Privacy Policy

EFFECTIVE DATE: July 15, 2019

In this Privacy Policy (“Policy”), we describe how Auto Hut (“Auto Hut”) collects, uses, and discloses information that we obtain about visitors to our website www.autohut.ca (the “Site”) and the services available through our Site (collectively, the “Services”).

This Policy applies to personal information about individuals and does not apply to the information ‎collected, used, or disclosed with respect to corporate or commercial entities. This Policy does not ‎impose any limits on our collection, use, or disclosure of the information exempted under applicable ‎privacy legislation, such as business contact information and certain publicly available information.

By visiting the Site or using any of our Services, you agree that your personal information will be handled as described in this Policy. Your use of our Site or Services and any dispute over privacy is subject to this Policy.

LIMITS ON COLLECTION, USE, AND DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

We will not collect personal information indiscriminately but will limit the collection of personal information to ‎that which is reasonable and necessary. We may also collect personal information as authorized or required by law.

Your personal information will only be used or disclosed for the purposes set out below and as ‎authorized or required by law.‎

THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU

We collect information about you directly from you and from third parties, and automatically through your use of our Site or Services.

Information We Collect Directly From You. The information we collect from you depends on how you use our Services. For example, without limitation, we may collect the following information from you in connection with the following Services:

  • To request coupons: email address
  • To book an appointment: First and last name, email address, phone number, and make/model/year of the vehicle
  • To provide contact information to one of our stores: First name, last name, email address, phone number
  • To provide information to customer service about a store: First name, last name, email address, phone number, physical address
  • Real Estate Form: First and Last name, email address, phone number, physical address
  • When you are a business customer (business to business customers):
    • Fleet Contact Form: First and last name, phone number, total vehicles in the fleet, email address
    • Franchise Opportunities (to request more information): First and last name, email address phone number, city, state or province, and zip code or postal code

Information We Collect Automatically. We automatically collect information about your use of our Site and Apps through cookies, web beacons, and other technologies, such as: domain name, your browser type and operating system, web pages you view on the Site; links you click on the Site, your IP address, the length of time you visit our Site and or use our Services, the referring URL, or the webpage that led you to our Site.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, we combine this information with other information we collect about you, including your personal information. Please see the section “Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms” below for more details.

HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

As permitted by applicable law, we use your information, including your personal information, for the following purposes:

  • To provide our Services to you, including to deliver promotional materials that you request.
  • To communicate with you about your use of our Services, to respond to your inquiries, and for other customer service purposes.
  • To tailor the content and information that we may send or display to you, to offer location customization and personalized help and instructions, and to otherwise personalize your experiences while using the Services.
  • To send you email marketing about our products and services and those of our affiliated entities in accordance with applicable laws.
  • To send you news and newsletters in accordance with applicable laws.
  • To assist us in advertising on third party websites, mobile apps, and other online services, and to evaluate the success of our adverting campaigns through third party channels (including our online targeted advertising and offline promotional campaigns).
  • To better understand how users access and use our Services, both on an aggregated and individualized basis. For example, we will evaluate which features of our Site are more (or least) used by users.
  • To administer surveys and questionnaires, such as for market research or member satisfaction purposes.
  • To comply with legal obligations, as part of our general business operations, and for other business administration purposes.
  • Where we believe necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person or violations of our Terms of Service or this Policy.
  • To improve the Site and the Services.
  • To allow you to participate in promotions and contests we may offer from time to time.
  • To authenticate your identity.
  • To maintain accurate customer records.
  • To monitor your compliance with any of your agreements with us.
  • To manage or transfer our assets or liabilities, for example in the case of an acquisition, disposition or ‎merger.
  • To protect us, yourself and others from fraud and error and to safeguard our business interests.
  • To collect debts owed to us.
  • To comply with legal and regulatory requirements.
  • For other purposes, we may inform you about it from time to time.‎

HOW WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION

We may share your information, including personal information, as follows:

  • Service Providers. We disclose the information we collect from you to service providers, contractors, or agents who perform functions on our behalf. These service providers include information technology service providers and other professional services providers.
  • Affiliates. We disclose the information we collect from you to our affiliates or subsidiaries so that they can provide you with information about goods and services that may be of interest to you. If we do disclose your personal information to our affiliates or subsidiaries, their use and disclosure of your personal data will be subject to this Policy.
  • Other Users of the Site and Services. Any information that you post to public portions of our Site, including, without limitation, reviews, comments, and text will be available to, and searchable by all users of the Site and Services.

We also disclose information in the following circumstances:

  • Business Transfers. If (i) we or our affiliates are or may be acquired by, merged with, or invested in by another company or (ii) if any of our assets are or may be transferred to another company, whether as part of a bankruptcy or insolvency proceeding or otherwise, we may transfer the information we have collected from you to the other company. As part of the business transfer process, we may share certain of your personal information with lenders, auditors, and third party advisors, including attorneys and consultants.
  • In Response to Legal Process. We may disclose your information to comply with the law, a judicial proceeding, court order, or other legal processes, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena.
  • To Protect Us and Others. We may disclose your information when we believe it is appropriate to do so to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service or this Policy, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
  • Aggregate and De-Identified Information. We may share aggregated, anonymized, or de-identified information about users with third parties for marketing, advertising, research or similar purposes.

LOCATION OF SERVICE PROVIDERS, HOSTING AND SERVERS

Our service providers may be located outside of the country in which you are located, and our servers ‎are currently located in Canada. You therefore acknowledge that your personal ‎information may be processed and stored in foreign jurisdictions and that governments, courts, law ‎enforcement or government or regulatory agencies in Canada and elsewhere may be able to ‎access or obtain disclosure of your personal information under a lawful order or otherwise through the ‎laws of the foreign jurisdiction, irrespective of the safeguards we have put in place for the protection of ‎your personal information.

OUR USE OF COOKIES AND OTHER TRACKING MECHANISMS

Our third-party service providers and we use cookies and other tracking mechanisms to track information about your use of our Site or Services. We may combine this information with additional personal information we collect from you (and our third-party service providers may do so on our behalf). We may also use cookies and tracking mechanisms to serve our remarketing campaigns so that third-party vendors, including Google, Twitter, and Facebook, show our ads on sites across the Internet. We ‎may also use targeted advertising services to tailor our advertisements (both on the Website and ‎other sites) to your interests. You can opt-out of these remarketing campaigns by turning off cookies in ‎your browser, as described below.

Cookies. Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your device’s hard drive through your web browser for record-keeping purposes. Some cookies allow us to make it easier for you to navigate our Site and Services, while others are used to enable a faster log-in process or to allow us to track your activities at our Site and Service. There are two types of cookies: session and persistent cookies.

  • Session Cookies. Session cookies exist only during an online session. They disappear from your device when you close your browser or turn off your device. We use session cookies to allow our systems to uniquely identify you during a session or while you are logged into the Site and Services. This will enable us to process your online transactions and requests and verify your identity after you have logged in as you move through our Site and Services.
  • Persistent Cookies. Persistent cookies remain on your device after you have closed your browser or turned off your device. We use persistent cookies to track aggregate and statistical information about user activity and to display advertising both on our Site, Services, and on third-party sites.

Disabling Cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but if you prefer, you can edit your browser options to block them in the future. The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your computer from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Visitors to our Site and Services who disable cookies will be able to browse certain areas of the Site, but some features may not function.

Flash Local Storage Objects. We may use Flash Local Storage Objects (“Flash LSOs”) to store your Site preferences and to personalize your visit. Flash LSOs are different from browser cookies because of the amount and type of data stored. Typically, you cannot control, delete, or disable the acceptance of Flash LSOs through your web browser. For more information on Flash LSOs, or to learn how to manage your settings for Flash LSOs, go to the Adobe Flash Player Help Page, choose “Global Storage Settings Panel” and follow the instructions. To see the Flash LSOs currently on your computer, choose “Website Storage Settings Panel” and follow the instructions to review and, if you choose, to delete any specific Flash LSO.

Third-Party Analytics. We use automated devices and applications, such as Google Analytics, to evaluate usage of our Site, and to the extent, permitted our Apps. We also may use other analytic means to evaluate our Site and Apps. We use these tools to help us improve our Site’s and Apps’ performance and user experiences. These entities may use cookies and other tracking technologies, such as web beacons or local storage objects (LSOs), to perform their services. To learn more about Google’s privacy practices, please review the Google Privacy Policy at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/. You can also download the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to prevent their data from being used by Google Analytics at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Track-Browser-And-Requests. Currently, our systems do recognize browser “do-track” requests. You may, however, disable certain tracking as discussed in this section (e.g., by disabling cookies); you also may opt-out of targeted advertising by following the instructions in the Third-Party Ad Networks section directly below.

Third-Party Ad Networks. We use third parties such as network advertisers to serve advertisements on third-party websites or other media (e.g., social networking platforms). This enables these third parties and us to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested. Third-party ad network providers, advertisers, sponsors and/or traffic measurement services may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs), Flash LSOs and other tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you. These third-party cookies and other technologies are governed by each third party’s specific privacy policy, not this one. We may provide these third-party advertisers with information, including personal information, about you.

Users in the United States and Canada may opt-out of many third-party ad networks. For example, you may go to the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”) Consumer Choice Page or the Digital Advertising Alliance Canada (“DAAC”) AdChoices Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having the information used by DAA companies or DAAC companies. You may also go to the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”) Consumer Opt-Out Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having the information used by NAI members.

Opting out from one or more companies listed on the DAA Consumer Choice Page, the DAAC AdChoices Page or the NAI Consumer Opt-Out Page will opt you out from those companies’ delivery of interest-based content or ads to you, but it does not mean you will no longer receive any advertising through our Site, Services, or on other websites. You may continue to receive advertisements, for example, based on the particular website that you are viewing (i.e., contextually based ads). Also, if your browsers are configured to reject cookies when you opt-out on the DAA or DAAC or NAI websites, your opt-out may not be effective. Additional information is available on the DAA’s website at www.aboutads.info, on the DAAC’s website at www.youradchoices.ca, or the NAI’s website at www.networkadvertising.org.

CONSENT

We will obtain your consent to collect, use or disclose personal information except where we are ‎authorized or required by law to do so without consent. For example, we may collect, use or disclose ‎personal information without your knowledge or consent where: the information is publicly available, as ‎defined by statute or regulation; we are obtaining legal advice, or we reasonably expect that obtaining ‎consent would compromise an investigation or proceeding. Other exceptions may apply.‎

Your consent can be express, implied or given through an authorized representative.

Consent may be provided orally, in writing, electronically, through inaction (such as when you do not ‎notify us that you do not wish your personal information collected/used/disclosed for various purposes ‎after you have received notice of those purposes) or otherwise.‎

You may withdraw consent at any time, subject to legal, contractual and other restrictions, provided that ‎you give us reasonable notice of your withdrawal of consent. If you notify us that you withdraw consent, ‎we will inform you of the likely consequences of that withdrawal, which may include our inability to ‎provide certain services for which that information is necessary.‎

USER GENERATED CONTENT

We invite you to post content on our Site and Services, including your comments, pictures, and any other information that you would like to be available on our Site or Services. If you post content to our Site or Services, all of the information that you post will be available to Auto Hut and other users of our Site. If you post your own content on our Site or Services, your posting may become public, and we cannot prevent such information from being used in a manner that may violate this Policy, the law, or your personal privacy.

THIRD-PARTY LINKS

Our Site and Services may contain links to third-party websites. Any access to and use of such linked websites is not governed by this Policy but instead is governed by the privacy policies of those third-party websites. We are not responsible for the information practices of such third party websites.

SECURITY OF MY PERSONAL INFORMATION

We have implemented reasonable physical, technical, managerial, organizational, and electronic ‎ precautions to protect the information we collect from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. We will take reasonable measures, through contractual or other reasonable means, to ensure that a ‎‎comparable level of personal information protection is implemented by the suppliers and agents who ‎assist ‎in providing Services.‎ ‎ Please be aware that despite our best efforts, no data security measures can guarantee security.

ACCESS TO MY PERSONAL INFORMATION

You may modify personal information that you have submitted by contacting Customer Service – see the Contact Us section below or by directly calling your Auto Hut local shop. Please note that copies of information that you have updated, modified, or deleted may remain viewable in cached and archived pages of the Site for a period of time.

Also, upon written request and authentication of identity, we will provide you with your other personal ‎information under our control, information about the ways in which that information is being used and ‎a description of the individuals and organizations to whom that information has been disclosed. We ‎will make the information available within 30 days or provide written notice where additional time is ‎required to fulfill the request.‎

In some situations, we may not be able to provide access to certain personal information. This may be ‎the case where, for example, disclosure would reveal personal information about another individual, the ‎personal information is protected by solicitor/client privilege, the information was collected for the ‎purpose of an investigation or where disclosure of the information would reveal confidential ‎commercial information that, if disclosed, could harm our competitive position. We may also be ‎prevented by law from providing access to certain personal information. When an access request is ‎refused, we will notify you in writing, document the reasons for refusal and outline further steps which ‎are available to you.‎

ACCURACY

We will make a reasonable effort to ensure that the personal information we are using or disclosing is ‎accurate and complete. In most cases, we rely on you to ensure that your information is current, ‎complete, and accurate.

If you demonstrate the inaccuracy or incompleteness of personal information, we will amend the ‎information as required. If appropriate, we will send the amended information to third parties to whom ‎the information has been disclosed. When a challenge regarding the accuracy of personal information ‎is not resolved to your satisfaction, we will annotate the personal information under its control with a ‎note that the correction was requested but not made.‎

RETENTION

We will keep your personal information for as long as necessary in connection with the ‎purposes identified above or as permitted or required by law. You must notify us if you no longer want us to retain your information.

We will destroy, erase or make anonymous documents or other records containing personal information ‎as soon as it is reasonable to assume that the original purpose is no longer being served by retaining ‎the information and retention is no longer necessary for a legal or business purpose. We will take due ‎care when destroying personal information so as to prevent unauthorized access to the information.‎

WHAT CHOICES DO I HAVE REGARDING USE OF MY PERSONAL INFORMATION?

We may send periodic promotional emails to you. You may opt-out of promotional emails by following the opt-out instructions contained in the email. Please note that it may take up to 10 business days for us to process opt-out requests. If you opt-out of receiving promotional emails, we may still send you emails about your account or any services you have requested or received from us.

You may also withdraw your consent to our collections, uses and disclosures of your information at any ‎time, subject to legal, contractual and other restrictions, provided that you give reasonable notice of ‎withdrawal of consent to us. On receipt of notice of withdrawal of consent, we will inform you of the ‎likely consequences of the withdrawal of consent, which may include our inability to provide certain ‎services for which that information is necessary.‎

CHILDREN UNDER 13

Our Services are not designed for children under 13. If we discover that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we will delete such information from our systems.

CONTACT US

If you have questions about the privacy aspects of our Services or would like to make a complaint, please contact us at Customer Service: [email protected]

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

This Policy is current as of the Effective Date set forth above. We may change this Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. We will post any changes to this Policy on our Site. If we make any changes to this Policy that materially affect our practices with regard to the personal information we have previously collected from you, we will endeavor to provide you with notice in advance of such change by highlighting the change on our Site and/or emailing you at the email address we have for you.