Who we are
Our website address is: www.marssociety.ca and we value and respect your privacy.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Contact forms
When filling out a contact form, you will only be asked for the minimum amount of information necessary to make contact and for us to reply. No identifying information is kept on this website or its content management system: All submissions through a contact form are immediately converted into an email that is sent to ‘[email protected]’. This email account is secure – It is password protected and is only accessible by appointed officers of the Mars Society of Canada. The information contained on this email account will never be shared with third parties without the expressed consent of the original sender.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
Who we share your data with
When you purchase a membership or make a donation, any data that you enter into this site will necessarily need to be shared with our payment processing service which is presently (January, 2019) PayPal.ca. Their privacy policy may be found here.
How long we retain your data
We do not presently allow comments on this site: Please use our social media links to encourage conversation. However, in the event that we do allow comments, your comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Although we presently allow visitor comments on some of the material on this site, we encourage our visitors to make use of our social media links for conversation. In the event that we do allow comments, they may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Our contact information
If you have any questions or concerns regarding your privacy, you may contact us at [email protected].
How we protect your data
- This website is protected with an SSL certificate.
- The hosting service that we use has extensive firewalls in place to prevent unauthorized access of information.
- Officers and directors or any member of the Mars Society of Canada who have access to the content management system that runs this website are not authorized to share any personal data with any organization.
What data breach procedures we have in place
The Mars Society of Canada will:
- report to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada breaches of security safeguards involving personal information that pose a real risk of significant harm to individuals
- notify affected individuals about those breaches, and
- keep records of all breaches.
What third parties we receive data from
This website receives no data from external third parties.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
Presently, we do not use automated decision making with any process associated with this site.
We do not profile individual user data, but we may compile summary statistics of usage of this website to help us to improve our visitor experience and to ensure that we are effectively communicating with our target audience. Such summaries do not include any personal data and are never shared with a third party.
