Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting it. This privacy policy explains our policies and practices regarding customer information, including why we collect customer information, how we use and safeguard it, and how you can contact us to access your customer information or if you have any questions or concerns about our privacy practices. Please take the time to read this privacy policy.

1 - Questions, Comments, Concerns and Complaints:

If you have any questions, comments, concerns or complaints about privacy and the handling of your personal information, please contact us at our Customer Relations Department (CRD), (514) 738-6009. We are committed to working with you to obtain a fair and rapid resolution of any complaints or disputes about privacy and the handling of your personal information and are happy to respond to your questions and comments.

If you have completed the above process and we have been unable to resolve your concern, you may file a complaint with the federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada or the appropriate provincial privacy officer. For more information, please go to http://www.privcom.gc.ca.

2 - Why We Collect and How We Use Customer Information:

GEMVIS collects, stores and uses information about you for the following reasons:

- To establish, maintain and improve our customer relationship with you and provide you with offers, incentives, marketing programs or promotional material about us and our services, such as coupons, brochures and newsletters;

- To improve our products and services we offer through customer surveys conducted by us and participation in market research studies conducted by third parties;

- To provide you with services you request and respond to your comments, concerns or requests for information, through our website such as requests for product brochures, or through our CRD;

- To assist our customer service department to meet your product and services needs such as providing you with offers, service reminders, marketing programs or promotional materials and assistance;

- To meet our legal obligations, assist in law enforcement purposes, and protect the business interests of GEMVIS and our customers.

3 - Types of Customer Information We Collect and Use:

We collect the following types of customer information about you.

- Information which enables us to identify and communicate with you including name, address, phone number, e-mail address, language preference, and title

- Information which enables us to offer you products which better meet your needs including demographic such as birth date, education level, occupation, marital and family status, purchase preferences and interests.

4 - How We Collect Customer Information:

A - Directly From You

We obtain information directly from you such as when you complete our surveys, participate in a focus group or other promotion, campaign or event, purchase or extended service plan or contact our CRD. We may also obtain information directly from you through our website.

If you do not want us to use this information to contact you for sales or marketing purposes or to request you complete a survey with respect to your experience and would like to limit our use of this information please contact our CRD.

B - From Other Parties

We may purchase or acquire a list of names and addresses, which may include your name and address where you have given your consent, from list vendors to send promotions or product information to the names on the list. We also have relationships with third parties with whom we conduct joint marketing activities through which we may obtain your name and address and other information about you with your consent. These activities clearly identify the other parties involved and provide information about their privacy practices. Any such other parties are bound by their privacy policy, not ours.

To ensure our database addresses remain accurate, we also obtain address information from third party licensed data providers for National Change of Address and other authorized parties.

5 - How We Collect Information on Our Website:

When you visit our website, we do not collect any personally identifiable information about you unless you provide it to us. All the information on our site is available for you to review without providing us with any personal information. If you do not agree with our privacy policy, please do not provide us with any personal information through our website.

Nonpersonally Identifiable Information:

Through our website, we collect nonpersonally identifiable information. This means that we do not track this information on an individual basis that identifies you but rather collect this information on an aggregate basis that includes all site visitors. Your visit automatically generates session log data consisting of the Internet Protocol (IP) address from which you came (which contains no personal information),
the website that referred you, the pages you visited, the date and time of those visits, the amount of time spent on our site,. We use this information to perform analytics on users' experience while using the site and to improve the functionality of our website to better meet user wants and needs, identify popular features, and measure site activity including peak site usage times, page visits and click throughs. We may share these site metrics which are not personal information with our affiliated companies, service providers and others.

Cookies, Web Beacons and Advertisements:

Our website uses "cookies", web beacons/GIF/pixel tags, third-party advertising networks that serve ads and other tracking technologies to collect aggregate or other nonpersonally identifiable information to develop website metrics and improve your online experience.

Our website may use session and/or persistent cookies to track user movement or other events across the website. A "cookie" is a small text file that helps us in many ways to make your visit to our website more enjoyable. There are a couple of different types of cookies. A session cookie is stored only on your computer's working memory (RAM) and only lasts for your browsing session. When you close all your browser's windows or shut down your computer, the session cookie disappears forever. A persistent cookie is stored on your computer's hard drive until a specified date which could be tomorrow, next week, or ten years from now. Persistent cookies stay on your computer until either they expire, they are over written by new cookies, or you manually remove them. Most browsers can be configured not to accept cookies, however, this may prevent you from having access to some site functions or features.

This site may use web beacons/GIF/pixel tags to help us determine site metrics such as if a page has been viewed and how many times. In general, any electronic image viewed as part of a web page, including an ad banner, can act as a web beacon. When you ask us to send you information on a product or a newsletter, we may also use web beacons to establish how many of the emails are actually opened.

You may also be directed to our site through banner ads or site links. Banner ads or site links that are placed by us use cookies or web beacons to deliver metrics on the effectiveness of the ads or links but do not collect any personally identifiable information.

Collection and Use of Personally Identifiable Information on our Website:

There are instances where we request personal information such as name, address and e-mail address on our site, such as to provide you with a service, coupon, or correspondence (promotions and mailed brochures), during promotions or where you participate in interactive online activities such as e-newsletter registration or Request a Quote, Brochure. At times we conduct voluntary online surveys to obtain your feedback. We request e-mail address as a means of contacting you. Any personal information collected is used as set out in this Privacy Policy.

Please remember that if you disclose personally identifiable information through a chat room or message board or other public online forum, this information may be collected and used by others.

Links to other Websites:

Our website may contain links to other websites. We encourage you to review the privacy statements of all sites which you visit, including those whose links are provided, so that you can understand how those sites collect, use and share your information. We are not responsible for the privacy statements, content or data handling practices on other websites.

Electronic Mail Sent to Us that Contains Personal Information:

You may decide to send to us personally identifying information in an email, for example in a message about your GEMVIS product or service. We will only use this personal information to identify you as a customer and to determine how to respond to your email and try to resolve the matter identified in the email.

6 - How You Can Opt Out of Further Marketing Communications:

Where we have an existing business relationship with you or where you have provided your information to us, unless you advise us otherwise, your information may be used for marketing and promotional purposes by us. You may decide that you do not want us to send you any further marketing or promotional communications If this is the case, please contact our CRD. You may notify us at any time and your direction will be effective within 30 days. You may, however, no longer receive some offers or information of value to you. It is important for you to know that even if you choose to withdraw your consent, we will continue to use and disclose your personal information to meet legal and contractual obligations such as honour your warranty and send you recall notifications.

7 - Security and Accuracy of Customer Information:

Safeguarding your personal information is important to us. We use systems, policies and procedures to protect your personal information from loss, misuse, theft or alteration. Customer information is only accessible by appropriate personnel who have a business need for this information. We provide training to educate our personnel about the meaning and requirements of this privacy policy. When you send personal information to our website, we use "Secure Socket Layers" (SSL) to protect your data. SSL is encryption technology that helps safeguard your personal information against misuse by unauthorized individuals.

We make reasonable efforts to keep your information up to date and accurate such as by using third party licensed data providers for National Change of Address and by updating our records with more current and accurate records. We encourage you, however, to contact our CRD as often as necessary to keep your name, address up to date.

8 - Access to and Rectification of Your Personal Information:

You may contact our CRD to review, correct or update certain of your personal information which is easily accessible to our customer consultants at the CRD. The information which may be accessible to our customer consultants includes your name, address and previous contacts to the CRD.

9 - Effective Data and Revisions:

This Privacy Policy is effective December 1st, 2004. Occasionally we may update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes to our privacy practices. If we update this statement, the new statement will be posted to the website ten days prior to the changes taking effect. You may determine when this policy was last updated by referring to the modification date at the bottom of the policy.