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Privacy Policy

Effective January 1, 2021

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (“NWMO”, “we”, “us” or “our”) is committed to maintaining your privacy and confidentiality of your personal information, defined as information about an identifiable individual. This platform, hosted by 76engage, is intended to facilitate meaningful public engagement relating to the NWMO’s development of an integrated strategy for the long-term management or all of Canada’s nuclear waste.

When you engage with us on www.radwasteplanning.ca (the “Site”), you may submit certain information (including personal information) to us and/or our Site host. This privacy policy (the “Policy”) describes your private rights and how the personal information you provide to us is collected, used, disclosed, and protected. We may update or amend this Policy at any time by posting a revised version on this webpage, which will be effective as of the published effective date. Your continued access or use of our website following a change to this Policy means that you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set out in the updated Policy. Please check back periodically for updates.

This Policy forms part of the Site’s Terms of Use. By accessing, using, engaging on and submitting any information to this Site, you agree that you had read and agree to the Terms of Use, including this Policy.

Your Consent

Where this Policy refers to “you”, it means either: (i) a user over the age of majority in your province or territory of residence; or (ii) a parent or guardian of a user who is under the age of majority. BY CREATING AN ACCOUNT ON THIS SITE OR OTHERWISE USING THE SERVICES IT OFFERS, YOU REPRESENT THAT YOU ARE OF THE LEGAL AGE REQUIRED TO FORM A BINDING CONTRACT IN YOUR JURISDICTION OR THAT YOU HAVE OBTAINED THE CONSENT OR YOUR PARENT(S)/GUARDIAN(S) BEFORE USING OR REGISTERING FOR AN ACCOUNT ON THIS SITE.

As part of this engagement, there may be certain activities where the inputs, comments and opinions of youth are encouraged. This Site is not designed to solicit the personal information of any users under the age of majority in their jurisdiction of residence (“Minors”), other than any information that is strictly necessary to create a user account (an “Account”, please see below). If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that a Minor has provided us with personal information and/or signed up for an Account without verification of consent, please contact us.

If you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as outlined in this Policy, you will be able access and use the Site and any services it offers. You can always withdraw your consent, however, if you choose to do so, we may not be able to provide you with the full range of services available through the Site.

What Information is Collected?

Creating an Account

If you are just visiting the Site, you can browse publicly accessible content without submitting to us any personal information, although some information is automatically collected as required for the operation of the site, and may be considered personally identifiable. Please see “Analytics and Other Tracking” below.

However, if you wish to actively engage on the Site by posting, commenting, or otherwise contributing to engagement, you will need to create an Account. To create an Account, you must provide a verifiable email address, your name, postal code, and a screen name. Your screen name is the name that will be shown on the Site when you participant through the Account. You may also be able to enter other optional information on your Account. In order to maintain your personal privacy, you are strongly urged to not include your name or personal information in your screen name, as this will be publicly visible to all visitors to the Site. This information for your Account will be stored with 76engage and accessible to us.

Information Your Post and Share

When you engage with us through the Site, you may post, comment or otherwise provide submissions to us. You are responsible for the content of your submissions. In order to foster meaningful, respectful dialogue in a safe environment, submissions will only appear publicly on the Site if they comply with the NWMO’s Community Guidelines.

Submissions made by users may include personal information. While we encourage all submissions to be open and honest, we also encourage you to be cautious about providing any other personal information in these submissions, as all submissions will be posted publicly on our website without any revisions or edits to your wording. We discourage you from sharing any sensitive personal information (e.g., address, health information, financial information) about yourself and others in your submissions if you would not like this information to become available to the public through the Site.

Contact Us Submissions

If you send us information through our Contact Us page, this information will also be stored. Unless required to resolve any query raised (i.e., troubleshooting an Account created), you can submit queries or comments through this form anonymously. Any information you include in the message sent through the Contact Us form will be stored by us and our Site host.

Mailing List

The NWMO has created a mailing list from members of the public who have asked to receive more information on the integrated strategy for the long-term management or all of Canada’s nuclear waste. As a result, we may have your email address on file if you provided it to us previously through www.nwmo.ca or through other means of engagement in-person or virtually. We may use this email to invite you to participate on this Site.

Analytics and Other Tracking

Our Site host, 76engage, may collect certain data from your use of the Site through passive tracking technologies and cookies. For more information on cookies, please see the Cookie Policy.

As visitors and users interact with the Site, 76engage may collect data such as:

  • User Interests. participant interests based on their activity. For example, when a participant up-votes or comments on a post tagged with certain topic, 76engage may store this topic as being of interest to the participant.
  • Server logs. As a web application, 76engage collects and stores information in web server logs. This information includes the time and date of the request, the requester’s IP address, and device information such as Operating System and browser version.
  • Crash logs. When the Site experiences a malfunction (crash), an automated notification may be sent to the engineering team with details about the crash. Crash logs do not include personal information and contain only the information needed for the engineering team to be able to reproduce and troubleshoot the error.
  • Analytics. Most 76engage installations use Google Analytics to help us and our clients understand how users use the Site. Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of 76engage. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network. You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity. For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en. Some clients may opt to use a different analytics solution.

76engage may share some of the information collected through the methods described above with the NWMO, so that we may conduct analysis and evaluations about website usage to determine what is most effective about the website, to help identify ways to improve it and to make it more user-friendly.

Why Do You Collect this Information?

The Site is intended to provide a platform for a broad range of engagement activities, so that we can welcome a diversity of views on the Integrated Strategy for the long-term management of Canada's radioactive waste. In this regard, we and our Site host collect information and other data necessary to fulfil the purposes described below:

  • Assist in development of the strategy for the safe, long-term management of nuclear waste in Canada. The key purpose of this Site and the engagement opportunities it provides is to ensure that Canadians and Indigenous peoples, including you, are able to obtain access to the information you require and submit your input, comments and opinions to help us develop a strategy for Canada. Based on the submissions we receive, we will produce outputs such as reports and summaries that will be uploaded to the Site.
  • Ensure acceptable use. We may use automated alerts to detect the use of specific keywords or phrases in submissions. For example, we may use this technology to get alerted when users disclose sensitive personal information that they do not need to disclose, or to be alerted to the use of inappropriate language or activities that breach the NWMO Community Guidelines. Our Site host also stores users’ IP addresses. Access to IP addresses gives 76engage the ability to perform intrusion detection analysis to ensure your safety and the safety of other Site users. For example, in the event of a denial of service attack, IP address information may be used to mitigate the attack in order to maintain service levels.
  • Help maintain a constructive dialogue. We believe that by asking users to provide their real names, users will be more likely to keep conversations constructive. We also provide users who prefer not to disclose their full names publicly the ability to create a screen name which if provided, it is displayed next to that user’s comments and contributions on the site.
  • Ensure quality of participation. We may use cookies (if you are logged into your Account) or IP addresses (in the case of anonymous visitors) to limit the number of times one same person can submit input.
  • Respond to requests and queries that you submit to us, including when you submit information through the Contact Us page or request customer care and support about your Account.
  • Send you information and invite you to participate in events, such as when you receive notification emails.
  • Ensure that participants are from a specific location. During Account creation, you may be prompted to include your postal code. This is important to ensure that you are able to participate in engagement activities that are relevant for you. For example, if engagement is relating to a specific region, it’s important that users who live in the region have a personalized user experience and are able to participate.
  • Diagnose technical problems and improve the user experience. We use information about the most popular content, the time users spent on pages or the documents they download. We may also use information on whether participants received, opened and clicked on links contained in emails. We use this kind of information to determine which areas of the user experience should be improved. For example, we may use information about whether an email was delivered to an email address to ensure that the receiving mail server isn’t blocking emails from us.
  • Make sure the participants on the Site are human (i.e. prevent automated bots from using the Site). For example, we may use Google reCaptcha in conjunction with third-party maintained known spammer lists to prevent automated bots from registering accounts. We also require that users verify their Accounts by clicking on a link sent to their email addresses. Until a user verifies their Account, the Account remains flagged as unverified.
  • Analyze participant input. The actual contents of user submissions are reviewed on an ongoing basis, analyzed and included in reports and data exports. In some cases, reports and data exports may include information about the participant who submitted the input. This information is only available to 76engage staff who must have access to this information in order to comply with contractual requirements, and to authorized administrators of the Site. In some cases, 76engage may use third-party systems to automatically analyze user-generated submissions with the purpose of extracting concepts using natural language processing and machine learning. In both these cases, no personal information is transmitted to the third-party and the contents of the submissions are not stored on the third-parties’ servers.

We or 76engage may also collect information for another purpose which is described to you before or at the time of collection.

How Can I Control My Privacy Settings?

Accessing, Updating or Deleting Information

You have the ability to access and control your information, and how it is used and shown on this Site through your Account settings. Mandatory information such as email address may not be deleted without deleting the entire Account. Please also note that deleting an Account may not delete comments users may have submitted using that Account.

As described in this Policy, you can withdraw your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information provided to us at any time, but doing so may restrict your ability to interact and use the Site. If you require assistance in deleting your Account or otherwise deleting information in any submissions, please contact us. All requests may be subject to verifying the requester’s identity and may be refused if in direct conflict with the law.

We may deny access when required or authorized by law. For example, we may deny access when granting access would have an unreasonable impact on other people’s privacy or when necessary to protect our confidential commercial information and the requested information cannot be severed from the balance of the record in which it is contained. If we deny your request for access to, or refuse a request to correct information, we shall explain why.

Unsubscribing from Notifications

If you have signed up to receive notifications, you can opt-out of these notifications at any time by using the unsubscribe method provided with every communication or by updating their subscription preferences in your Account.

Do You Share My Information?

Your personal information is not shared with anyone except our personnel or hired consultants who require the information to fulfil a purpose for which the information was collected.

We will never sell, rent, trade or exchange your data with anyone, unless required by law.

We may disclose your personal information in certain circumstances, such as:

  • when required to do so by law to law enforcement authorities or regulatory agencies;
  • if the action is in good faith necessary to protect or defend the rights or property of us or our Site host, 76engage;
  • in order to prevent or investigate a possible wrongdoing in connection with the Site host;
  • to protect the personal safety of users, the NWMO, our Site host, or the public; or
  • when you have consented to the disclosure (e.g., consented to the publishing of your submission on our website).

If our Site host is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, the information in their possession may be transferred. We will provide notice before your personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

How Long Will You Keep My Information?

We will keep your information only to the extent necessary for the purposes set out in this Policy, to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies. You can submit a request that we remove your information from our records by contacting our Privacy Officer at the contact information below. Subject to our requirements for continued retention of your information (i.e., auditing purposes) or to fulfill our legal obligations, we will make every reasonable effort to honour your request.

Personal information, whatever its form, will be protected by security safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information. The safeguards will protect personal information against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. A detailed description of these measures can be provided upon request. Note that given the sensitivity of this information we may be required to verify your identity and we may choose not to share this information if we believe that it may compromise the efficacy of the measures they describe.

Where is My Information Stored?

This Site hosted by 76engage as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Your information is hosted on Canadian datacenters. Datacentres store the database and server logs.

Cookies may be sent to your computer when you access the Site. Our Site host, 76engage, stores cookies on users’ computers in order to make the experience of using the Site friendlier to these users. 76engage does not, however, store or collect information from users for advertising or any other commercial purposes. Users can instruct their browsers to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you don’t accept cookies, they may not be able to use some functionality of the Site. For more details, please see the Cookie Policy.

Google Analytics store analytics data on Google’s servers. While we strive to anonymize all data transmitted to Google, there may be edge cases on which some personal information may be transmitted. We are not aware of any such case and should cases become known, we will eliminate them or update this Policy if elimination isn’t feasible.

Email delivery data, including email addresses (such as for our mailing list) may be stored with the NWMO’s hired consultants and third-party service providers to facilitate the delivery of the emails. Any consultants and service providers are bound to contractual confidentiality and security measures.

User information, including personal information, may be transferred to—and stored on—systems located outside of a user’s state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from the user’s jurisdiction.

Questions/Concerns?

If you have any questions about this Policy, our privacy practices on this Site, or require access to the personal information we hold about you, please contact us through our Contact Us page or write to NWMO’s Privacy Officer at:

NWMO
22 St. Clair Avenue East, 4th Floor
Toronto, ON M4T 2S3
Attention: Privacy Officer