Horse-Canada.com Rules
HORSE PUBLICATIONS GROUP PRIVACY POLICY
1. About Horse Publications Group
Horse Publications Group (HPG) is the largest equestrian publishing company in Canada. HPG publishes
five Canadian titles including Horse Sport, Horse-Canada, Canadian Thoroughbred, Racing Quarterly and
Canadian Horse Annual.
This Privacy Policy applies to our collection, use and disclosure of personal information regarding the
clients and consumers of our products and services, including our online and print publications, and our
individual service providers.
2. The Collection of Personal Information
Canadian privacy legislation defines personal information broadly as information about “an identifiable
individual” or as information that allows an individual to be identified. The types of personal information
that we may collect from you from time to time include: your name, address, telephone number, e-mail
address, your forwarding address (e.g. during a vacation), previous address(es), payment information
(for billing purposes), your mailing preferences (such as “no wrappers”, etc.), delivery instructions,
and individual customer service preferences (such as “do not solicit”). In addition, from time to time,
we may ask you to provide us with more detailed information regarding your interests, occupation,
and background. For example, we sometimes ask our customers to complete surveys in order to get a
better sense of who they are and what issues, products or services may be of interest to them and our
readership. Finally, from time to time, we may acquire demographic and other information about you
(e.g. your occupation and interests) from an outside organisation, but only if you have previously agreed
to allow such an organization to disclose the information to companies such as HPG.
3. Why we Collect your Personal Information
We collect your personal information for the purposes listed below:
(a) To provide the product, service or information you requested
If you are a customer of one of our publications, we use your name and address (postal and/or e-mail)
in order to deliver the product, service or information you requested and to follow up with you about
the transaction (i.e., send a bill, notify you that your subscription is expiring, etc.). If you enter into a
contest offered through one of our websites or printed publications, we use your personal information
to administer the contest on our own behalf or on behalf of our sponsors.
(b) To process payment
Your credit card number, debit card number, or banking information for pre-authorized payments is
used only for processing payments and for presenting you with payment options – not for marketing
purposes.
(c) To send you information
From time to time we may send you further information about the publication, its offers, or other
products produced under its name.
(d) Other purposes
In addition, from time to time, we may use your personal information for the following purposes:
- to detect and protect HPG and other third parties against error, fraud, theft and other illegal
activity, and to audit compliance with HPG policies and contractual obligations; - to understand your needs and preferences, including to contact and communicate with you and
to conduct surveys, research and evaluations; - to obtain audited statements regarding numbers of subscribers per publication;
- to engage in business transactions, including the purchase, sale, lease, merger, amalgamation or
any other type of acquisition, disposal, securitization or financing involving HPG; - for any other purpose we may indicate to you from time to time.
4. The Disclosure of Your Personal Information to Third Parties
We may disclose your personal information to the following third parties in the following circumstances:
(a) Disclosure to Service Providers
We may disclose your personal information to other companies that provide services on our behalf,
including label printers, invoice printers, fulfillment contractors, auditors, our software developers
(including website developers and hosts), data processing, document management and office services.
In addition, we may disclose your personal information to an organization or individual retained by
HPG to evaluate your creditworthiness or to collect debts outstanding on an account or to our auditors.
We will only provide those companies the information they need to deliver the service and they are
prohibited from using that information for any other purpose.
(b) Disclosure to Affiliates and Business Units
We may disclose your personal information to any of the companies and business units that form part
of the HPG group (i.e. amongst HPG, its subsidiaries and affiliates) in order to serve you better and to
provide you with information about our group’s products and services.
(c) Disclosure to Trading Partners
From time to time our magazines or websites may make their list of customers available to other
carefully screened organizations (such as other magazines, book publishers, banks or charities) that
want to let you know about a product or service that might interest you. The material to be sent to you
is reviewed by us before the names and addresses (including e-mail addresses) are released to ensure
the organization is reputable and material is appropriate and not misleading.
(d) Disclosure in Business Transfers
HPG may be involved in the sale or transfer of some or all of its business. As part of that sale or transfer,
HPG may disclose your personal information to the acquiring organization, but will require the acquiring
organization to agree to protect the privacy of your personal information in a manner that is consistent
with this Privacy Policy.
(e) Law Enforcement and Legal Disclosure
HPG may disclose your personal information to a government institution that has asserted its lawful
authority to obtain the information or where HPG has reasonable grounds to believe the information
could be useful in the investigation of unlawful activity, or to comply with a subpoena or warrant or an
order made by a court, person or body with jurisdiction to compel the production of information, or to
comply with court rules regarding the production of records and information, or to HPG’s legal counsel.
If you would prefer for us NOT to share your information as described above in sections 4(a)-4(d), simply
inform us (see “Contact Us” below).
5. Control of your Personal Information
At HPG, we want you to be able to maintain control over how we use your personal information. In
particular:
- You may have the right to “opt out” of some or all of the identified purposes, uses and
disclosures listed in sections 3 and 4 above. - You always have the option to instruct us not to use your name, address, e-mail address, etc.
beyond providing you with the product, service or information you requested. See “Contact Us”
below. - E-mail communications will always include an identification of the sender and an “Unsubscribe”
option. If you receive a mailing from any of our consumer magazines and you wish to know
the source of your name (i.e. what list it came from), we will make every reasonable effort to
determine the source and provide you with the information. For this request, or to confirm that
any personal information we may have is correct, please contact us (See “Contact Us” below).
(Note that some account information can be confirmed by visiting the customer care section of
our consumer magazine websites).
As mentioned above, we may not be able to provide you with our services if you withdraw your consent
to our use of your personal information.
6. The Storage and Protection of Your Personal Information
Your personal information is stored in secured locations and on servers controlled by HPG, located
either at our offices or at the offices of our service providers.
We make every reasonable effort to protect against the loss, misuse, and alteration of personal
information under our control. Our security policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary.
Only authorized employees and suppliers have access to your personal information. Where information
is sent to a third party for processing, we make sure, through our contracts with them, that all your
information is kept secure. We keep your information for the time we are providing you with a product
or service, and for a reasonable time thereafter in the event that you wish to resume service.
We operate secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection
systems. Credit card information is processed using industry-standard encryption and security.
8. Privacy and our websites
HPG sometimes collects personal information through its various websites. In this section, we provide
you with additional information regarding such collection.
Cookies – When an individual visitor accesses the HPG websites, we may use a browser feature called
a “cookie” to collect information such as the type of Internet browser and operating system the
visitor uses, the domain name of the websites from which the visitor came, date and duration of the
visit, number of visits, average time spent on our websites, pages viewed and number of cookies
accumulated. A cookie is a small text file containing a unique identification number that identifies the
visitor’s browser, but not necessarily the visitor, to our computers each time our websites are visited.
Unless a visitor specifically informs us (e.g. by enrolling for our services or sending us correspondence
from the websites), we will not know who the individual visitors are. In addition to the identified
purposes described in our Privacy Policy, we may use this website information and share it with other
organizations with whom we have a commercial relationship to measure the use of our websites and to
improve the functionality and content of the websites. Visitors can reset their browsers either to notify
them when they have received a cookie or refuse to accept cookies. However, if a visitor refuses to
accept cookies, he or she may not be able to use some of the features available on our websites.
Online Communications – In order to provide our website visitors with a product, service or information,
visitors may voluntarily submit personal information to us for purposes such as asking a question,
obtaining information, subscribing to, reviewing or downloading a publication, participating in contests
and surveys. If you are known to HPG as a registered user of an online service, we may combine
and store personal information about your use of our websites and the online information you have
provided with certain other online and offline information we may have collected.
E-Mail Communications – Occasionally, we may send marketing or promotional e-mail communications
to you with information that may be useful, including information about the products and services of
HPG and other third parties with whom we have a relationship. We will include instructions on how to
unsubscribe and inform us of preferences if recipients decide they do not want to receive any future
marketing or promotional e-mails from HPG.
Also, if you send us an email message, we may retain that message and your email address, as well as
any response we send you.
Opinion Polls – Opinion polls on our websites are anonymous. We do not correlate votes submitted
via such polls with names or individual email addresses, unless otherwise disclosed at the point of
collection.
Chat Rooms and Bulletin Boards – Some of HPG’s websites offer chat rooms and bulletin boards. Only
individuals 18 years of age or older may participate in our chat rooms and bulletin boards. The voluntary
disclosure of personal information in a chat room or on an bulletin board is not governed by this Privacy
Policy. Any communications which are part of chat rooms or discussion boards are public and not
private and you provide such information at your own risk. Although it is prohibited to use our forums
as a source of email addresses for sending unfounded or unsolicited messages or spamming, others may
still capture your email address and send you email messages if you post your email address and we
cannot control such actions by others. We advise you to remain prudent and attentive at all times when
you are on line on the Internet.
Searches – For your convenience, search functions are sometimes provided on our websites. We keep
logs of the words searched to learn more about what kind of information our visitors are seeking, and
thus improve our services.
Hyperlinks – For your convenience, HPG’s websites sometimes contain hyperlinks to websites managed
by third parties. By activating these hyperlinks, you will leave HPG’s websites for those of the third
parties, which may have different privacy policies and practices than HPG. HPG cannot be held liable for
the use of such third party websites.
Individuals Under 18 – No personal information should be submitted or posted on our websites by
individuals under 18 years of age without their parent’s or guardian’s permission. We may request
name, address, phone number, email address and date of birth from an individual under 18 years of age
for contest participation so that we may notify him or her if selected as a winner. In the event we do so,
we will request their parent’s or guardian’s consent prior to collection.
No information collected from online guests under 18 years of age is used for any marketing or
promotional purposes whatsoever by HPG. Unless otherwise disclosed at collection, we do not provide
any personal information collected through any HPG website from individuals under 18 years old,
regardless of its source, to any third party for any purpose whatsoever.
9. Changes to the Privacy Policy
HPG reserves the right to modify or supplement this Privacy Policy at any time. If we make a change to
this Privacy Policy, we will post such change on our websites. However, HPG will obtain the necessary
consents required under applicable Privacy Laws if it seeks to collect, use or disclose an individual’s
personal information for purposes other than those to which consent is obtained unless otherwise
required or permitted by law.
10. Contact Us
The HPG webmaster oversees compliance with this Privacy Policy and applicable Privacy Laws. You can contact the webmaster:
Horse-Canada.com Webmaster
225 Industrial Parkway South, Unit 1
Aurora, Ontario L4G 4J9
e-mail: webmaster@horse-canada.com
fax: (905) 841-1530
