Effective Date: July 23, 2007
Wellocities, an Ontario Corporation which owns and operates www.Wellocities.com cares about the privacy of each user that visits our site.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the following statement, you should first contact Wellocities at privacyhelp@Wellocities.com. You can also contact us via regular mail at: Wellocities, 12 Lawton Boulevard, Toronto, ON, M4V 1Z4.
Wellocities recognizes the importance of protecting the privacy of information we collect from our on-line community. We are committed to respecting the privacy of anyone coming to the Wellocities Site. It is our intent to balance legitimate business interests in collecting and using information received from and about you with your expectations of privacy.
Wellocities strives to develop innovative services to better serve our users. We recognize that privacy is an important issue, so we design and operate our services with the protection of your privacy in mind. This Privacy Policy outlines the types of personal information we gather when using our services, as well as steps we take to safeguard it
Information collection and use
We collect personal and non-personal information to fulfill your requests for searches and products, improve our services, customize the content and advertising, and contact you. We will also use your information to pre-fill fields to save you from entering the same information repeatedly. By knowing about you, we are able to deliver more helpful health information, programs and tools, and offer you the most relevant services.
There are many aspects of our site that can be enjoyed as a visitor, but you need to register in order to take advantage of certain free services on the site.
Information you provide
We collect personal information when you voluntarily provide it to us or authorize us to collect it on your behalf.
Registration: When you register for the site, we collect personal information from you such as your name, email address, password and other optional information. Registering allows you to use personalized features, health tools and content whenever you come to our site; build a public profile; participate in online discussions; develop and maintain a personal health record; and rate or review doctors, hospitals and treatments.
Health tools and community features: Throughout our site, there are health tools, questionnaires, and community features that ask for additional information, including contact information, demographics, personal health information, health interests, goals, family medical history, and vital statistics. In most cases, you can use health tools as a visitor, but saving and retrieving your results requires you to be a registered member of Wellocities.
Search: When you search on our site, we store the search terms and the link(s) visited so that we can continuously improve the quality of our search results.
Opinions and polls: Occasionally, you may be asked to give your opinion when you visit our site. We use information from opinion polls to better understand the needs of our users and to gather information about health care trends and issues. Questions and answers are stored, but they are not linked to identifying information about you and will not be shared with third parties.
Log information: When you visit our site, our servers will automatically collect log information. This information may include your Web page request, Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We collect log information so that we can properly administer our system and gather summary information about how our site is being used, including the pages visitors are viewing. Our Web advertising partner, may use your IP address to determine your approximate geographic location in order to provide you with location-relevant advertising.
Cookies: We and our advertising partners collect anonymous information about your use of our site through cookies. The cookie does not tell us who you are.
The information collected by cookies helps us generate customized content and also allows us to statistically monitor how many people are using our site and for what purpose. We do not store any identifying information in any cookies on your computer.
We also have agreements with companies (Ad Networks) that serve advertising on behalf of third parties. These companies may place or recognize a unique cookie, sometimes called a “third party cookie,” on your browser. Cookies are used to understand Web usage patterns of people who see advertisements, to control the sequence of advertisements you see, to provide you with the most relevant advertising, and to make sure you don’t see the same ad too many times. Ad Networks may connect information about pages you visited on our site with information about pages you visit on other sites and show you advertising based on this combined information. While we do not control Ad Networks or what they do with the information they collect, we have relationships only with organizations that have agreed to participate in the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and abide by NAI principles, which prohibit members from connecting personally identifiable information to information they collect through cookies without your explicit consent.
Please see our Advertising policy for more information about our relationship with advertisers.
Your browser software can be set to reject all cookies or to accept cookies only from our site. Most browsers offer instructions on how to reset the browser to reject cookies in the “Help” section of the toolbar. If you reject our cookies, you may not be able to log in or use certain functions and conveniences of our site.
Web beacons: We – and our advertisers – may also use Web beacons, sometimes called single-pixel GIFs, that momentarily direct your browser to a server other than Wellocities in a way that may not be apparent to you. Web beacons are used to count users who visited specific pages and determine which emails were opened and/or acted upon when we send HTML-formatted email messages. We do not link any identifying information to Web beacons. To avoid Web beacons in some emails, go to My account, click on “Manage alerts” and select “text-only” alerts.
Information that we obtain from third parties
We may use your name and shipping address to obtain additional information about people in your neighborhood. This is summary information for people who live within your postal code area. The information can include presence and age(s) of children, presence and age(s) of elderly parents, size and value of dwellings, and other census data. We will use this information, combined with information you provide to us and information collected by our systems, to better understand the characteristics of the visitors to our site and to develop new products, services and content areas. The information will also allow us to tailor content, advertising and offers to your interests and needs.
When we associate information that we obtain from third parties with personal information that we have collected under this policy, we will treat the acquired information like the information that we collected ourselves. We will not share information we obtain from third parties in personally identifiable form. However, we may share aggregated, non-personal information, as described in this policy, that may include information we obtained from third parties in a form that does not permit you to be identified. We will only obtain and use this kind of information from third parties if you give us permission to do so.
Information disclosure to third parties
We know the importance of keeping information you’ve entrusted to us confidential. We will not rent, sell or share personal information about you with third parties except to provide you with a product or service you request or under certain circumstances as described below. In all other cases, we will ask for your permission before we disclose your personal information.
Disclosure for legal reasons: We may release personal information to third parties: (1) to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena or court order; or (2) in special cases, such as a physical threat to you or others, a threat to homeland security, a threat to our system or network, or cases in which we believe it is reasonably necessary to investigate or prevent harm, fraud, abuse, or illegal conduct. In the event that we are legally compelled to disclose your personal information to a third party, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you unless doing so would violate the law or court order.
Agents and contractors: Contractors sometimes have access to your personal information in the course of assisting in operating our business and providing products or services to you. These contractors include vendors and suppliers that provide us with technology, services, and/or content for the operation and maintenance of our site. Some of these relationships may be with companies that co-brand portions of their site and services, or that provide services to you on our behalf. Co-branded sites may have their own privacy policies posted on their sites. If you visit a co-branded site, please read the privacy policy that is posted on that site. Access to your personal information by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the contractor to perform its limited function. Contractors have an obligation under their contracts with us to keep your information confidential and to comply with our privacy and security policies.
Aggregated, non-personal information: We may share aggregated information about you with third parties. This is information that is combined with the non-personal information of other users and does not allow you to be identified or contacted. Depending on the circumstances, we may or may not charge third parties for this aggregated information. We also may not limit the third parties’ use of the aggregated information.
Changes in our corporate structure: If all or part of our company is sold, merged or otherwise transferred to another entity, the personal information you have provided at this site may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will take steps to ensure that, without your consent, any personal information that is transferred will not be used or shared in a manner inconsistent with the Privacy Policy under which it was collected.
Choice and control over your personal information
Whenever reasonably possible, we offer you choices when we ask for personal information and we tell you why we collect different types of information. You may always decline to provide personal information to us and/or refuse cookies in your browser, although some features or services may not function properly as a result. To make it easy for you to make the choices that are right for you, we provide the following controls:
My account: You can change or update your account information, including your contact information, marketing, communications and privacy preferences at any time.
My public profile: You can view and control the privacy settings for your profile by going to My Profile. The different privacy settings are described below.
My health portfolio (under development): We are developing special privacy controls for your health portfolio. These privacy controls are being designed so that you can determine how your information is used and displayed on the site and with whom it may be shared.
Search (under development): You can turn off “Recent searches” (we save your last 6 searches unless you ask us not to) by going to Search. You can also remove any recent searches we have saved about you by clicking on “Clear this list” under your list of recent searches. If you don’t want us to display your recent searches in the future, click “Don’t remember my searches.”
Close my account: You can close your account by visiting emailing policy@wellocities.com. We will send you a confirmation email. Once you close your account you will not be able to sign into the site to access any information you may have saved or created on the site, such as information from assessment tools or trackers, your blog, your clipboard or your health portfolio. Your personal information will be permanently deleted.
Personal Health Folder
As a registered user of the site, you can create and store your important health information in one secure place. The information in your health folder may be all self-reported. The health folder and your records archive will enable you to store personal health information about yourself and your family. Access to information received from third parties may require an additional level of registration and authentication, and we may verify your identity before you can store and retrieve information on the site.
Communications
Email communications: Email communication that you send to us via the email links on our site may be shared with a Customer Care representative, employee, or the medical expert that is most likely to be able to address your inquiry. If you provide personal health information in your email, it will be used only for the purposes of answering your email. From time to time, we may send you service-related emails, such as a welcome email when you register with our site.
Invitations: When you invite a friend to join our site we will automatically send your friend an email invitation on your behalf. We will not use your friend’s email address for any other purpose. Similarly, when you email a message using the “Email this page” function, the email addresses are used to facilitate the email communication and are not retained by us.
Private messages: Private messaging enables you to send emails to other site users without revealing your email address. Only your screen name (the nickname you select for yourself when you register) will be visible to recipients of the email. We will not share your email address with other users unless you choose to make it viewable by others. If you do not want others to send you private messages or know when you’re signed into the site, you can manage these capabilities in My account.
Personalization
The more we know about you, the more we can tailor our content, tools and services to your interests and needs. Information you provide when you create your public profile and health folder, the types of trackers or calculators you’ve used will be used to personalize your experience of the site, pre-fill certain fields, and deliver relevant advertising and marketing offers for you.
No personalization: We will not use any information about you to tailor the content or to pre-fill fields for you. However, your browser may pre-fill fields for you. We will use the history of your interactions with the site to modify the content and the advertising you see. The advertising you see will be based on the content you are viewing, your location, the history of your activities on the site, and on other information that third party advertisers might have about you.
Community
Our site features Community areas where people with similar health and wellness interests can share information and support one another. These include blogs, forums, public profiles, stories and Wellocities Pages.
Please remember that any information that you post in public areas is, by design, open to the public and, depending on the privacy setting, may appear in search engine results. For forum postings, as well as for doctor, hospital and treatment ratings, you cannot make the postings private, but you can make these postings “Anonymous” so that your screen name is not associated with your postings.
Forum postings, ratings and comments: By default, when you post to a forum, rate a doctor or treatment, review a hospital or comment on another user’s blog, story or profile, your post will be associated with your screen name and your photo if you’ve provided one in your profile.
Wellocities Desktop (under development): After you register, you can create your own health pages by using modules you create yourself or that Wellocities has created already. Modules you create include writing your own text, uploading a photo or video, or subscribing to an RSS feed. The page you create can be viewed by the public, and they can show up in search engine results.
Your blog: After you register, you can create your own blog.
Privacy controls (under development): You can choose the level of privacy that’s right for your blog. If you want “Everyone” to see your blog, your blog will show up in search engine results. If you don’t want your blog to show up in search results, select “Wellocities users,” “My community” or “Me” as your privacy setting.
Your public profile (under development): When you register, you are automatically provided with a community profile that is public. Your profile shows your screen name and the date you registered with our site. When you visit your profile for the first time, we will ask if you’d like for us to show your profile to others who have similar health interests to the ones you may have told us about. We will only do so with your permission.
Health information we collect from third parties on your behalf:
As a Wellocities member, you will be able to store personal health information for yourself and your family in your Health folder and in your records archive. This information will include medical records that you enter, either directly or through some of the tools you may use. Access to this information may require an additional level of registration and authentication, and we may verify your identity before you can store and retrieve information on the site.
Efforts we take to safeguard your personal information
We are committed to protecting the security of your information through procedures and technology designed for this purpose by taking these steps:
We limit access to your personal information and all interactions with your personal information is logged.
We have physical, technical and procedural safeguards to help protect your personal information.
What you can do to help keep your information secure
Choose your passwords carefully: Always create a password that’s easy for you to remember but difficult for someone else to figure out. Don’t use your name, address, phone number, initials, Social Insurance number, license plate or birthday. Don’t use names of your friends, family or pets, company names, common numerical sequences or the word “password.”
Suggestion: Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and upper- and lowercase letters. Also, remember to change your password frequently and never give your password to anyone.
Log out and close your browser: Open browsers invite snoops. When you finish your online session, close your browser to erase any information it may have temporarily stored on your computer.
Install antivirus software and spyware protection: Viruses are dangerous. Many viruses are sent as email attachments. They can slip into your system without your knowledge the moment you open the email. Some viruses such as Trojan Horses can capture the contents of your system, including your passwords. Installing up-to-date antivirus software and running it will help thwart these and other unwanted programs.
Spyware is a program or technology that aids in gathering information about a person or organization, often without their knowledge, and includes programs like hijackers and keyloggers. The best way to identify whether or not spyware is installed on your computer is to run and regularly update antispyware programs. Similar to antivirus software, antispyware software identifies and helps you remove spyware.
Changes to this Policy: We may update this Policy from time to time. We will notify you about material changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to the email address specified in your account. We may also make non-material changes to our Policy that generally will not affect our use of your personal information. If you don’t agree with the new policy, you always have the option of closing your account. Please see instructions for closing your account above. Our current policy, identified by its effective date, will be posted on the Site, and you should check it frequently.