Introduction
The Tri-Cities Dispatch is owned and operated by Constellation Media Society. This policy governs the Dispatch’s use of information and has been primarily designed to comply with British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
What is personal information?
Personal information is information that can be linked to an individual. For example, if you contact us by email, we consider your email to be personal information, even if it does not include your name.
Excluded from this definition is contact information that would allow for a person to be reached at their place of business (name, position, business phone number, etc.).
How we collect your information
Most of the personal information we have about you will be collected directly from you in order to maintain our relationship. For example, you may be asked for your name and email in order to receive our newsletter. We also use third party services, for example to provide us with some details about visitors to our website.
Third Party Services
We use third party services to communicate with you, facilitate financial transactions, conduct advertising, and maintain our website. When we engage a third-party service, we do so on the understanding that any personal information collected by that party will only be stored, used and disclosed in compliance with the applicable privacy law(s).
You can visit the websites of our database and analytics providers to find detailed information on their privacy policies.
How we use and keep your information
We use personal information collected from you when you sign up to our newsletter, make a donation, respond to surveys and promotional offers and use our website in order to:
- Communicate with you via email;
- Personalize your experience by showing you content that will be most interesting to you;
- Improve our website and content selection;
- Facilitate donations; and
- Undertake marketing and promotions.
We will not use your information for any additional purposes with your explicit consent. We only keep your information for as long as we need it for these purposes.
Disclosure
We will not sell your personal information, but we may disclose limited information to third party platforms for advertising and promotional purposes.
We will not otherwise disclose your information unless we first ask for your consent, if we are legally required to do so, or in exceptional circumstances where there is a serious threat to security.
Advertising and promotions
We may reach out to existing subscribers with optional surveys to provide us with more information about themselves in order to tailor our product, and to get a better understanding of our audience.
When we disclose information to third party advertising platforms, they may link that information to other data that they already have about you in order to better tailor our advertisements or to identify other people who might be interested in our content.
Cookies
Cookies are small files that are placed on your computer when you visit a website such as ours and that help us to recognize repeat visitors and track interactions on our website. We use cookies to personalize your experience and to develop and promote our content. For example, we use cookies to compile aggregate, non-personal information about how many people are visiting our site and which pages they viewed. You can choose to disable cookies at any time.
Security
We use password-protected, restricted access services to keep your data secure. Employees and contractors who have access to your personal information are trained on how to keep this information secure. When you interact with our website, your traffic is encrypted, protecting it from third party surveillance.
Accuracy and access to your personal information
To access personal information about you stored in our database, or to correct this information you can make a written request to our privacy officer via the email [email protected] Any questions or concerns about our privacy practices can be directed to the same email.
