This data confidentiality and privacy policy describes how the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a not-for-profit organization headquartered at 1920 rue Baile, Montréal (Québec) H3H 2S6 Canada (“CCA”), gathers, uses, divulges and otherwise uses your personal information when you visit and use our website, our online bookstore, (henceforth called “The Platform”), or when you email us to view or download objects in our Collection, sign up for our newsletter, sign up for and participate at our public programs and activities, and when you make a donation or a purchase at our online bookstore (henceforth collectively referred to as “Services”).

This privacy policy applies equally to privacy and confidentiality practices at the CCA whether such personal information be collected online, by telephone, or in-person.

The CCA stands behind our commitment to respect, goodwill, transparency and confidentiality and responsibility particularly as it pertains to all dealings with personal information.

How does the CCA collect your personal information and what information is collected?

• Personal info: we do collect certain personal information which you provide to us, such as your address to ship you a book, or your email address and your affiliation with the CCA to be able to send you our newsletter or invitations to events. Unless you request it, we will not use your personal information to send you promotional emails or other unsolicited information. We also do not sell and share your personal details with any third parties, other than those required to ship you an item or to allow you to attend an online meeting.
• Other communications : We may also solicit your opinions on your experience of our Services and/or Platform and it is possible that names or email addresses may be recorded in such an exchange. If you communicate with us via telephone, we may temporarily retain your personal details to make a purchase on your behalf, or a reservation for you. Any credit card information is destroyed immediately after the transaction has been made.
• Cookies: We use “cookies” on our website (the Site) as well as other surveillance technologies such as web beacons, tags and pixels to collect information about your device: browser type, IP address, time zone, and other cookies installed on your device. Additionally, as you browse the Site, we collect information about the individual web pages or products that you view, what Sites or search terms referred you to the Site, and information about how you interact with the Site. We refer to this automatically collected information as “Device Information” and we collect and analyze it to be able to offer you an improved customer experience.
• Google Analytics data: We receive information on your usage of our platforms via Google Analytics, via the technologies mentioned above. We use this data to measure traffic and create statistical reports on how our websites are being used. None of the collected data can be used to identify you personally nor as an individual; it is aggregated information. To learn more about the data gathered by Google by its service Google Analytics, please visit this page: How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps.
• Web access logs: We also maintain standard web access logs, which record data on all visitors to transactional pages. These logs may contain: i) the internet domain from which you access the Platform, ii) your IP address (when you access the Internet you are automatically assigned an IP address which could be either static allowing you to be identifies or dynamic which generally does not identify you), iii) the type of browser and operating system you are using iv) the date and hour of your visit v) the pages you visited on our website, and vi) the address of the website from which you connected to our Platform.
• Children – this platform is not intended for children, nor do we encourage children to provide their personal information on it. If we learn that we have collected personal information on a child under 14 years of age, we will delete this information immediately. If you believe that we are holding information on a child, please advise us at privacy@cca.qc.ca. We follow the directives and legal requirements stated in the applicable laws.

What other uses does the CCA have for my personal information?
The CCA may use and share your personal information for the following purposes: To enable you to sign into our Bookstore platform and to make use of our Services (such as reserving books and collection objects, purchase a digital asset or product in our bookstore, attend a webinar, receive our newsletter, make a donation, become a Friend of the CCA); To generate statistics, collate information, measure activity on the platform, and to detect and prevent security threats. To help us develop our brand, or promotional and advertising materials.
If you have provided us with your email address, we may use it for the following purposes: To communicate with you about our Services, events and activities and other news concerning the CCA; To respond to your requests, enquiries and submissions; And other possible uses we may identify in future.
To learn more about what information we receive on website users, please email us at cspeirs@cca.qc.ca.

Communication and storage of personal information
Your personal information will not be transferred to third parties other than those mentioned above or those required to carry out our Services, e.g. sending you our newsletter, fulfilling online transactions such as Shopify, or Mailchimp for example. We may provide your information to other third-party providers in the process of providing our Services, such as Zoom for online seminars, and that includes uses mentioned below.

As it pertains to personal information stored during an online transaction, how and for how long, please refer to Shopify’s privacy policy.

Only authorized members of our personnel who have a direct need to access your information to carry out their jobs will have access to any databases containing your personal information. Your personal information will be held at our offices and on our servers or those of our providers which may reside in a jurisdiction outside of Quebec and Canada and by consequence those may be subject to laws governing those jurisdictions. We might communicate your personal information for purposes of verification such as for online transactions. We might communicate certain information to third parties in a way that does not personally identify you, such as providing statistics of how many users visit from a certain geographical region.

Only authorized members of our personnel who have a direct need to access your information to carry out their jobs will have access to any databases containing your personal information. Your personal information will be held at our offices and on our servers or those of our providers which may reside in a jurisdiction outside of Quebec and Canada and by consequence those may be subject to laws governing those jurisdictions. We might communicate your personal information for purposes of verification such as for online transactions. We might communicate certain information to third parties in a way that does not personally identify you, such as providing statistics of how many users visit from a certain geographical region.

Storage, preservation and destruction of your personal information

Your personal information are kept as long as required for the purposes for which they were collected, or to be able to conform to legal and regulatory requirements. Personal information is destroyed when it is no longer needed. When we destroy documents or personal information we apply rigorous processes and we ensure that only authorized personnel have access to documents and personal information. All personal information is stored in a confidential manner conforming to federal and provincial (including Quebec) legislation applicable to the protection of privacy and personal information. The CCA takes reasonable administrative, technical and physical measures to protect your information from loss, theft and unauthorized access, use, alteration and destruction. Conforming to measures stipulated by the law, you have the right to access your personal information and to demand it be corrected if it is incorrect, incomplete, ambiguous or inexact, of if the collection, communication or conservation of your information is not authorized by law. If you find errors or omissions, please inform us and we will make the necessary changes. All demands for access to, or correction of your personal information should be addressed via an email to privacy@cca.qc.ca

European residents If you reside in Europe you have the right to access any personal information we hold about you and to demand that this information be corrected, updated or deleted. If you want to exercise this right please contact us via email at privacy@cca.qc.ca.

In addition, if you are a European resident, please note that we process your information to perform any contracts we may have with you (for example if you place an order through our bookstore website), or otherwise to pursue our legitimate business interests listed above. In addition, please note that your information will be transferred outside Europe, including to Canada and the United States.

Targetted Advertising This section explains the CCA’s online promotional practices. As mentioned earlier, we use cookies and other surveillance technology (scripts, graphic images and web beacons) on our Platform. Cookies are small text files that your browser installs on your computer or other device and which allow a website to recognize you on subsequent visits. Certain cookies are necessary for our website to function, or to help identify you when, for example you sign into your CCA Bookstore account. We collect this information to help us analyze your user experience and our site’s performance. We also have third parties such as Google Analytics who use these cookies or other digital markers to maintain or improve our Platform and our Services. 

Does the CCA create interest-based advertising campaigns? The CCA uses many tools including occasionally interest-based advertising services to help us ensure that for the limited amount of advertising we do, it will be useful and pertinent to our audiences. We adapt and personalize these ads depending on what we understand your interests to be based on your activity on our website as well as other websites you have visited.

Does the CCA run ads on social media? The CCA has chosen to not advertise on social media.

What are my choices regarding cookies and targeted advertising? You have the choice to accept cookies, or not, even for interest-based advertising, which is when you are shown ads for websites similar to other sites you have visited.

Cookies. Most browsers are programmed by default to accept cookies, however by clicking Help in the task bar of most browsers you can learn how to stop accepting cookies and to delete any current ones.

Interest based advertising If you do not want to receive advertising based on your interest in certain web pages, or you want to exercise your right to choose which third part advertising networks can show you interest-based ads, please consult the options below:

You can unsubscribe from advertising networks here:

• Opt-out page for the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada (DAAC): Opt-Out Tools — AdChoices in Canada (youradchoices.ca)

• Opt-out page for the NAI: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp; et
• Opt-out page from the Digital Advertising Alliance Ad Choices: http://www.aboutads.info/choices/.

These organizations above give you the tools to identify companies which place cookies on your browser and show you how to deactivate these cookies. If you unsubscribe, you will still receive online publicity – from companies other than the CCA - but it will no longer be interest-based.

Interest-based social media ads. To unsubscribe from interest-based social media advertising, adjust your Ad Preferences in the settings of your social media apps or use links provided in the ads themselves.

If you have other questions, please email us at privacy@cca.qc.ca

How to contact us For any questions related to this privacy policy or to practices at the CCA related to data privacy, please communicate with us by emailing privacy@cca.qc.ca

This page was last updated 1 November 2023.