Privacy Policy
1. Information We Collect
Our primary purpose in collecting personal information from you is to provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customized experience. This allows us to provide services and features that will meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience safer and easier. We only collect personal information about you that we consider necessary for achieving this purpose.
In general, you can browse MERX without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. Once you give us your personal information, you are not anonymous to us. If you choose to use our Site, we may require you to provide contact and identity information, billing information, shipping information and other personal information as indicated on the forms throughout MERX. Where possible, we indicate which fields are required and which fields are optional. You always have the option to not provide information by choosing not to use a particular service or feature.
Under some circumstances, we may require some additional financial information, such as but not limited to credit card information. We use your financial information, including credit card information, to verify the accuracy of your name, address, and other information, as well as to bill you for your use of our services.
We automatically track certain information about you based upon your behaviour on our Site. We use this information to do internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behaviour to better understand, protect and serve you and our community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our Site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on our Site or not), your computer browser information, and your IP address.
We currently use cookies on our Web site to check your language preference and to maintain session information, including identification of users and preparation of customized Web Pages. We do not save information across visits; we only use cookies to maintain session information during one unique visit.
Web Browsers set aside a small amount of space on your hard drive to keep these preferences, then every time you visit a Web site your browser checks to see if you have any predefined preferences (cookies) for that server. If you do, it sends the cookie to the server along with the request for a web page. Your browser will not give up its cookie data to any server except the one that set it.
We are working in collaboration with third-party service providers, including Google, who also use tracking tools in order to systematically collect anonymous data about the parameters of your visits to our Sites or other websites. Once again, such information is used to target advertisements and content that may be of interest to you, and also to provide statistical insight through features such as Google Analytics.
In some instances, tracking tools used by third-party service providers may be disabled. For example, Google allows you to deactivate cookies designed to target ads by accessing the Opt-Out page of its main website. Google Analytics may also be deactivated, once you download the browser add-on available for that purpose. You may also decline the use of cookies by other third-party vendors by logging on to the Network Advertising Initiative consumer deactivation page.
If you establish a credit account with us to pay the fees we charge, we collect some additional information, such as: a billing address, credit card number and credit card expiration date and tracking information from cheques or money orders.
If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.
2. Our Use of Your Information
We use your personal information to facilitate the services you request. We use personal information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on MERX to: resolve disputes; troubleshoot problems; bill your account; inform you about online and offline offers, products, services, and updates; customize your experience; detect and protect us against error, fraud and other criminal activity; enforce our User Agreement; and as otherwise described to you at the time of collection, use or disclosure. At times we look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes, and in particular we may examine your personal information to identify users using multiple User ID's or aliases. We may compare and review your personal information for errors, omissions and for accuracy.
If you choose to open a Credit account, or otherwise provide us your financial information, we use your address and financial information to bill you and provide associated support.
You agree that we may use personal information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyse MERX usage, to improve our content and product offerings, and to customize MERX content, layout, and services. These uses improve MERX and better tailor it to meet your needs, so as to provide you with a smooth, efficient, safe and customized experience while using MERX.
You agree that we may also use your personal information to contact you and deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, administrative notices, product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of MERX. By accepting the User Agreement and Privacy Policy, you expressly agree to receive this information. You may make changes to your notification preferences at any time.
3. Our Disclosure of Your Information
As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any of your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes.
- External Service Providers. There are a number of separate services offered by third parties that we refer to as external service providers that may be complimentary to your use of MERX (e.g., MERX Enhanced and Value Added Service Providers). If you choose to use these separate services, disclose information to the external service providers, and/or grant them permission to collect information about you, then their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. We do not disclose your personal information to external service providers unless you provide your explicit consent. With your consent we may provide some of your personal information to the external service provider offering such services, for your convenience. To prevent our disclosure of your personal information to an external service provider, you can decline such consent or simply not use their services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services.
- Internal Service Providers for Our Operations. We may use third parties that we refer to as internal service providers to facilitate or outsource one or more aspects of the business, product and service operations that we provide to you (e.g. couriers, Canada Post, and bill collection) and therefore we may provide some of your personal information directly to these internal service providers. These internal service providers are subject to confidentiality agreements with us and other legal restrictions that prohibit their use of the personal information we provide them for any other purpose except to facilitate the specific outsourced MERX related operation.
- Other Corporate Entities. We may share our data, including personal information about you, with our subsidiaries and joint ventures or potential partners or assignors. To the extent that these entities may have access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. Our subsidiaries, joint ventures, potential partners or assignors shall follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this document, to the extent allowed by applicable law.
- Legal Requests. MERX cooperates with law enforcement inquires, as well as other third parties to enforce laws such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights, to help protect you and the MERX community from bad actors. Therefore, in response to a verified request by law enforcement or other government officials relating to a criminal investigation or alleged illegal activity, we can (and you authorized us to) disclose your name, city, province, telephone number, email address, UserID history, and order history without a subpoena. However, in an effort to balance your right to privacy and the ability to keep the community free from bad actors, we will not disclose additional information to law enforcement or other government officials without a subpoena, court order or substantially similar legal procedure, except when the additional disclosure of information is necessary to prevent imminent physical harm or financial loss.
4. Your Use of Other Users' Information
In order to facilitate interaction among all of the MERX user community members, MERX provides you, via a Document Request List, with limited access to other users' contact and shipping information. As a subscriber you have access to this list as well as to any contact information provided by a jurisdiction in an Award Notice.
By entering into our User Agreement, you agree that, with respect to other user's personal information that you obtain through MERX or through a MERX-related communication or MERX-facilitated transaction, MERX hereby grants to you a license to use such information only for: (a) MERX-related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, and (b) any other purpose that such a user expressly agrees to, after you tell them the purpose you would like to use it for. In all cases, you must give users an opportunity to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them. In addition, under no circumstances, except as defined in this Section, can you disclose personal information about another user to any third party without our consent and the consent of that user. You agree that other users may use your personal information to communicate with you in accordance with this Section.
MERX and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add a MERX user to your mail list (email or physical mail) without their express consent.
5. Control of Your Password
You are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password, including fees charged to your account. Therefore, we do not recommend that you disclose your MERX password to any third parties. If you choose to share your User ID and password or your personal information with third parties, you are responsible for all actions taken with your account and therefore you should review that third party's privacy policy before doing so. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personal information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change your password as detailed in Section 6.
6. Accessing, Reviewing and Changing Your Personal Information
We offer you the ability to automatically review and change the personal information you submit to us by logging into MERX and entering the new information yourself. Generally, we prefer not to modify your personal information based upon your request but it is possible to do so. You can change your password, email address, contact information, financial information, shipping information and user preferences by going to Customer Profile and selecting the Update button. You must promptly update your information if it changes or is inaccurate. The change of information will not alter the historical information captured in the Document Request List. Only orders made after this change will be affected.
Subscribers, who have opted for a monthly subscription as opposed to an annual, semi-annual or quarterly subscription, may cancel their subscription on-line or upon written request. We will deactivate your account, contact information, billing information, shipping information and financial information from our active databases. To make this request, please contact us at merx@merx.com or call our MERX Call Centre at 1-800-964-MERX (6379) or (613) 727-4900.
We will retain in our files some personal information you have requested us to remove in order to prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our User Agreement and comply with legal requirements as is permitted by law. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personal information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your requests. However, such personal information will be deactivated from public and member viewing and will only be available to select MERX personnel.
7. Other Information Collectors
Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties, whether they are Buyers, other users of MERX or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the personal information you disclose to them. Since MERX does not control the privacy policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy customs and policies of that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.
8. Security
Your information is stored and processed on computers located in Canada. MERX uses procedural and technical safeguards to protect your personal information against loss or theft, as well as against unauthorized access or disclosure, to protect your privacy, including firewalls and encryption. We employ many different security techniques to protect such data from unauthorized access by users inside and outside the company. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
9. Notice
We may amend this Privacy Policy at any time by posting the amended terms on the MERX system. All amended terms shall automatically be effective 30 days after they are initially posted on MERX.