The purpose of this Privacy Policy is to inform our customers, website visitors, and other individuals we deal with in Canada (“users”, “you” or “your”) how Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board / Conseil Consultatif de Publicité Pharmaceutique (“PAAB”, “we”, “us” or “our”) collects, uses, discloses and protects personal information.  By visiting our website at http://www.paab.ca/ (the “Website”), or otherwise providing us with personal information, you consent to the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy.  

Your Consent

By visiting our Website or providing us with personal information, you consent to our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy or at the time of collection.  If you provide us with personal information relating to someone else, you represent and warrant to us that you have obtained consent from that individual to provide their personal information to us.

You may withdraw your consent to our collection, use and disclosure of personal information at any time, subject to contractual and legal restrictions and reasonable notice.  However, if you withdraw your consent to certain uses of your personal information, we may no longer be able to provide our products or services.

What we Collect

“Personal Information” is information in any form which can be attributed to an identifiable individual, but does not include business contact information, such as your name, title or position, business address, telephone number, facsimile number, or e-mail address. PAAB is committed to maintaining the accuracy, security and privacy of your Personal Information.

In most cases we collect personal information directly from you.  For example:

• If you sign up for our newsletter, we will collect your name and email address in order to send you our newsletter and other information and offers that may be of interest to you.  We may use other personal information we collect about you to customize these communications.
• We collect information about your interactions with us, including to respond to your inquiries, provide the products and services you request, and otherwise administer our business, including to better understand our customers, customize our marketing efforts and to improve our products and services.
• We may collect and use personal information for other purposes with your consent or as permitted or required by law.  

In some cases, we may collect personal information about you from someone else. For example, social media identifiers that include both personal and non-personally identifying information about you may be obtained by using social media sharing and log-in features. You can control what information you share through some social networking sites’ privacy settings.

Public Forum

Our Website may make public chat rooms, forums, message boards, and/or news groups available to you from time to time. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose any personal information. We are not responsible for information you disclose on these public forums. While we will make reasonable efforts to remove such information upon  your request, we cannot guarantee that we will fulfill that request.

If you choose to become a registered user, we will ask you to provide us with basic account information such as your name, email address, country, and postal code. We may also ask you supplementary information, such as your birth month and year, income range, the industry you work in, and your current position. If you choose to provide it, we use supplementary information for internal purposes such as making improvements to our website and analytics. 

The Website integrates a number of third party social media platforms to make your experience on our website more convenient. For example, you can seamlessly log in to our website by using your existing social media profile such as Facebook or LinkedIn. If you do so, the social media platform will provide PAAB with your Social Media Identifier and any additional information that you have consented to being shared with the outside parties. For example, with your consent, the social media platform can provide us with your personal information to auto-fill a registration form. Information that is provided to PAAB by the social media platform is subject to the privacy policy of that particular service.

Website Visitors

For visitors to our Website, we may collect certain information automatically when you visit our Website. We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies to collect non-personal information such as the type of Internet browser and operating system used by you, the domain name of the website from which you came, the date and duration of your visit, number of visits, average time spent on our Website, IP address associated with your computer, pages viewed and number of cookies accumulated. Cookies are small browser features stored on the hard-drive of your computer which are used to track and collect information concerning your visit to our Website. This information is primarily used for the technical performance of the Website (including but not limited to ensuring the security of the Website). This information may also be used to help us understand how many users visit our Website, what pages they visit and for how long, whether they use the hyperlinks we provide or respond to advertising and to tailor our advertisements to you. We may also use these technologies to remember your preferences. If you would prefer not to accept cookies, most browsers will allow you to change your browser settings to notify you when you receive a cookie or set your browser to automatically reject any cookies.

How We Use Your Personal Information

We collect Personal Information to enable us to manage and develop our business and operations, including: to establish, maintain and manage relations with you so that we may provide you with, or receive from you, the products and services that have been requested; to be able to review the services that we provide to you so that we may understand your requirements for our services and so that we may work to improve our services; to be able to inform you of our services other than those that you have specifically requested, including sending you information promoting our other services; to be able to comply with your requests (for example, if you prefer to be contacted at a business or residential telephone number or e-mail address and advise us of your preference, we will use this information to contact you at that number or e-mail address); to protect us against error, fraud, theft and damage to our goods and property; to enable us to comply with applicable law or regulatory requirements; and any other reasonable purpose to which you consent. 

We may use your Personal Information to contact you regarding issues with your use of PAAB’s services such as posting on the public commenting board that are subject to our Terms of Service. We reserve the right to contact you if we have reason to believe that you have violated our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines.

We will not disclose your Personal Information to any third party to enable them to market their products and services. Where we are permitted to disclose your Personal Information to third parties, we shall ensure that such third parties protect your Personal Information and use it only for the purposes that we instruct them to use it for.

We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information using physical, electronic or procedural security measures appropriate to the sensitivity of the information in our custody or control, which may include safeguards to protect against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.  Authorized employees, agents and mandataries of PAAB who require access to your personal information in order to fulfil their job requirements will have access to your personal information.

Use of Electronic Communications

We would like from time to time to send commercial electronic communications (such as emails), with publications, announcements, event invitations, and other information, to subscribers, individuals with whom we have a commercial relationship, and individuals with whom we have a business or personal relationship. If you have not already provided us with such consent and wish to receive or continue to receive such communications from us, please feel free to contact us by email at info@paab.ca.  If you wish to withdraw your consent at any time please feel free to contact us by email at info@paab.ca.

Access, Correction, and Contacting Us

The file containing your personal information will be maintained on our servers.   You may request access to or correction of your personal information in our custody or control, or make other inquiries, by writing to info@paab.ca. Your right to access or correct your personal information is subject to applicable legal restrictions and we may take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access or making corrections. 

Changes to our Policy

We reserve the right, from time to time, to amend or change this Privacy Policy by posting such revisions to our Website. Changes to the Privacy Policy shall be effective upon posting. In the event that any amendment affects the purpose(s) for which we collect, use or disclose your Personal Information, we will obtain any additional consent required from you under applicable privacy laws. We recommend that you visit this Website frequently to review the current version of this Privacy Policy. Your continued provision of personal information or use of our Website following any changes to this Privacy Policy constitutes your acceptance of any such changes.  

Last updated: August 8, 2019