Privacy policy

The law we follow

We are a private-sector organization based in Alberta. Personal information we handle is governed by Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) and, for information that crosses provincial or national borders, by the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Both laws are built on the same ten principles — accountability, identified purposes, consent, limiting collection, limiting use and disclosure, accuracy, safeguards, openness, individual access and challenging compliance — and this policy is written to them.

What we collect, and why

• Subscriber accounts — name, email address, password (stored only as a salted hash), and for print plans a mailing address. Purpose: to deliver the magazine and give you access to the digital archive.
• Payments — when card payments are enabled they are processed by Stripe; we receive a transaction reference, the amount and the last four digits of the card, never the full card number. Until then, orders are recorded in a sandbox and no card data is collected.
• Email alert sign-ups — your email address and the provinces and categories you chose. Purpose: to send the digests you asked for. Every message carries an unsubscribe link.
• Community Supporter (advertiser) accounts — business contact details and the content you publish on your supporter page. That page is public by design; only publish what you intend the public to see.
• Contact form and advertising enquiries — the name, email, phone and message you provide. Purpose: to reply to you.
• Server logs — IP address, browser type, pages requested and timestamps, kept for security and to keep the site running. Logs are rotated and are not used to build profiles.

We collect nothing beyond what those purposes need, and we do not buy or sell mailing lists.

Anonymous tips

Anonymous reporting is a core feature of this platform. The tip form does not ask for your name, and you can leave the contact field empty. We store the tip text, the case it relates to, and a one-way hash of the submitting IP address that we use only to detect abuse of the form; the hash cannot be reversed into an address, and we do not log the raw address with the tip. Tips are forwarded to the police service responsible for the case exactly as written. If you choose to leave contact details, they are passed on with the tip so investigators can follow up; we do not use them for anything else.

Crime Watch Canada is not a law-enforcement agency and cannot guarantee anonymity against a court order. If you need the legal protections of a Crime Stoppers program, call Crime Stoppers directly at 1-800-222-8477.

How we use personal information

Only for the purpose it was collected for and for closely related purposes you would reasonably expect: fulfilling subscriptions, sending alerts you signed up for, replying to enquiries, invoicing advertisers, and keeping the service secure. We send marketing email only about our own magazine, only to people who have a relationship with us, and always with a working unsubscribe link, as the Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) requires.

Cookies and sessions

The site sets one cookie, cw_session, which keeps you signed in and carries short status messages between pages. It is marked HttpOnly and SameSite and expires after 30 days or when you sign out. We do not use advertising cookies, cross-site trackers or third-party analytics scripts. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address in the course of serving them; Stripe sets its own cookies on checkout pages when payments are enabled. Supporter pages may embed a map link, which opens the map provider only when you click it.

Who we share information with

• Police services — tips, as described above.
• Service providers — our hosting provider, our email delivery service and Stripe, each bound to use information only to provide their service to us. Some of these providers operate outside Canada, which means information may be subject to the laws of those jurisdictions.
• Advertisers — never. Community Supporters see aggregate page-view counts for their own page, not who viewed it.
• Legal requirements — where a law, subpoena or court order requires it.

Retention and security

Account information is kept while your account is active and for two years after, unless you ask us to delete it sooner. Order records are kept for seven years to meet tax requirements. Tips are kept until the related case is closed and then archived without contact details. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt; connections are encrypted with TLS; the database is not exposed to the internet; and staff access is role-based and logged. No system is perfectly secure — if we discover a breach that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify affected people and the Privacy Commissioner as the law requires.

Your rights

You may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, withdraw consent to uses that are not necessary for a service you have asked for, and ask us to delete it subject to the retention rules above. We answer within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response you may complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Contact

Privacy Officer, Crime Report Publications Ltd.
12904 54 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5A 0A4
admin@crimewatchcanada.com · +1 780-443-4453