On January 1, 2004, all Canadian businesses must respect the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPED).

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act is described as:

An Act to support and promote commerce by protecting personal information that is collected, used or disclosed in certain circumstances.

The term personal information is defined as information about an identifiable individual but does not include the name, title or business address or telephone number of an employee of an organization.

According to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the key elements that the policy should include are the following:

1. a general statement of the policy's purpose and principles;
2. designation of a person as privacy coordinator and a description of that person's role;
3. identification in general terms of the purpose for which personal information is collected;
4. mechanisms for obtaining consent;
5. limits on the use, disclosure and retention of personal information, mechanisms to ensure the security of information;
6. procedures to structure employees' right of access to the information; and,
7. procedures for challenging the employer's compliance with its privacy obligations.

Therefore, the present document will do the foregoing, in as easy to understand language as possible.

Our Privacy Policy
Premier Service is absolutely committed to protecting your privacy. We do not and will not ever sell, lend, give, provide, disseminate or transmit your personal information to any person or any company for marketing purposes, or any other purpose aside from our mystery shopping.

You can visit every page on our website without giving us any information about yourself. Our web hosting company (easyhosting.com) does record the domains of computers that visit our site, and generates logs with this information. We do not use these logs for any purpose, marketing or otherwise. Frankly, which computers visit our site is of no interest to us.

We also do not use cookies on our site.

The only time we collect any personal information about you is when you apply to be a mystery shopper by filling out the on-line application.

Why we collect information

Your information is used only to schedule, assign, and of course, pay you for mystery shops. The only people that have access to your information are our report reviewers, schedulers, supervisors, and when we develop new software: our database developer.

What specific information we collect, and why

The information we keep on you consists of the following:

• Your name and address, so that we know with whom we are dealing.
• Your E-mail address, so that we could notify you of mystery shops.
• Your PayPal E-mail address, if it's different, so we can pay you.
• Additional demographic information that you volunteered to provide us (eye glasses, clothing size, age) so that we could offer you special shops (such as opticians, plus sized stores, petite stores, etc.)
• The three questions that you answered on our application.
• A record of the shops you have completed, so that we know what stores you've shopped, and how much money we owe you.

Our Privacy Coordinator

Michael Glazer is co-director of Premier Service and will serve as our Privacy Coordinator. In addition to being an attorney, he also has a certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution, and an MBA in Management Information Systems. Therefore, he will be the best possible resource to help handle any complaint or issue you may have with Premier Service's Privacy Policy.

Exceptions to disclosure

Premier Service may disclose your personal information if required to do so by law or in the good-faith belief that such action is necessary to:

1. conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Premier Service or the site;
2. protect and defend the rights or property of Premier Service, or
3. act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of Premier Service employees, independent contractors, users of Premier Service products or services, or members of the public.

Furthermore, should the tax authorities (or any other governmental body) ever ask us for the names of mystery shoppers and amounts they were paid, we will of course provide them with this info. (As an aside, this is why we ask every single mystery shopper to please declare your income.)

How we secure your information at Premier Service

Premier Service is committed to protecting the security of your personal information. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use or disclosure.

When you apply to our website, your information is temporary stored in a secure location on Easyhosting's web servers.

Several times each day, we download this information to our local server, and erase it from the Web.

Aside from printing cheques and our monthly newsletter, your personal information is not printed on paper. All the information is stored in a Microsoft Access database, and is protected by firewalls, on computers with passwords.

Only those who schedule, review or assign shops have access to your personal information.

How we secure your information outside our offices

The off-site schedulers and reviewers (independent contractors) who receive copies of the database, receive it via E-mail. We always send the file in an encrypted, compressed format, protected by passwords.

Furthermore, we insist that all our schedulers and reviewers password protect their computers, as well.

Moreover, only information essential to the reviewing or scheduling of mystery shopping assignments is sent to the schedulers and reviewers.

Access to your Personal Information

As we stated above, the only personal information that we store is what you filled out on your application. Nothing else is collected, nor used.

There is a possibility, though that you may wish to know what information we store.

According to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, there are guidelines to this process.

Should you wish to receive a copy of all your personal information that we have on file, simply send a letter to our main office at 2 Laniel Street, Montreal, Canada H9B 3G5, to the attention of "The Privacy Coordinator".

Please remember that there are two principal directors at Premier Service, and tens of thousands of mystery shoppers in our database. Therefore, honoring these requests entails a fair amount of labour, administrative work, postage and handling fees, and so forth.

Therefore, pursuant to the PIPED, you will be charged a nominal fee of approximately $10.00USD for your request. You will be notified of the exact cost before we process your request.

According to the act, we have 30 days to acknowledge your inquiry, but we will most certainly try to get to it sooner than that.

Enforcement of this Privacy Statement

If you have questions regarding this statement, you should first contact the Privacy Coordinator at Premier Service by sending an E-mail to privacy@premierservice.ca.

If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should then contact the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Their address is 112 Kent Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 1H3. According to the Commissioner's website, complaints via E-mail will not be accepted. Please contact the office by postal mail.

Changes to this Statement

Premier Service will occasionally update this privacy statement. When we do, we will also revise the "last updated" date at the top of the privacy statement. For material changes to this statement, Premier Service will notify you by placing prominent notice on our Web site. Thank you for reading.