Privacy Policy
Privacy & Confidentiality Policy
General & Limitations
As Registered Psychologist, I am held to high ethical standards by the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO). Once a professional relationship is established, client information is confidential as regulated by the CPO guidelines. The 3 main exceptions to confidentiality are threat of harm to self or another person, suspected abuse of a minor, and court-ordering of records.
Questions and Comments on Blog
Please note that any response to your questions does not constitute counselling / therapy or act as a substitute for receiving counselling. A professional relationship has not been established. As questions will be responded to in my blog, questions and their responses are not confidential. It is your responsibility to ensure that you only provide information that you are comfortable being shared in a public format. If you need immediate assistance or are in a crisis situation (i.e., threat to self or other), please call 911 or go to a hospital emergency department.
Privacy Policy
Last updated: January 15, 2015
Privacy Policy Table of Contents
- Our Commitment To Privacy
- Meaning Of Personal Information
- Collecting and Using Personal Information
- Releasing Personal Information
- Protecting Personal Information
- Providing Personal Information Access and Accuracy
- Consent
- Visiting Our Information Sites
- Cookies
- Flash - Local Shared Object
- Email Comments, Questions Or Responses
- Responding To Contest Or Surveys
- Addressing Your Concerns
- Changes To This Privacy Policy
1. Our Commitment To Privacy
Protecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal information has always been fundamental to the way we do interact with you within the Flow Consulting ("Flow"). We strive to provide you with the best customer service. To us, that includes treating you fairly and with respect. The Flow Privacy Policy informs you of our policy on privacy, and tells you about the ways we help ensure that your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal information are protected.
2. Meaning Of Personal Information
Our Privacy Policy informs you of the policies and practices we have in place relating to the management of personal information at Flow. The words “personal information” means information about you as an identifiable individual. It does not apply to businesses or business information but may apply to you as a personal customer, including individuals carrying on business alone or in partnership with other individuals and signing officers of our business customers.
3. Collecting And Using Personal Information
Either before or when we collect personal information about you, we will explain how we intend to use it. We will limit the personal information we collect to what we need for those purposes, and we will use it only for those purposes. We will obtain your consent if we wish to use your personal information for any other purpose.
4. Releasing Personal Information
We may provide your personal information to other persons in situations where:
(a) We have your consent;
(b) The other parties are our suppliers or agents who assist us in serving you, for the same purpose for which we collected it;
(c) We are required or permitted to do so by law or applicable regulators and self-regulatory organizations; and
(d) Transfers of a business are involved.
5. Protecting Personal Information
We will protect your personal information with appropriate safeguards and security measures. We will retain your personal information only for the time it is required for the purposes we explain.
We will protect your personal information with appropriate safeguards and security measures. We have thorough security standards to protect our systems and your personal information against unauthorized access and use. When we provide personal information in response to a legal inquiry or order, we ensure that the order is valid and we disclose only the personal information that is legally required. All employees of Flow are familiar with the procedures that must be taken to safeguard customer personal information. And to us, protecting the confidentiality of your personal information is more than a procedure - it's part of our job. It is specified in our employment agreements and regularly confirmed in writing. We audit our procedures and security measures regularly to ensure that they are being properly administered and that they remain effective and appropriate to the sensitivity of the personal information. We retain your personal information only as long as it is required for the reasons it was collected. The length of time we retain personal information varies depending on the product or service and the nature of the personal information. This period may extend beyond the end of your relationship with us but only for so long as it is necessary for us to have sufficient personal information to respond to any issue that may arise at a later date. When your personal information is no longer needed for the purposes explained to you, we have procedures to destroy, delete, erase or convert it to an anonymous form. We ensure that your personal information is stored securely. From time to time we may store personal information outside of Canada where it may be subject to lawful access requests in the jurisdiction in question.
6. Providing Personal Information Access And Accuracy
We will give you access to the personal information we retain about you subject to certain statutory limitations. We will respond to your requests within the timelines prescribed by the applicable privacy legislation. We will make every reasonable effort to keep your personal information accurate and up-to-date.
Having accurate personal information about you enables us to give you the best possible service and minimize the possibility that out of date personal information may be used to make a decision which impacts you. We have policies and procedures to help us maintain the accuracy of your personal information. For most updates, we rely on you for personal information. You can help by keeping us informed of any changes, such as if you move or change telephone numbers. If you find any errors in our personal information about you, let us know and we will make the corrections immediately, and make sure they are conveyed to anyone we may have misinformed. For personal information that remains in dispute, we will note your opinion in the file.
7. Consent
Why We Ask For Your Personal Information:
We ask you for personal information to establish and serve you as our customer. At the time you begin a relationship with us and during the course of our relationship, we may collect personal information about you. We obtain most of our personal information about you directly from you. The personal information we ask for depends on which product or service you want.
The purposes for which we collect, use and disclose your personal information include:
(a) Providing services to you;
(b) Communicating with you by e-mail as described below;
(c) For administration of contests or surveys as described below
How We Obtain Your Consent:
It is important to understand the different ways that we may obtain your consent to collect, use, disclose and share your personal information. Depending on the situation and the sensitivity of the personal information, we may obtain your consent in different ways. Express consent may be obtained verbally, online or in writing. Implied consent may be obtained through your use of a product, or when you approach us to obtain products or services from us. We will not make your consent a condition of obtaining a product or service, unless it is reasonably or legally required, and we will clearly indicate when this is the case.
When We Release Your Personal Information:
We do not sell or rent customer lists or personal information to others. However, we may release your personal information to parties outside Flow in certain circumstances, which include:
(a) With your consent;
(b) For servicing purposes;
(c) When required or permitted to do so by law or applicable regulators and self-regulatory organizations; and
(d) Transfers of a business.
Withdrawal Of Consent:
We will explain your options of refusing or withdrawing consent to the collection, use or release of your personal information, and, given reasonable notice, we will record and respect your choices. In most cases you are free to refuse or withdraw your consent at any time. You may do so by contacting us at (647) 343-7068. Our staff will be pleased to explain your options and any consequences of refusing or withdrawing your consent, and record your choices.
8. Visiting Our Information Sites
When you go directly to the information portion of our website and move from page to page, read pages or download content onto your computer, we learn which pages are visited, what content is downloaded, and the address of websites that you visited immediately before coming to our website. However, none of this is associated with you as an individual. It is measured only in aggregate. We use this information to find out how many people visit our website and which sections of the sites are visited most frequently. This helps us to know what type of personal information is most useful to our website visitors so that we can improve our website and make it easier for our website visitors to access personal information. We record the statistical information on the numbers of visitors to our website, but no personal information about you in particular will be kept or used.
9. Cookies
A cookie is a small file containing certain pieces of personal information that a website creates when you visit the site. It can track how and when you use a site, which site you visited immediately before, and it can store that personal information about you.
There are two common types of cookies, “session cookies” and “persistent cookies”. Session cookies store personal information only for the length of time that you are connected to a website - they are not written onto your hard drive. Once you leave the website, the originator of the cookie no longer has the personal information that was contained on it. Flow uses session cookies as an additional security feature for its online services. For example, when you login to any web service and are authenticated through your login ID and password, a cookie will store the identification number of your browser. Throughout your session, the cookie acts as a type of digital signature to identify your current session to the web server.
We also use session cookies to track your visits within our site. We use that information to determine the type of personal information that you are looking for in our site and to improve our site. We use information about the site you visited immediately prior to our site to assess the viability of links to our site that we have created on third party sites.
The personal information stored in “persistent cookies” is written onto your hard drive and remains there until the expiry date of the cookie. Flow uses persistent cookies to store non-sensitive personal information that you are aware of and have agreed to. For example, if you choose the option on our login screen to remember your Flow account, the system will remember and automatically input your user name each time you use the service from that personal computer.
We also employ persistent cookies, in order to provide you with a more comfortable online experience. A persistent cookie is placed on your computer's hard drive to remember your language preference and ensure you are always presented with the appropriate language. We also employ a persistent cookie to ensure that any online targeted offer which you have already responded to is not presented again each time you login to our Internet banking site. When you submit an application online for a product or service, we may also collect non-personal information, such as city, province and postal code in order to better serve our customers.
We use personal information about your computer, such as IP Address and Browser type. The primary method of collecting this personal information is through a persistent cookie which is added to your computer. The personal information is collected to assist us in authenticating you and your computer. All persistent cookies used by Flow are encrypted for additional security.
Currently, most browsers do not distinguish between session cookies and persistent cookies. For web services to operate, your browser must be set to accept cookies. If you are concerned about having your browser enabled to accept cookies while you are surfing other websites, we recommend that you enable your browser to notify you when it is receiving a cookie. This gives you the ability of accepting or rejecting any cookie presented by the web server you are visiting.
10. Flash - Local Shared Object
Local shared objects, sometimes referred to as “Flash cookies”, are data files that a website creates when you visit the site. Shared objects are most often used to enhance your web-browsing experience.
A local shared object is like a browser cookie, except that it can also store data more complex than simple text. Shared objects, by themselves, can't do anything to or with the data on your computer. More importantly, shared objects cannot access or remember your email address or other personal information unless you willingly provide such personal information. For more information about Flash, please visit www.adobe.com.
11. Email Comments, Questions Or Responses
When you send us an email or when you ask us to respond to you by email, we learn your exact email address and any personal information you have included in the email.
We use your email address to acknowledge your comments and/or reply to your questions, and we will store your communication and our reply in case we correspond further. We will not sell your email address to anyone outside Flow. We may use your email address to send you information about offers on products and services that we believe may be of interest to you. If you don't want us to contact you by email with offers on products and services, you may tell us so at any time.
If you have asked us to put you on an email mailing list to provide you with certain information on a regular basis, or if we send you information about our offers on products and services by email, you may ask us to remove you from the list at any time (using the unsubscribe instructions provided with each email and on the site where you signed up).
Remember that email sent over the Internet is generally unencrypted. If Flow requests that you transmit confidential personal information to us over the Internet when filling out an application online, we ensure that such transmission is encrypted. We recommend that you use caution when forwarding free-format email messages to us and that you do not include confidential personal information in those messages, as they are not encrypted.
We will never send email messages to customers requesting confidential personal information such as passwords or account numbers. Please do not act on any such emails as you may compromise your banking personal information by following links to a counterfeit Internet site(s).
12. Responding To Contest Or Surveys
When you submit your response to a survey question or enter one of our contests, we learn your answer or any opinions or personal information that you volunteer. In a contest we will use your personal information for the purpose of awarding a prize. For a survey, we may use your submission to come up with the survey results, and we may publish those results in aggregate on our website. We may also use your response to improve our products or services. Based on your participation in either, we may forward information about our offers on products and services that we believe may be of interest to you.
13. Addressing Your Concerns
If you have any questions, concerns or problems about privacy, confidentiality or how a request for personal information was handled, we encourage you to let us know, and you can take the following actions. If you choose to mail, fax or email us, please include your full name, address and telephone number. Contact us in one of the following ways:
Telephone:
(647) 343-7068
Mail:
Flow Consulting
142 Charlton Boulevard
Toronto, Ontario
M2R 2J1
Canada
Email:
14. Changes To This Privacy Policy
Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Privacy Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes). Each version of this Privacy Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date.