page or site is subject to that website’s privacy policy and is not subject to this Privacy Policy.

4. Limiting Collection of Personal Information

We limit the collection of personal information to that which is necessary to fulfill the purposes identified in this Privacy Policy and we collect, use and disclose your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

5. Use, Disclosure and Retention of Personal Information

Your personal information will not be used without your consent for purposes other than those for which it was collected or in accordance with applicable laws.

We retain your personal information only for as long as we need it to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected and to comply with our legal obligations.

We may also use and disclose your personal information to third parties under the following limited circumstances:

to service providers that help with the Kidney Foundation’s operations and Services including, without limitation, customer services, monitoring and analyzing Site activity, and operating and maintaining the Site. Such service providers may only use your personal information for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy;
when necessary to protect the safety, property or other rights of the Kidney Foundation, its representatives, and users of the Services, including to detect and protect fraud;
with other charities, through an exchange list brokerage, unless you have opted-out. Specifically, the Kidney Foundation, through its Direct Mail program, may disclose your name and mailing address (but not your email address), to other charities;
with your consent; or
when otherwise required or permitted by law.

If you voluntarily submit or post any information, photographs or other content to any Kidney Foundation forums, eTools, Twitter pages, Facebook pages or other social networking pages/sites, your personal information may be automatically included in the posting, including without limitation, your user name and email address and this information may be collected and used by others.

6. Data Processors in Other Country

To provide you with Services, we may use service providers, data processors and other third parties (collectively, “Third Parties”) to perform services on our behalf. These Third Parties may store, process and transfer personal information on servers located outside of Canada in jurisdictions whose data protection laws may differ from those of Canada, which may include the United States of America. As a result, personal information may be subject to access requests from governments, courts, or law enforcement in those jurisdictions according to the laws in those jurisdictions. For example, information may be shared in response to valid demands or requests from government authorities, courts and law enforcement officials in those countries. Subject to applicable laws in such other jurisdictions, we will use reasonable efforts to ensure that appropriate protections are in place to require our Third Parties to maintain protections on personal information that are equivalent to those that apply in Canada.

7. Links to Other Sites

The Site may contain links to other websites or Internet resources, notably those belonging to our sponsors, partners or collaborators. When you click on one of those links you are contacting another website or Internet resource that may collect information about you voluntarily or through cookies or other technologies. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of any sites owned and operated by any third parties. Other sites may collect and treat information collected differently, so we encourage you to carefully read and review the privacy policy of each site you visit.

8. Providing Credit Card Information on our Site

If you make a credit card transaction (ex: for a donation, registration to an event, on-line purchase, etc…) through the Kidney Foundation, we request the information reasonably needed by us to complete the processing of the transaction. For one-time payments, when you provide payment information, such as credit card numbers, credit card security codes, name on your credit card and expiration dates, we will transmit this data directly from you to the credit card processing company. The Kidney Foundation only stores your credit card type, the last four digits of your credit card number and its expiration date in the event an incorrect payment requires a refund. The Kidney Foundation will send you a “thank you” email to confirm successful credit card charges, or the transaction may be confirmed on screen (when the transaction is done online). For pre-authorized debits for recurring donations, all information is stored by the Kidney Foundation or Third Parties acting on our behalf, in an encrypted manner. The encrypted data is provided at the appropriate intervals to the credit card processing company. We may also share your personal information with Third Parties including credit card processing companies in order to bill you, but we do not provide any more information than reasonably necessary for this purpose.

9. Providing Credit Card or Banking information through our Direct Mail Program

If you make a donation through our Direct Mail Program we will request the information reasonably needed by our Third Party Direct Mail processing facility to complete the transaction. This information may include such information as credit card numbers, credit card security codes, name on your credit card, expiration dates, bank account number, bank transit number as well as your banking institution name and address. Any such payment information collected will be immediately provided to our Third Party Direct Mail processing facility. The Kidney Foundation does not store this information. For pre-authorized debits for recurring donations, all payment information is stored in an encrypted manner by the Third Party Direct Mail processing facility. The encrypted data is then provided at the appropriate intervals to your credit card processing company and/or banking institution in order to process said recurring donation. We may also share your personal information with Third Parties including credit card processing companies and/or banking institutions in order to bill you, but we do not provide such Third Parties with more information than is reasonably required for this purpose.

10. Cookies, Web Beacons and Other Similar Technology

As you interact with the Services, we may use automatic data collection technology and services that record and collect information that identifies your computer, tracks your use of this Site and collects certain other information about you and your surfing habits. This data collection technology may include cookies, web beacons and other similar devices on this Site to enhance functionality and navigation for our visitors.

A cookie is a small data file that is placed on the hard drive of your computer so that your computer will “remember” information when you visit a site. Web beacons and tags are small strings of code that are used in conjunction with a cookie and allow us to record activity on our Site. Internet tags, graphic tags and similar web beacon type functions allow us to count the number of users who have visited a particular web page or to access certain cookies. We may use web beacons on this Site to count users and to recognize users by accessing our cookies. Being able to access our cookies allows us to personalize this Site and improve your experience at this Site. We may also include web beacons in HTML-formatted e-mail messages that we send to determine which e-mail messages were opened.

Information tracked through these mechanisms includes, but is not limited to: (i) your IP address; (ii) the type of web browser and operating system being used; (iii) the pages of the Site a user visits; and (iv) other sites a user visited before visiting this Site.

You can reject or disable cookies by managing your browser settings and following the directions provided in your Internet provider’s help file. Please note that if you disable cookies, you may be unable to access some customized features on this Site.

11. Google Analytics

Our Site uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service of Google, Inc. (“Google“), or comparable technology. Google uses “cookies”, which are text files stored on your computer, to analyze how you use our Site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of our Site (including your IP address) is sent to a Google server in the U.S. and stored there. Google will use this information to evaluate your use of our Site, compile reports on Site activity for our Site operators and to provide other site activity related to internet services. Additionally, Google may transfer this information to a third party when required by law or to a third party processing information on Google’s behalf. You can set your internet browser to prohibit the installation of cookies, although we must point out that some features and functions of our Site will then be unusable. By using our Site, you consent to the processing of data about you collected by Google in the manner described and for the above mentioned purpose. The consent for collection and storage of data can be withdrawn at any time in the future by clicking on the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en.

12. Browsing Information

We want to make your experience with the Kidney Foundation as supportive and as customized as possible, and to do this, we, with the help of our Third Parties, may use cookies on your computer to trace your online browsing habits on our Site. We and/or our Third Parties may then use the information collected from the cookies to provide you with suitable Kidney Foundation advertisements when you visit our Site and other websites, such as social media sites, Google and Yahoo. If you do not want to receive this type of customized advertising, you may set your browser to block third party cookies or clear your cache after each use.

13. Security

To help protect the confidentiality of your personal information, the Kidney Foundation employs reasonable technical, physical and administrative security safeguards to protect your personal information against loss, theft, and unauthorized access. Any personal information you provide to us is exchanged on a secure server. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we are committed to protecting your personal information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you provide to us.

We take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting you access to your account on our Site, however, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your username, password and any other account information. We also take reasonable steps to make the Kidney Foundation’s employees, contractors and volunteers aware of the importance of maintaining the confidentiality of personal information so that unauthorized persons do not gain access to personal information that we have disposed of or destroyed.

14. Individual Access and Accuracy of Personal Information

You may request access to your personal information which we may hold by contacting us at the contact information set forth below, and we will respond within the time periods provided for under applicable laws. We will need to verify your identity before providing you with the personal information that we hold about you. There is no cost for such access request unless you require copies of records. We may not be able to provide you with access to your personal information if the information cannot be separated from the personal information of others, cannot be disclosed for reasons of security or commercial confidentiality, or is protected by legal privilege. If we cannot provide you with access to your personal information, we will advise you of the reasons as to why access is being denied, unless we are prohibited by law from doing so.

You may request to update and change your personal information at the contact information set forth below. We will endeavor to correct or complete any personal information which you advise us is inaccurate or incomplete.

15. User Content in Comments, Chat Rooms and Message Boards

If you post comments on the Site (such as commenting on a recipe or blog) or if you use chat rooms and message boards that may be available on our Site from time to time, you should know that when you voluntarily disclose your personal information on our message boards, chat rooms, comment boxes or other interactive areas where personal information can be posted, the information can be collected and used by other internet users. This may result in unsolicited messages from other posters or parties. We expressly disclaim any obligation or responsibility for the security of information that you voluntarily post in our chat rooms, on our message boards, in the comment sections of our Site or in other interactive features of our Site. Please refer to our Terms of Service to understand your obligations when providing your own content.

16. Changes to this Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy may be amended by the Kidney Foundation from time to time in the Kidney Foundation’s sole discretion and without any prior notice to you. The collection, use and disclosure of your personal information by the Kidney Foundation will be governed by the version of this Privacy Policy in effect at that time. We will post the most current version on our Site and will indicate at the top of this page the date this Privacy Policy was last revised. Please check back from time to time to ensure that you are aware of any updates or changes in this Privacy Policy. Your continuing access or use of this Site after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the Privacy Policy as revised.

17. Your Consent to the Terms of this Privacy Policy

Subject to legal and contractual requirements, you may refuse or withdraw your consent to certain of the purposes identified in this Privacy Policy at any time by contacting us at the contact information set forth below. If you refuse or withdraw your consent, you acknowledge that the Kidney Foundation may not be able to provide you or continue to provide you with certain services or information which may be of value to you.

18. How to Contact Us

We welcome your feedback. If you have questions, comments or concerns about this Privacy Policy, or would like to do any of the following:

see your personal information that you have already sent us so that you can correct, update or delete it from our files;
if your child under the age of majority has used this Site and sent us personal information, delete that personal information from our files;
ask that we not send you electronic communications or otherwise contact you; or
report any violation of this Privacy Policy.