Privacy Policy

Who Are We?

We are people too so we understand that privacy is a serious matter. ArtsQuest Inc. under the URL artsquest.ca, is committed to fostering an online environment of trust and transparency. We start by providing you with a clear understanding of the personal information we require in order to function as an online business, what we do with that information and how we keep it secure for you. This policy will also outline the information that is gathered that you do not voluntarily give us (through the use of cookies and analytics), why we gather it, and then what happens to it. As a user of artsquest.ca we want you to feel comfortable using our website so therefore we will supply you with privacy settings that give you control over how certain information is used by us. Last but not least, our policy will give you some valuable information on how you can participate in the security of your personal information and keep it safe.

Please note that this Privacy Policy is part of the Terms of Use. By accepting the Terms of Use you are consenting to the use of your personal information by ArtsQuest Inc. as described in this Privacy Policy. This policy only applies to artsquest.ca and its services. We are not responsible for the privacy policies of any third-party websites.

For Artists/Curators/Artist Groups (Also referred to as sellers)

Required Information Gathered and How It is Used

Essentially, all three of these users are one and the same. In order to participate as a curator or in an artist group you must be registered as an artist with your own store. For the purposes of this privacy policy the information will be the same and gathered only once unless information updates are required. This information is stored in our data base until such time the ArtsQuest store has been closed.

  1. First and last name (identity verification)
  2. Username (your store identity)
  3. Business name (if applicable) (so we know if you are operating under something other than your given name)
  4. Email address (primary mode of communication between you and ArtsQuest)
  5. Canadian address including city or town or village, province or territory, and postal code (in order to be an artist member of artsquest.ca you must reside in Canada)
  6. Stripe account information (so you can get paid)
  7. Media (images, audio and text)

Additional Information for Artist Groups:

  1. First and last name of group members (in order to be in an artist group you must be a registered artist member of artsquest.ca)
  2. Group name (so we are able to link the members of an artist group with a signatory group name; example The Southern Alberta Sunset Painters Group)

Some of this information is for ArtsQuest administrative purposes and use only, such as numbers 4, 5 and 6, and is in no way made public, shared or sold unless we are required to disclose it under a court of law.

Voluntary/Optional Information Gathered

This information can be made available as a matter of public/buyer interest in order to enhance and personalize your store. It is not essential to include it but it can give potential buyers a level of comfort if they know more about the artist they are considering purchasing from. Please note this information is provided by you (the artist) through the use of the account settings on your personal administrative page.

  1. First and last name
  2. Biography/passions/what makes you tick
  3. Your website URL
  4. Personal photo/avatar
  5. Social networking accounts as links
  6. Your location
  7. Your artist group name (if applicable)

Additional Information for Artist Groups:

  1. Members’ first and last name or nickname/handle/username (same as for each artist’s personal store if applicable)
  2. Number of members
  3. Group name
  4. Group profile

Other information that is publicly displayed is the date you became a member of artsquest.ca or your artist group was formed, your favourites, items available for sale, comments you and others may contribute in public spaces (such as within the pages of your store), reviews, ratings, sold item listings, and your store policies.

For Buyers 

Required Information Gathered

In order to make a purchase from an artsquest.ca member artist as a guest buyer or a registered buyer there is certain information that would be considered the bare minimum for us to gather. The information is used solely for the purpose for which it was intended; to complete a transaction between you (the buyer) and the artist (the seller). Your information is retained within our data base for the purposes of taxation reporting to the Government of Canada until such time that we are released from this obligation, at which time your information will be deleted from our data bases. This information is never made public, shared or sold unless we are required to disclose it under a court of law.

  1. First and last name
  2. Billing address
  3. Shipping address if not the same as the billing address
  4. Credit card number, expiry date and three digit security number (not retained)
  5. Email address

If you choose to become a registered buyer with artsquest.ca you will be required to create a password in order to login. This password is secure and encrypted and is not available to anyone other than you. The information we have gathered from you as a result of a purchase or purchases made by you is made available to you as a registered buyer. This information is never made public, shared or sold unless we are required to disclose it under a court of law.

  1. Order history (including items purchased, quantity, price, artist store)
  2. Order date
  3. Favourites you have chosen to bookmark for future purchases
  4. Not yet purchased items remaining in your shopping cart

For Gift Registry, Personal Shopper and Gift Certificate Users 

Required Information Gathered

Both the Gift Registry and the Personal Shopper are services provided by artsquest.ca, the use of which requires personal information gathering. The following information is necessary for the proper function of the service(s) with some optional information provided by you (the user) if you desire.

  1. First and last name of the user
  2. Email address of the user
  3. Special occasion (IE: birthday, retirement, anniversary) (not required for Gift Certificate users)
  4. Date of the special occasion (not required for Gift Certificate users)
  5. Name of the recipient of the special occasion (not required for Gift Certificate users)

Voluntary/Optional Information Gathered

This information can be made available to us by you (the user) if you choose to do so. It will enable us to provide you with an enhanced level of service as a user of the Gift Registry or Personal Shopper service. The information provided is for artsquest.ca administrative purposes and use only and will never be made public, shared or sold unless we are required to disclose it under a court of law.

Gift Registry Only

Email addresses of prospective buyers:

This information allows artsquest.ca to send out an announcement to each email address you provide about your Gift Registry. It is not intended to solicit any further business or correspondence between ArtsQuest and the email addressee. Once the Gift Registry campaign is over, all the emails you provided for the sole purpose of announcement will be deleted from our data base unless the email addressee chooses to become a buyer (See Privacy for Buyers). The email addressee may request their email address be removed prior to the campaign being over if they contact us directly via the contact information at the end of this document.

Personal Shopper Only

Personal item preferences pertaining to the taxonomy of the catalogue:

This information allows artsquest.ca to personalize your choice of gift for the loved one in your special occasion date book. Along with sending you an email reminder in advance, we can send you some gift suggestions based on the information you picked out from our taxonomy such as price range, colour, medium, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc.

Gift Certificate User Only

Email address of the person you wish to send an ArtsQuest gift certificate to:

You can choose this as an option or give a printable form of the gift certificate. The email address is only used for the purpose for which it was intended; to inform the recipient they have received an ArtsQuest gift certificate from you. We may also use it periodically to send reminders to the recipient if, after some time, they haven’t yet used it or they have a balance remaining in their gift certificate account.

Keeping the Lines of Communication Open 

If you decide to partner with ArtsQuest as a member artist or give us the pleasure of serving you as a buyer it is important that we maintain a clear channel of communication with you. Sometimes we will need to give you information that can enhance your artsquest.ca experience such as announcements about new website developments, policy changes, transaction notification and confirmation, email confirmation/welcome email when you register your account and special occasion reminders from your Personal Shopper. Our communication mode of choice is email so it is important to make sure your email address is up to date. We are, however, not averse to calling you on the phone or posting a letter to your physical address if that’s your preference. It is as simple as letting us know through your account setting preferences. This is all service-related information which you cannot opt out of.

There are other kinds of information that are nice to know but not need to know such as The ArtsQuest Newsletter or latest blog. There could also be fun information about upcoming events, featured artist reports, contests or new items available. Or there could be information that is not quite as fun like asking you to participate in an ArtsQuest survey. Once again you have a choice as to whether you want to receive all of these, some of these or none of these; just set your account settings accordingly.

General information will always be made available through artsuest.ca’s social media channels with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.

If you no longer wish to receive any communication from us it is as simple as closing your account which you can do HERE. Or if you receive our newsletter or blog postings but no longer wish to, you can choose to unsubscribe at any time directly from your email.

The Ways in Which We Do Share Your Information

ArtsQuest Inc., in its simplest form, is in the business of providing a service to its member artists by facilitating the transactions that occur between the buyer and the seller. We are also in the business of keeping your privacy private and secure.

There are three ways in which we do this.

  1. Requiring the bare minimum of information from you in order to function as an online business.
  2. Sharing only the need to know information with the people who need to know it.

Stripe – our payment processor; Stripe’s Privacy Policy

Ethical Host – our website hosting provider, developer and technical assistance; Ethical Host’s Privacy Policy

Mail Chimp – our email marketing service for our newsletter, personal shopper service, and automated email system; Mail Chimp’s Privacy Policy

  1. Asking you to participate by offering choices of certain information you may wish to disclose. As well, we provide you with suggestions on how to keep your information safe, not only on our website, but others as well.

There are five scenarios by which we do share your information.

  1. Personnel or contractors who are directly involved with the day to day or occasional operation of artsquest.ca will need to know certain information in order to do their job. We require that they take the utmost care in handling all personal information which they have access to. Each person is required to read My Role and Responsibilities of Handling Personal Information prior to becoming involved with any artsquest.ca operations.
  2. The transaction that takes place between member artists and buyers requires the flow of certain information such as shipping address and email address. By making a purchase through our website you are giving us permission to share your information in this way. Both the seller and the buyer will be privy to certain information about each other in order to complete the buying process. We expect you to respect each other’s privacy and to use it only for the purpose for which it was intended. It is not your right to use the artsquest.ca platform to collect personal information such as email addresses and use it for solicitation or to share it or sell it to third parties. Any use other than for artsquest.ca related communications or transactions is prohibited without the expressed consent of the person in question. You must comply with all relevant legal rules around privacy when handling information that is not your own.
  3. ArtsQuest Inc. may require the services of third party companies to provide such things as payment processing, analytics, research and security. These companies have limited access to your information in order to perform these services on our behalf and are obligated to ArtsQuest Inc. and you not to use or disclose your information for other purposes.
  4. As a member artist you are required to supply media (images, audio or text) within your store. By doing so, you automatically give ArtsQuest Inc. permission to use this media for marketing purposes such as on our social media channels, advertising or within the artsquest.ca website itself.
  5. ArtsQuest Inc. may release your information to a third party in the following circumstances: to protect, establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims; to comply with a subpoena, court order, legal process or other legal requirement; or when we believe in good faith that such disclosure is necessary to comply with the law, prevent imminent physical harm or financial loss, or investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, intellectual property infringement, piracy or violations of artsquest.ca’s Terms of Use. In such events we may disclose a name, physical address, email address, phone number, country and company name.

Please be aware that this is artsquest.ca’s privacy policy and in no way implies that our privacy practises apply to the privacy practises of other third parties associated with us or not. It is your responsibility to make sure you read their policies and ask questions before giving out your personal information. Although we are huge on educating and making our members aware of the importance of privacy, we are not responsible for how they handle your personal information.

Other Ways in Which We Could Use Your Personal Information

Cookies; Not Just For Eating

In order to understand how we use cookies to gather information and for what purpose it serves for you and us, it is necessary to know what cookies are.

Cookies are tiny files that are stored on your computer by websites that you visit or applications that you use that record your preferences or browsing activities. These files allow websites to customize your return visits; for instance to automatically populate specific fields for you such as a log-in box or they enable online advertising networks to share specific advertising with you that are based on your perceived interests.

Purpose of Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Analytics

ArtsQuest uses Google Analytics to track and help improve the services we offer and gather site usage information. This information is collected by the use of cookies, identifiers for mobile devices (e.g., Android Advertising Identifier or Advertising Identifier for iOS) or similar technology used to collect data. Please see “How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps” located at www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.

Embedded Content From Other Websites
We may embed content from other sites such as Youtube or Vimeo to display videos. They both may add a cookie for tracking purposes as well unless your browser specifically is set to deny them.

How Long Do We Retain Your Personal Information?

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users (sellers and buyers) that register on our website, we also store the personal information you provide in your user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except you cannot change your username). In the case of a member artist, your voluntary/optional information can be edited or deleted at any time but in order to delete your required information you must request to have your account/store closed. Website administrators can also see and edit this information.

Any transactional information between a buyer and seller is retained within our data base for the purposes of taxation reporting to the Government of Canada until such time that we are released from this obligation, at which time your information will be deleted from our data bases.

How Do We Protect Your Private Information? 

ArtQuest only stores that information which is necessary to do business and communicate with the vendors and the customers. Our website is secured with multiple firewalls, exploit scanners and housed in a Secure Data Centre. We do not store credit card information, it is only used and entered for processing of a transaction on our payment partners website.

How Can I Help Keep My Personal Information Safe? 

  1. Get in the habit of logging out of a website before you move onto another one. It is kind of like leaving the front door wide open while you go visit your friend in another neighbourhood; something may or may not happen but it is good not to take the risk. Some websites will automatically time your session out after a while but others may not. Just a good habit to get into.
  2. Take advantage of a website’s privacy controls such as the ones we have provided for you to use. These give you the control on what kind of information you don’t mind being public and what you want to remain private. The more information about you that is made public the greater the chance it could be used for illicit purposes.
  3. If you upload images to any website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. Pictures taken by digital cameras can contain a lot of information, like date, time and camera used. But last generation cameras and phones can add the GPS coordinates of the place where it was taken, making it a privacy hazard. You can be showing your home’s location to the world. Using this tool you can view and remove exif data online of your pictures without downloading any program.
  4. Take the strength of your passwords seriously. They can protect you or they can make it easy for your privacy to be breached. When creating a password for a registered account within artsquest.ca, whether you are a seller or buyer, your password must have certain requirements met in order to be acceptable. We know that having oodles of passwords in your life is a pain, but for your convenience you can choose to have your password remembered on our site. This is one benefit of enabling cookies.

    Please do not give out your artsquest.ca password to anyone. We will not be held responsible for any misuse of your account by anyone who is not you.
  1. For more important tips on helping to keep your privacy private see Protecting Your Privacy Online.

Contact Information

ArtsQuest Inc.
Box 390
Slocan, B.C.
V0G 2C0
Email: contact@artsquest.ca

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