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Privacy Policy of The Secure Surfing Organization
The Secure Surfing Organization (SSO) member information, including name and address information, is a proprietary trade secret. We view the information provided to us by non-members as equally a matter of trust. We have very strict policies designed to protect such personal information. The Secure Surfing Organization will not share personal information that it receives with any third party without consent.
IMPORTANT: When you click a link to purchase from an SSO vendor, click on a sponsor advertisement or link, or click on any lick that takes you outside the SSO website, the information that you may provide to that vendor or on those sites is not controlled or influenced by The Secure Surfing Organization and so is not protected by this policy. Moreover, if you make a purchase through SSO from a third-party seller, we must supply your information to that seller to complete the transactions. In such cases your consent is implied since you know that your information must be shared for your desired actions (eg. the purchase) to be completed.
We do not share even names and addresses with third parties except in the course of serving members or visitors. Where it is in the interests of the member, and according to the wishes of the member, we may provide such information as a necessary part of serving the member such as described above.
We will not honour "confidentiality agreements" that require us to keep secret from our members how their names and addresses or other personal information have been used. If you ask us if we have used your name in conjunction with a business or organization, we will tell the truth.
By their nature some promotions require that we share your information. For example, if we have a sponsored promotion, we must share your information with the sponsors so that you are able to receive your benefit. If such sharing involves more than name, address and phone number, we will explicitly say so in the promotion rules.
What information do we collect?
We collect four kinds of personal information:
1. Information necessary for the normal conduct of business. We must have members' names, addresses and phone numbers to provide service. We must have credit information for those who require credit, including credit numbers for those using them to purchase products or services from us or through us.
2. Information helpful in the conduct of business. We may ask a great many questions of members in the course our relationship. Some questions are vital such as information related to privacy and safe internet practices needs. Questions include what kinds of products they use, how much they pay for products, what kinds of sellers they prefer, and what kinds of information they find useful. We hope to know what experiences our members have with the various products including software and consumer products, both free and commercial solutions. Some of this information is essential to building programs and services. For example we must know how well our vendors are doing in meeting the needs of members. Such questions are always optional.
All this information is treated as highly confidential and no one is given access unless it directly involves their specific job with The Secure Surfing Organization. That is, access is restricted even within The Secure Surfing Organization itself.
3. "Byproduct information." We obtain some personal information as a byproduct of other activities. An example would be when a vendor provides us a list of their customers so that we may mail a special offer or do a match ("merge-purge") against our own membership list, for example, to do a joint mailing. Our purpose is to deliver something on behalf of a member or a trusted vendor, and as a byproduct of doing that we end up with names and addresses. Byproduct information is NOT maintained or kept. Personal information received from third parties is destroyed as soon as the purpose for which we receive it has been served.
4. Internet operation information. This is information that we may obtain for the purpose of operating our internet web site. We use cookies to store your preferences or ease your access. For example, when we design a web page for the exclusive use of members, we have to implement password protection. To make it easier for you to log on, our site stores your name and password in a cookie on your computer. We may similarly store information about what pages you visit or services you access. We may do this both to improve your access to matters of relevance to you and to help us understand areas of greater and lesser importance to our members. We may use the information about your use of our site to customize what and how we deliver information to you.
For members, we may record information collected from our web site directly to your member records. We consider this information to be as confidential as any other personal financial information and give it the highest levels of protection. An example would be recording your purchases to your member record.
WE ALSO MUST USE COOKIES TO ENABLE TRANSACTIONS AND TO ENSURE THERE IS A TIE BACK TO SSO FROM VENDOR OR SPONSOR SITES. When you click on a product or sponsor link, a cookie is created that identifies SSO as the source of your action. This does mean that some of the cookies are the so-called “Tracking Cookies.”
They are not used to track your behaviour around the web, but to track your clicks as originating from The Secure Surfing Organization and to transmit to the vendor’s site the specific product or service you selected on our site. In the case of Sponsored advertisements or links, these cookies track your click to SSO so that SSO can be credited with a contribution. Some of these cookies may look cryptic or meaningless. There is nothing secret in these codes and the gibble is simply the way the receiving site has the cookie constructed.
If you are concerned about cookies, you may find this story useful.
NOTE: PLEASE NEVER CLICK ON A LINK OR AN AD THAT YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN. While this may seem like it is helping SSO in fact it is very harmful and can cause us to lose our sponsors.
Except in the limited ways described in the previous paragraphs, we do not provide information about your use of our web site to any one else.
We may require registration and legitimate e-mail addresses from non-members as a condition of participation in or access to a number of internet features. We commit never to share e-mail addresses obtained in this way.
How do we use the information we collect?
1. Our primary use of the information we collect is for practical purposes. For example, it is very important that we have current, complete and accurate addresses and phone numbers so that we may properly deliver the services for which our members pay. We use your information in the ways described under “What information do we collect?” above.
2. We may use the information we collect to contact you ourselves. We frequently contact members and suppliers for a variety of reasons, including conducting surveys, testing the quality of our service and to encourage members to renew their accounts.
We also use the information we collect in our key planning activities. For example, when we learned that a large number of members were interested in business security issues, we added an SSO for Business section.
4. We may employ a third party to contact members or suppliers for the purposes described above. We have a market research program that involves surveying internet consumers, including non-members. It is important for us to occasionally use outside firms so that we can be confident the information we receive is not biased by our own perceptions. It also allows members to be confident that their answers are confidential. When we use outside firms for research, member identities are not revealed with their responses so respondents can be fully frank in their answers.
As these firms are acting as our agents, we do not view this as sharing your information. Our agents, including our contractors, are bound to return any paper forms of member information and to destroy any electronic forms, once the purpose of their possession of the information has been served.
Employee Information
Personal information about employees of The Secure Surfing Organization is held in strict confidence.
We collect only such employee information as is required for employment purposes. Information for workplace-related social activities may be gathered by the employee social committee, including things like birthdays. Due to their workplace context, such activities are subject to privacy protection under this policy and the information collected may only be used for the purpose intended and agreed to by the affected employees.
Employee information is not shared with third parties except as provided by law and in the due intended course of business, including for example, background checks. Information about an employee may be held as confidential from the employee if the information also includes or serves to divulge third-party information of a private, commercial or confidential nature. Except as required by applicable law, nothing in this policy is intended to prevent the withholding of any information from employees where such is deemed to be in the interest of the organization.
How do we protect your information?
First, The Secure Surfing Organization has and will use the full force of law to prosecute anyone who exercises unauthorized access to our records.
Second, access to any personal information is restricted to employees who have a direct need for that access.
Third, The Secure Surfing Organization has expended significant resources to secure the databases with both hardware and software security tools.
Fourth, the data is kept in a secured facility with video monitoring controlled access.
Fifth, The Secure Surfing Organization does not hold on to information for which it no longer has a legitimate use. If you are a member and quit or do not renew, we will retain your records for no more than six months in the hope that you may change your mind.
Sixth, The Secure Surfing Organization uses commercial-grade shredding to dispose of unneeded documents that may contain personal information including application forms and even envelopes that display return addresses.
Seventh, while most our members and users are U.S. citizens, The Secure Surfing Organization locates its head office in Canada and as such is subject to the much stricter Privacy Laws of Canada. All members and users benefit from the protection of those stricter laws, regardless of their country of domicile.
Note that there are no guarantees that systems will not be breached. Determined hackers or criminals pose a threat to all information stores. But The Secure Surfing Organization employs every means within its power to protect your information which is after all our greatest asset.
Are there exceptions?
We have few exceptions to the policies detailed above, except as compelled by law. However, there are circumstances that do not fall within this policy of which you should be aware. For example, while we commit not to share phone numbers we cannot prevent the use of the publicly distributed phone books or web directories. It is important to be clear that our privacy policy applies only to personal information we ourselves collect directly and indirectly from our own members. If we use third-party sources we rely upon those sources for the permissibility of using the information. Note however, that we will always disclose such sources on request of any person contacted through them.
Notwithstanding this policy, The Secure Surfing Organization reserves the right to withhold any information from anyone where it is both in the interest of the organization to withhold and not inconsistent with applicable law. In other words, circumstances could arise where we feel we have to keep certain information secret and if that happens and the law allows us to, we will keep it secret. Such a situation has never arisen and may never arise. We include this statement only to ensure you understand that there are no absolutes and care should be exercised in understanding the coverage of all privacy policies, including ours.
The “Few Exceptions”
If we have reason to believe a person is a child predator, fraud artist including identity thieves, or is a risk to themselves or others, WE WILL SHARE ALL INFORMATION WITH RESPONSIBLE LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES. BY BECOMING A MEMBER OR USING THIS SITE, YOU GRANT US THE RIGHT TO DO SO WITHOUT RECOURSE TO ANY REMEDY. If you are not prepared to accept the idea that The Secure Surfing Organization must have the right to share any and all information regarding potential criminals or imminent victims, then you have no reason to be a member or to use our services including the web site. It is after all at the core of what we are doing.
Standards
The Secure Surfing Organization privacy policy exceeds the standards set by government and industry. Should you observe a gap in this policy or its practice, please contact us immediately.
The Secure Surfing Organization is committed to promptly dealing with any complaints or concerns regarding privacy issues. Your may also review and request corrections to your personal information that The Secure Surfing Organization has in its files. Federal privacy laws require such requests to be in writing and sufficiently documented to ensure the request is coming from you. This avoids strangers making requests in your name. You may write to Privacy Officer, The Secure Surfing Organization, 1101 – 430 5th Ave N, Saskatoon, CANADA S7K 6Z2. Be sure to include the postal code. You should include your The Secure Surfing Organization membership number if you are a member and your complete name, address and phone number for identification purposes.
You may also e-mail your request, ensuring to include the same information:
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