VON Canada Statement of Information Practices
About this Statement of Information Practices
Thank you for visiting this website. On this page, we describe our practices for handling personal information. Read this page to learn how we use your personal information when you use our website, when you sign up for Home Care or Community Services, when you make a donation, or when you interact with us in other ways.
We may update this Statement of Information Practices. The most current version of our Statement of Information Practices will be posted on this website.
What types of personal information do we collect?
The types of personal information that we collect depends on how we interact with you.
Home Care. When we provide home care services, we will collect personal health information about you. The type of personal health information depends on the nature of the home care services. Examples of personal health information include: your health conditions, your health history, your care plan, your health card number, other care providers, prescriptions, and substitute decision-makers.
Community Programs. The types of personal information we collect depends on the nature of the community program. For example, if you participate in an Alzheimer’s day program, we collect personal health information to understand your needs and information about your activities in the program.
Donors. If you are a donor, we collect personal information about you to process your donation and issue you a charitable receipt (if applicable). We also collect information to communicate with you about your donation and potential future donations.
Applicants for Employment & Volunteers. When you apply for a job or a volunteer opportunity, we collect personal information that you provide with your application and responses to our interview and screening questions. We will also collect personal information from your references and from background checks.
Website visitors. You can browse our website without identifying who you are. Like many websites, we use cookies and other technologies to understand how visitors use our website and whether they visited us as a result of our advertising. If you visited certain pages of our website, such as our donor or jobs pages, we may show you advertising after you leave our site. We also automatically collect information about your browser, the page that referred you to our site, your internet protocol address, and other technical information relating to our visit. We do not try to derive your identity from that information.
Why do we collect and share your personal information?
We collect and share your personal information for the purposes of providing and administering programs and services, fundraising, management of our business, and fulfilling our legal obligations, as in the examples set out below.
Delivery of care programs and services
- Caring for you, including by sharing it with other care providers involved in your care
- Providing other services to you such as health education programs
- Billing and processing payments for our programs and services
- Reporting to the government funders or funding agencies
Fundraising
- Soliciting and processing donations
- Issuing charitable donation receipts
- Providing targeted advertising to our donors or prospective donors
Management and business development
- Planning, administering and managing our internal operations
- Conducting risk management activities
- Training our staff and third parties acting on our behalf
- Conducting research and compiling statistics
- Assessing and improving compliance with our policies and procedures and the quality of our programs and services
- Managing subcontractor relationships
- Complying with legal and regulatory requirements
- Fulfilling other purposes permitted or required by law
Outreach
- Communicating through social media
- Targeting advertising if you have previously visited our website, provided a donation, or for brand awareness or advocacy purposes
- Sending newsletters and other communications about our programs, services, and the management of our business
Employees and volunteers
- Recruiting and managing employees and volunteers
Withdrawing consent
You may withdraw your consent for the collection and use of your personal information by contacting us. See the “How to contact us” section below.
If you withdraw consent in the context of our care services and issue a consent directive (also known as a "lockbox" request), your consent directive may be overridden with your express consent or where otherwise permitted by law. Before withdrawing your consent in the context of our care services, please discuss the associated risks and benefits with a member of your care team.
If we are providing care services to you or if you are a donor, you may request access and correction to your personal information.
Please note that we may still be required to retain or use your personal information where we are required or permitted to do so by law. For example, we will retain health records to comply with regulatory best practices or the requirements of a funder. We must retain records of donations for tax and audit purposes.
Cookies
We use cookies, pixels and other similar technologies. Cookies are small text files that are stored on your device. Pixels are small image files that appear on our web pages or in advertisements. We use these technologies for a variety of business purposes. Examples include:
- to remember your device the next time you visit one of our websites or web applications
- to track how you are using our websites, website applications and mobile apps
- to deliver online advertising
- to find out if our emails have been read
- to find out if links were clicked in our promotional email content and advertisements
Some cookies and pixels are provided by third parties who share information with us. For example, if we advertise on Facebook, the advertisement and our website may contain pixels so that we understand that a visitor to our website saw the Facebook advertisement. This helps us know that the advertisement was useful and relevant.
Online Marketing
VON does not collect or use health information for advertising.
We use the services of social media networks, internet search providers (like Google), and other third parties to deliver content to individuals who we think will be interested in it. We use these services for recruitment, fundraising, brand awareness, and advocacy purposes. To opt out of online advertising, please use the privacy settings in the browser you choose. For example, you can set your browser to reject cookies or to notify you if a website asks for your location.
We may deliver advertisements based on the general location of your IP address, your search terms or your social media profile. For example, social media platforms (such as Facebook) allow us to show you advertisements based on the fact that you match characteristics of our target audience or to exclude you from advertisements because we don’t think they are relevant to you. This is called custom audiences. For example, if you are a donor, we may use Facebook’s tools to convert information (such as your email address or phone number) into a unique code, which Facebook may match to information you provided to them. We can then show you an advertisement on Facebook or find other people who have similar interests as you and show them an advertisement. If you would also like to limit social network advertising, you may adjust your social network advertising settings or use opt-out features that may be provided in the social network advertisement.
Even if you opt-out, you may still receive online advertising from VON on other websites or platforms, but these ads will not be personalized for you based on information we have about you.
Email or Mail Marketing
We and our service providers collect your email and mailing addresses when you subscribe to VON communications. We may communicate with you about our fundraising programs via the email and/or mailing addresses you provided to us, based on your prior interests as donors or stakeholders.
To unsubscribe from VON email communications, use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of recent emails we sent to you. You may also unsubscribe or ask to be removed from our mailing lists by writing to us via the email or the mailing address under the “How to contact us?” section below.
How do we protect your information?
We take steps to protect your information from theft, loss and unauthorized access, copying, modification, use, disclosure and disposal. These steps include physical protections to protect files containing personal information, technological measures to protect electronic data, contractual measures to require that our subcontractors protect information, as well as administrative policies and procedures that our employees and volunteers are required to follow.
We store and process personal health information of our clients in Canada. For other types of personal information, we may transfer your personal information to third party service providers outside of Canada if we are permitted to do so under applicable laws.
We dispose of personal information securely when it is no longer required to be retained.
How long do we retain personal information?
We retain personal health information collected in the course of providing care services in accordance with the requirements of our funders or for periods that are recommended by regulatory bodies.
We retain other personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes it was collected, including compliance with legal obligations and to protect our legal interests.
How to contact us?
For more information about our privacy protection practices, or to raise a concern you have with our practices, contact us at:
Privacy Officer, VON Canada
2315 St. Laurent Blvd., Suite 100
Ottawa, Ontario K1G 4J8
Email: privacy.officer@von.ca
How can you make a complaint?
We encourage you to contact our Privacy Officer about any complaints you may have, so we may work with you to resolve your concerns.
If we are providing healthcare services to you, you also have the right to complain to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of your province if you think we have violated your rights. The Commissioners can be reached at:
Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario:
2 Bloor Street East, Suite 1400
Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8
Tel: (416) 326-3333
Toll Free: 1 (800) 387-0073 (free within Ontario)
TDD-TTY: (416) 325-7539
Email: info@ipc.on.ca
Web site of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario
Information and Privacy Commissioner for Nova Scotia:
P.O. Box 181
Halifax, NS B3J 2M4
Tel: (902) 424-4684
Toll Free: 1-866-243-1564 (within NS)
Fax: (902) 424-8303
Email: oipcns@novascotia.ca
Web site of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Nova Scotia
