PRIVACY POLICY

BC Agriculture Council (BCAC) is committed to protecting the privacy of personal information of its customers. This Privacy Policy has been prepared to affirm BCAC’s commitment to maintaining high standards of confidentiality, to provide information on the BCAC’s practices concerning the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information, and to comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and other applicable statutes.

1. DEFINING PERSONAL INFORMATION
Personal information is any information about an “identifiable individual” that can be used to distinguish, identify or contact a specific individual. Business contact information such as information on your business card and certain publicly available information, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers as published in telephone directories are not considered personal information under federal legislation (PIPEDA). Information about corporations is not considered personal information.

Where an individual provides his or her home address to the BCAC as their business contact information, BCAC considers it to be business contact information, and is therefore not subject to protection as personal information.

2. COLLECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION
We collect no personal information about you unless you choose to provide that information to us. We do not use techniques that collect personal information about anyone without their knowledge. We only collect personal information about individuals when they specifically and knowingly provide it to us; for example, when subscribing to the BCAC Agvocate Update e-newsletter. You may also provide us with your credit card information in order to pay for your application to or renewal of your BC Farmer Identity Card. We collect this information only to set up your account, process the order, and provide you with the services you are purchasing. We do not store credit card information for later use.

3. BC AGRICULTURE WEBSITE
A visitor to the BCAC website is not required to reveal any individually identifiable information, nor is such information collected passively by electronic means. Personal information is only collected when an individual voluntarily submits his or her information. The personal information collected in this manner is subject in full to the Privacy Policy contained in this document.

If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will neither gather nor store any personal information about you. Our web server collects statistical data about visitor information used only in aggregate. This tracking system does not record personal information about individuals or link this information to any personal data collected.

4. USE OF INFORMATION
The BCAC commits to you that individual information will be used to establish and maintain responsible relationships with you, and to provide you with products, services and support. Your personal information will be used to provide you with the specific transaction that you applied for or services requested in the application you submitted.

5. CONSENT BY INDIVIDUALS
The information you provide to the BCAC such as your name, address, etc, allows the BCAC to inform you about events and activities, and to notify you of issues, events or special offers which may be of interest to you. By requesting information, you are giving the BCAC permission to contact you by way of the information you provide. If you wish to be removed from the BCAC’s communications, you can opt out at any time through the opt-out mechanism provided in such communications or by emailing us through our contact page.

6. DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION
The BCAC may share aggregate information about its customers – not individual data – with current and/or potential sponsors and partners, and other parties to help them better understand the BCAC. Such aggregate information is used to give the BCAC demographic data about its customers.

7. SECURITY OF INFORMATION
The BCAC endeavours to maintain appropriate safeguards and adequate physical, procedural and technical security with respect to our offices and information storage facilities so as to prevent any unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use, or modification of personal information. Safeguards include securing physical documents and technological measures by way of secure access and encryption. BCAC employees are authorized to access personal information based only on their need to deal with the information for the reason(s) for which it was obtained. Safeguards are in place to ensure that the information is not disclosed or shared more widely than is necessary to achieve the purpose for which it was gathered. We also take measures to ensure the integrity of this information is maintained and to prevent its loss or destruction.

To ensure the integrity and privacy of the personal and credit card information you pass to us via the Internet when you make an online transaction, the BCAC has obtained a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Server Certificate, the industry standard with the strongest level of 128-bit encryption. All information collected within a secure page is encrypted while being transmitted to the BCAC’s secure server. The BCAC server is configured according to industry best practices. All critical vendor-issued security updates are applied as soon as possible following their release.

8. CONNECTING WITH US
If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or about BCAC’s information handling practices, please contact us.

SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

We’re always looking for ways to engage with our stakeholders, including through social media. We’re here to listen and will work to ensure our channels are a place for you to get information that you need. To help ensure that everyone has a productive, positive experience on our social media channels, here are a few quick guidelines:

CONTENT
Our goal is to use social media to help inform our audiences on the value of agriculture in British Columbia, BCAC's contribution to it as well as share industry-related information that may be useful. Retweets, “Likes” and shares of third party content do not imply endorsement by the BC Agriculture Council.

BE RESPECTFUL
We understand that sometimes you may have concerns or issues, but please ensure that you keep dialogue polite, respectful and considerate. We’ll do our best to ensure you get the information that you need.

Being respectful includes avoiding profanity and obscenity. You’re welcome to post about concerns or problems that you may have, but please use language that is acceptable for everyone. Please note that we will remove posts that are attacks, misinformation, unsupported allegations and any posts that reference violence, racism, hatred or bigotry towards others.

CONSIDER YOUR PRIVACY
BCAC takes privacy and security very seriously. We ask that you do not share personal information (such as your address, FID account information or other personal details) with us through social media. We’ll remove posts that include personal information to protect privacy, but with any online service, you should exercise your judgement about the kind of information you share.

Users who register with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social networks are advised to read privacy policies regarding how their profile information will be used.

BE FRIENDLY
We want to hear from everyone and will work to keep our social media channels a place where you can engage with us productively. Users that continually ignore or disregard our guidelines will be warned and banned from our channels if we can’t work through things, or if there’s no alternative.

FOLLOWING/FOLLOWERS
We follow social accounts that are relevant to our work and our mandate. This could include accounts belonging to individuals as well as organizations, public and private. Our decision to follow a particular person or group does not imply an endorsement of any kind.

WHEN YOU CAN FIND US
Our channels are monitored during regular business hours, 8:30am-4:30pm Monday through Friday (excluding statutory holidays).

CONNECTING WITH US
Along with our social media channels, you can reach us by phone, email and through our website at www.bcac.ca