PRIVACY STATEMENT
Festivals and Events Niagara - Privacy Statement
last revised: Sept 8 / 06
Festivals and Events Niagara is committed to protecting your privacy. Please read the Festivals and Events Niagara Online Privacy Statement below for details about particular Festivals and Events Niagara sites and services that you may use.
This Festivals and Events Niagara Online Privacy Statement applies to data collected by Festivals and Events Niagara through the majority of its Web sites and services, as well as its offline support services.
Collection of Your Personal Information
In order to access some Festivals and Events Niagara services, you will be asked to sign in with an e-mail address and password, which we refer to as your credentials. In most cases, these credentials will be part of the Festivals and Events Niagara Network. By signing in on one Festivals and Events Niagara site or service, you may be automatically signed into other Festivals and Events Niagara services. Some services may require added security, and in these cases, you may be asked to create an additional security key.
At this Festivals and Events Niagara site, we ask you to provide personal information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address or telephone number. We may also collect demographic information, such as your ZIP/Postal code, age, gender, preferences, interests and favorites. If you choose to make a purchase or sign up for a paid subscription service, we will ask for additional information, such as your billing address, that is used to create a Festivals and Events Niagara billing account.
We may collect information about your visit, including the pages you view, the links you click and other actions taken in connection with Festivals and Events Niagara sites and services. We also collect certain standard information that your browser sends to every website you visit, such as your IP address, browser type and language, access times and referring Web site addresses.
When you receive newsletters or promotional e-mail from Festivals and Events Niagara, we may use web beacons (described below), customized links or similar technologies to determine whether the e-mail has been opened and which links you click in order to provide you more focused e-mail communications or other information.
In order to offer you a more consistent and personalized experience in your interactions with Festivals and Events Niagara, information collected through one Festivals and Events Niagara service may be combined with information obtained through other Festivals and Events Niagara services. We may also supplement the information we collect with information obtained from other companies. For example, we may use services from other companies that enable us to derive a general geographic area based on your IP address in order to customize certain services to your geographic area.
Use of Your Personal Information
Festivals and Events Niagara collects and uses your personal information to operate and improve its sites and deliver the services or carry out the transactions you have requested. These uses may include providing you with more effective customer service; making the sites or services easier to use by eliminating the need for you to repeatedly enter the same information; performing research and analysis aimed at improving our products, services and technologies.
We also use your personal information to communicate with you. We may send certain mandatory service communications such as welcome letters, billing reminders, information on technical service issues, and security announcements. Some Festivals and Events Niagara services, such as the information package program, may send periodic letters that are considered part of the service. We may also occasionally send you product surveys or promotional mailings to inform you of other products or services available from Festivals and Events Niagara and its affiliates.
Personal information collected on Festivals and Events Niagara sites and services may be stored and processed in Canada or any other country in which Festivals and Events Niagara or its affiliates, subsidiaries or agents maintain marketing activities, and by using a Festivals and Events Niagara site or service, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country. Festivals and Events Niagara abides by applicable Canadian laws regarding the collection, use, and retention of data.
Sharing of Your Personal Information
Except as described in this statement, we will not disclose your personal information outside of Festivals and Events Niagara and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your consent. Some Festivals and Events Niagara sites allow you to choose to share your personal information with select Festivals and Events Niagara partners so that they can contact you about their products, services or offers. Other sites do not share your contact information with third parties for marketing purposes, but instead may give you a choice as to whether you wish to receive communications from Festivals and Events Niagara on behalf of external business partners about a partner's particular offering (without transferring your personal information to the third party).
Some Festivals and Events Niagara services may be co-branded and offered in conjunction with another company. If you register for or use such services, both Festivals and Events Niagara and the other company may receive information collected in conjunction with the co-branded services.
We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of mailings, providing customer support, hosting websites, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. Those companies will be permitted to obtain only the personal information they need to deliver the service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of the information and are prohibited from using it for any other purpose.
We may access and/or disclose your personal information if we believe such action is necessary to: (a) comply with the law or legal process served on Festivals and Events Niagara; (b) protect and defend the rights or property of Festivals and Events Niagara (including the enforcement of our agreements); or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of users of Festivals and Events Niagara services or members of the public.
Accessing Your Personal Information
You may have the ability to view or edit your personal information online. In order to help prevent your personal information from being viewed by others, you will be required to sign in with your credentials (e-mail address and password). The appropriate method(s) for accessing your personal information will depend on which services you have used.
Communication Preferences
You can stop the delivery of future promotional e-mail from Festivals and Events Niagara sites and services by following the specific instructions in the e-mail you receive.
These communication choices do not apply to mandatory service communications that are considered part of certain Festivals and Events Niagara services, which you may receive periodically unless you cancel the service.
Security of Your Personal Information
Festivals and Events Niagara is committed to protecting the security of your personal information. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For example, we store the personal information you provide on computer systems with limited access, which are located in controlled facilities. When we transmit highly confidential information over the Internet, we protect it through the use of encryption.
If a password is used to help protect your accounts and personal information, it is your responsibility to keep your password confidential. Do not share this information with anyone. If you are sharing a computer with anyone you should always choose to log out before leaving a site or service to protect access to your information from subsequent users.
Collection and Use of Children's Personal Information
Many Festivals and Events Niagara sites and services are intended for general audiences and do not knowingly collect any personal information from children. When a Festivals and Events Niagara site does collect age information, and users identify themselves as under 13, the site will either block such users from providing personal information, or will seek to obtain consent from parents for the collection, use and sharing of their children's personal information. We will not knowingly ask children under the age of 13 to provide more information than is reasonably necessary to provide our services.
Parents can change or revoke the consent choices previously made, and review, edit or request the deletion of their children's personal information.
Festivals and Events Niagara Web sites use "cookies" to enable you to sign in to our services and to help personalize your online experience. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web page server. Cookies contain information that can later be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer.
Festivals and Events Niagara Web sites use cookies to store your preferences and other information on your computer in order to save you time by eliminating the need to repeatedly enter the same information and to display your personalized content and appropriate advertising on your later visits to these sites.
When you sign in to a site using your credentials, the Festivals and Events Niagara Network stores your unique ID, and the time you signed in, in an encrypted cookie on your hard disk. This cookie allows you to move from page to page at the site without having to sign in again on each page. When you sign out, these cookies are deleted from your computer. The Network also uses cookies to improve the sign in experience. For example, your e-mail address may be stored in a cookie that will remain on your computer after you sign out. This cookie allows your e-mail address to be pre-populated, so that you will only need to type your password the next time you sign in.
You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to sign in or use other interactive features of Festivals and Events Niagara sites and services that depend on cookies.
Use of Web Beacons
Festivals and Events Niagara Web pages may contain electronic images known as Web beacons - sometimes called single-pixel gifs - that may be used to assist in delivering cookies on our sites and allow us to count users who have visited those pages and to deliver co-branded services. We may include Web beacons in promotional e-mail messages or our newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened and acted upon.
Festivals and Events Niagara may also employ Web beacons from third parties in order to help us compile aggregated statistics and determine the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns. We prohibit Web beacons on our sites from being used by third parties to collect or access your personal information.
Finally, we may work with other companies that advertise on Festivals and Events Niagara sites to place Web beacons on their sites in order to allow us to develop statistics on how often clicking on an advertisement on a Festivals and Events Niagara site results in a purchase or other action on the advertiser's site.
Use of Third Party Ad Networks
The majority of the online banner advertisements you see on Festivals and Events Niagara Web pages are displayed by Festivals and Events Niagara. However, we allow other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to display advertisements on Festivals and Events Niagara Web pages. Some of these ad networks may place a persistent cookie on your computer in order to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement. In this way, ad networks may compile information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows an ad network to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. Festivals and Events Niagara does not have access to the cookies that may be placed by the third-party ad servers or ad networks.
Festivals and Events Niagara maintains relationships with a number of the third-party ad networks currently operating. Those ad networks that use persistent cookies may offer you a way to opt out of ad targeting. You may find more information at the Web site of either the individual ad network or the Network Advertising Initiative.
Changes to This Privacy Statement
We will occasionally update this privacy statement to reflect changes in our services and customer feedback. When we post changes to this Statement, we will revise the "last updated" date at the top of this statement. If there are material changes to this statement or in how Festivals and Events Niagara will use your personal information, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes prior to implementing the change or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to periodically review this statement to be informed of how Festivals and Events Niagara is protecting your information.