Sourcing Innovation Privacy Policy and Procedures

Your Personal Data:

What we need

Sourcing Innovation, a wholly owned service of ToP KaTS Consulting Inc., will be what is known as the ‘Controller’ of the personal data you provide to us. We will only collect data that we need to enable us to work more effectively with you.

For basic free blog subscriptions and comments, we only collect basic personal data about you which does not include any special type of information or electronic location-based information beyond the IP address used to access our service. Our billing process will record your details if you are a company or an individual who signs up for paid services.

This basic information does however include name, screen name, email and, optionally, a contact number if you choose to provide one. We will combine this data with information we collect if you register for freemium downloads. This may include:

  • Your current role
  • Number of Years’ experience in your role
  • Current employer
  • Highest Level of Education Completed
  • Areas of Interest
  • Experience you may have with relevant technologies
  • Vendors whose technologies you have worked with

This information helps us tailor our offerings towards your needs. If you sign up for paid subscription services or content offerings, we will need your billing information.

Why we need it

We need to know your basic personal data in order to provide you with the blog subscription and commenting capability should you request it.

We require more data for freemium and paid services to help us tailor our educational and informative services to meet the interests of our readership at large.

We do not collect more data than we need to provide the services to which you subscribe. Please note that if you do not sign up for any services, we do not collect any personal information.

From time to time we may link to freemium downloads of partners, hosted on their site. Please note that any information you provide to them to access their service is not shared with us or under our control. We advise you to review their Privacy and Data Use policies before providing any personal information.

What we do with it

All the personal data we collect is processed by our staff in Canada. For the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance this information is located on servers within Canada.

No third parties have access to your personal data unless the law allows them to do so.

We have a Data Protection regime in place to oversee the effective and secure processing of your personal data.

If you are an employee and your company has paid for our services, note that we may be (legally) requested to provide your employer proof of subscription / content request and delivery to you. If so requested, we will provide the data necessary to provide this proof of subscription / content delivery to your employer.

How long we keep it

If you sign up for any paid services, we are required under Canadian tax law to keep your basic personal data (name, address, contact details) for a minimum of 7 years after which time it will be destroyed. If your access or content is paid for by a company, your employer will also hold that data in their invoices and payment systems. If you are a private consumer, you will be invoiced as any commercial customer.

The information you provide to us to access our services will be kept until you notify us that you no longer wish us to maintain this information, at which time it will be deleted (unless, of course, we are legally required to maintain it for tax purposes, at which point it will be deleted once we are no longer legally required to maintain it).

What we would also like to do with it

When you sign up for one or more services, we reserve the right to use your name and email address to offer you that service. We also reserve the right to inform you of any upcoming changes to the offering, complementary offerings, or changes in Sourcing Innovation and/or its parent, ToP KaTS Consulting Inc.

We would also like the right to inform you of new and future offerings and similar products provided by Sourcing Innovation or ToP KaTS Consulting that you may be interested in. We will ask you to opt-in upon sign up. If you do not wish to receive this information, at any time you will be able to opt-out through e-mail or our website contact form. This information is not shared with third party organizations and you can unsubscribe at any time via email or our website contact page.

What are your rights?

If at any point you believe the information we process on you is incorrect you may request to see this information and even have it corrected or deleted*. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our team who will then investigate the matter. There is no charge or fee for this service (for a first request — additional requests will incur a fee, unless prohibited by law, to prevent vexatious behaviour).

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) or the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are a European Citizen.

Data Subject Access Request procedure

Under the PIPEDA and GDPR regulations, you can submit a Data Subject Access Request to us (DSAR). The procedure is:

  1. You will need to contact us on our email address at info@sourcinginnovation.com. Please ensure that you provide a contact email address and mobile number for us to contact you directly.
  2. We will then validate your identity.
  3. Once this is complete, within 30 days we will provide a listing of all information that we have on our systems.
  4. As above, there is no charge for this service (for a first request — additional requests will incur a fee, unless prohibited by law, to prevent vexatious behaviour).
  5. We will send a PDF of the information we have collected to the e-mail address we validate.

* unless, of course, you are a subscriber to a paid service; in this situation, Sourcing Innovation is required to legally maintain a minimum amount of information on you for 7 years for tax compliance purposes (but will still correct any incorrect data or delete any data not legally necessary)