Policy on Privacy of Personal Information

The Canadian Physiotherapy Association is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information obtained by reason of your relationship with us. This policy explains the types of personal information we collect, including through our website www.physiotherapy.ca and all other websites owned by the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (collectively, the “Site”), how it is used, and the steps we take to ensure your personal information is handled appropriately.

Our policies and practices have been designed to comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Canada) and corresponding provincial privacy acts.

For purposes of this Customer Privacy Policy, “CPA”, “we” or “us” means the Canadian Physiotherapy Association.

What is personal information?

Personal information is information about an identifiable individual and may be recorded in any form. Personal information includes such things as age, income, date of birth, ethnic origin and credit records. Information about individuals contained in the following documents is not considered personal information:

  • public telephone directories, where the subscriber can refuse to be listed,
  • professional and business directories available to the public,
  • public registries and court records, and
  • other publicly available printed and electronic publications.

We are accountable to you

The CPA is responsible for all personal information under its control, including any personal information that is transferred to third parties for processing, storage or other purposes. We have a Privacy Officer who is accountable for compliance with these privacy  principles.  Please refer to the “How to Contact Us” section below for information on contacting our Privacy Officer.

We let you know why we collect and use your personal information and get your consent

The CPA identifies the purpose for which your personal information is collected and will be used or disclosed. If that purpose is not listed below, we will do this before or at the time the information is actually being collected. By submitting personal information to the Site, you will be deemed to consent to the CPA’s use of your personal information for the purpose of:

  • communicating with you generally, including for purposes of maintaining or renewing your membership with the CPA, if applicable,
  • verifying your identity,
  • processing your purchases for publications from our e-store,
  • processing your registration for events;
  • protecting against fraud or error
  • recommending products, events and services that the CPA believes will be of interest  to you,
  • performing statistical analyses of user behaviour and characteristics, in order to measure interest in and use of the various sections of this Site so as to improve the design, content and navigation of our Site and to gather marketing information. Only aggregated data from these analyses, not individual data, will be used for this purpose,
  • complying with legal and governmental requirements, and
  • fulfilling any other purpose that would be reasonably apparent to the average person at the time we collect it from you.

Changing your consent preferences

You can change your consent preferences at any time by contacting the CPA’s Privacy Officer. To change your preferences, refer to the “How to contact us” section below.  Please note that if you do make such a change, you may not be able to benefit from all of the products or services available on the Site or, if applicable, as a member.

We limit collection of your personal information

The CPA collects only the information required to provide products and services to you, and to manage your membership in the CPA, if applicable. The CPA will collect personal information only by clear, fair and lawful means.

We receive and store any information you enter on our Site or give us in any other way. You can choose not to provide certain information, but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of our features and services.

We also receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with us. For example, like many websites, we use “cookies,” and we obtain certain types of information when your web browser accesses the Site. Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive through your web browser, to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to provide features such as easy one-click purchasing, personalized greetings, and storage of items in your Shopping Cart between visits.

The “help” portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Additionally, you can disable or delete similar data used by browser add-ons, such as Flash cookies, by changing the add-on’s settings or visiting the website of its manufacturer. Because cookies allow you to take advantage of some of the Site’s essential features, we recommend you leave them turned on. For instance, if you block or otherwise reject our cookies, you will not be able to add items to your Shopping Cart, proceed to checkout, or use any physiothereapy.ca products and services that require you to sign in.

Examples of the information we collect and analyze include the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information, such as browser type, version and timezone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform; purchase history, which we sometimes aggregate with similar information from other customers to create features such as “most popular” or lists; the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our website, including date and time; cookie numbers; products you viewed or searched for; and the telephone number used to call our customer service number. We may also use browser data such as cookies, Flash cookies (also known as Flash Local Shared Objects), or similar data on certain parts of our website for fraud prevention and other purposes. During some visits we may use software tools such as JavaScript to measure and collect session information, including page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse away from the page.

We limit disclosure and retention of your personal information

The CPA does not disclose personal information to any organization or person for any reason, nor does it engage in the practice of selling or trading personal information to third parties for promotional or other purposes, except the following:

We may share your personal information with third party organizations in order to offer you a product or service. You can tell when a third party is involved in your transactions, and we share customer information related to those transactions with that third party. In addition, the CPA has a mailing label service whereby it sells the name and physical address of members on the CPA’s mailing list to third party organizations who submit an order to the CPA requesting the mailing labels. The CPA reviews and approves any materials to be sent out by third parties and third parties are restricted from using the mailing list for any other purpose.

We employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf.  Examples of situations where this may occur are include fulfilling orders, delivering packages, sending postal mail and e-mail, removing repetitive information from use and member lists, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, processing credit card payments, and providing customer service. In addition, this may involve rental of pre-authorized mailing list labels which are prepared by the CPA and obtained from our membership list data.  These other companies and/or individuals have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes. No addresses of individuals or companies are sold or traded for any purpose.

We may use service providers located outside of Canada, and, if applicable, your personal information may be processed and stored in other countries and therefore may be subject to disclosure under the laws of those countries.

You are deemed to consent to disclosure of your personal information for those purposes. If your personal information is shared with third parties, those third parties are bound by appropriate agreements with the CPA to secure and protect the confidentiality of your personal information.

The CPA retains your personal information only as long as it is required for our business relationship, or if applicable, to maintain or renew your membership, or as required by federal and provincial laws. 

We keep your personal information up to date and accurate

The CPA keeps your personal information up to date, accurate and relevant for its intended use.

You may request access to the personal information we have on record in order to review and amend the information, as appropriate. In circumstances where your personal information has been provided by a third party, we will refer you to that party (e.g. credit bureaus). To access your personal information, refer to the “How to contact us” section below.

The security of your personal information is a priority for the CPA

We take steps to safeguard your personal information, regardless of the format in which it is held, including:

  • physical security measures such as restricted access facilities and locked filing cabinets
  • electronic security measures for computerized personal information such as password protection, database encryption and personal identification numbers. We work to protect the security of your information during transmission by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software, which encrypts information you enter,
  • revealing only the last four digits of your credit card number and the expiration date when confirming an order. Of course, we transmit the entire credit card number to the appropriate credit card company during order processing,
  • organizational processes such as limiting access to your personal information to a selected group of individuals, and
  • contractual obligations with third parties who need access to your personal information requiring them to protect and secure your personal information.

It’s important for you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and your computer. Be sure to sign off when you’ve finished using any shared computer.

What About Third-Party Advertisers and Links to Other Websites?

The Site may include third-party advertising and links to other websites. We do not provide any personally identifiable customer information to these advertisers or third-party websites.

These third-party websites and advertisers, or Internet advertising companies working on their behalf, sometimes use technology to send (or “serve”) the advertisements that appear on our Website directly to your browser. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. They may also use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (also known as action tags or single-pixel gifs), and other technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. We do not have access to or control over cookies or other features that they may use, and the information practices of these advertisers and third-party websites are not covered by this Privacy Policy. Please contact them directly for more information about their privacy practices. In addition, the Network Advertising Initiative offers useful information about Internet advertising companies (also called “ad networks” or “network advertisers”), including information about how to opt-out of their information collection. You can access the Network Advertising Initiative at http://www.networkadvertising.org.

We are open about our Privacy Policy

We are committed to providing you with understandable and easily available information about our policy and practices related to management of your personal information. This policy and any related information is available at all times on the Site (including on our website, www.physiotherapy.ca) under Privacy Policy or on request. To contact us, refer to the “How to contact us” section below.

We provide access to your personal information stored by the CPA

You can request access to your personal information stored by the CPA. To contact us, refer to the “How to contact us” section below. Upon receiving such a request, CPA will:

  • inform you about what type of personal information we have on record or in our control, how it is used and to whom it may have been disclosed
  • provide you with access to your information so you can review and verify the accuracy and completeness and request changes to the information, and
  • make any necessary updates to your personal information.

We respond to your questions, concerns and complaints about privacy

The CPA responds in a timely manner to your questions, concerns and complaints about the privacy of your personal information and our privacy policies and procedures.

How to contact us

Please contact information@physiotherapy.ca

Changes to this Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy may be modified at any time. We may e-mail periodic reminders of our notices and conditions unless you have instructed us not to, but you should check our Site frequently to see recent changes. We are, however, committed to protecting your information and will never materially change our policies and practices to make them less protective of personal information collected in the past without the consent of affected individuals.