Privacy Policy

Last revised: October 2nd, 2024

The protection of your privacy and personal information is important to us at AutoCanada Inc. This Privacy Policy (the “Policy”) provides information on how we protect your privacy, including information on how we collect, use and disclose the personal information that we control.

When we say “AutoCanada”, “we”, or “us” in this Policy, we mean AutoCanada Inc. including where applicable all AutoCanada controlled dealerships and collision centers and other stores across Canada.

Please read this Policy carefully to understand how we handle your personal information.

What This Privacy Policy Covers

This Policy applies when you access or use AutoCanada’s websites (the “Website”) or any other services we offer and which refer or link to this Policy, except if it mentions otherwise.

Click on the links below to find the information you’re looking for more quickly:

Personal Information We Collect
How We Collect Personal Information
How We Use Personal Information
How We Use Online Advertising
How We Share Personal Information
Our Use of Cookies and Similar Technologies
How to Control Your Cookie Preferences
Opting Out of Marketing Communications
Retention, Storage, and International Transfer of Personal Information
How We Protect Personal Information
Your Rights Regarding Your Personal Information
Third-Party Websites and Services
Changes to this Privacy Policy
How to Contact Us

Personal Information We Collect

In this Policy, ”personal information” means any information about or that relates to an identified or identifiable individual, which includes:

information that can be used to identify individuals directly or indirectly, such as a person’s name, social security number, or driver’s licence; and
information that, when used in combination with other available information, allows a person to be identified, such as a person’s age, occupation and place of residence.

Except in Québec, personal information does not include any business contact information when used to communicate with you in relation to your employment, business or profession, such as your name, position name or title, work address, work telephone number, work fax number, or work e-mail address.

The information we may collect about you varies depending on the nature of our relationship with you. Generally, the personal information we collect falls into the following categories (not all of which may apply to you):

identity information, such as your name, social insurance number, driver’s licence, title, date of birth and gender
contact information, such as your billing address, delivery address, e-mail address and telephone numbers
financial information, such as your bank account number and payment card details used to purchase products or services
technical and usage information when you use our Website, such as your internet protocol (IP) address, login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating systems and platforms and other technologies on the devices you use to access our Website
technical and usage information when you use some of our services, such as event data recorded through vehicle systems and communicated to us through our Roadside Assistance service
professional information, such as your professional designations and the name of your employer
marketing and communications information, such as your preferences for receiving our newsletter and information you provide when you communicate with us, such as for customer support, technical assistance, marketing and billing, for participation in surveys, polls, sweepstakes, or promotions; or when you contact us for any other reason by phone, email, social media or via any other means
credit information, such as your credit score and other information about your consumer behaviour and credit use.
images and videos, arising from video surveillance that can include elements such as a person's face, distinctive physical characteristics, information about their location, or any other data that, when combined with other available information, could enable the identification and or geolocation of a specific individual.

Also, whenever we want to collect, use or disclose sensitive personal information, we will obtain your express informed consent beforehand.

How We Collect Personal Information

How we collect personal information depends on the nature of our relationship with you. Generally, we collect personal information in the following ways:

when you access or use our Website
when you connect to a Wi-Fi network at one of our locations
over the telephone, electronically, through text messaging or through in-person interactions at one of our locations
when you or one of our representatives fills out a document related to a transaction you’re undertaking with us or to any other of our services, such as booking appointments, salespersons’ customer information sheets when you purchase a new or used vehicle, new or used vehicle purchase deal sheets, trade-in information documents, purchase and sale agreements, applications for financing, or any other purchase, repair order forms or invoices, such as applications for insurance or the purchase of a warranty or extended service plan
through vehicle systems when they record event data
when you visit one of our stores and are filmed by our closed-circuit television(“CCTV”) cameras
from third parties such as vehicle manufacturers, credit providers, credit reporting agencies or other third parties who may refer you to us if they think you would be interested in our services
through your communications with us through our call centre or any other means, such as through email, social media, or text message
through public sources to confirm addresses and phone numbers

How We Use Personal Information

How we use your personal information depends on the nature of our relationship with you. Generally, we use personal information for the following purposes:

to provide our services, including for booking appointments, fulfilling and delivering orders for goods and services, administering transactions, verifying identity, and determining eligibility for financing
to ensure the accuracy of the information we have on record
to advise of special offers, updates and other information through newsletters, online advertising or other means. For more information on how we use online advertising, see the “How We Use Online Advertising” section.
to communicate with manufacturers, including for warranty processing, and other related purposes to ensure product quality and customer satisfaction
if you use any of our technology applications, to administer your use of those applications
if you visit one of our locations, to ensure safety and security (which may include video surveillance)
to respond to your inquiries, complaints, or requests
to manage our business and our arrangements with our clients, affiliates and others, including to detect and prevent errors and fraud
to improve our business, products, and services, including through compiling statistics and conducting surveys
to analyze the performance of vehicles, to maintain and repair operating systems, to investigate accidents and systems, and to locate vehicles
to investigate legal claims and protect our rights, operations, or property
for other purposes as you may consent to from time to time
as otherwise required or permitted by law

We refer to these as our “Identified Purposes.”

How We Use Online Advertising

We may engage in interest-based advertising in connection with your use of our Website and other services, and across third-party websites or service offerings when you leave our Website or other services.

Interest-based advertising means that your preferences and interests are collected through cookies or similar technologies and then used to provide you with advertising and marketing materials that are relevant to you, based on those preferences and interests. For example, we may use Google Ads or Google’s DoubleClick to provide you with advertising based on your browsing history and search requests. We may also use YouTube to provide you with personalized advertising based on your viewing content.

For information on how to control your cookie settings, see the “How To Control Your Cookie Preferences” section.

We only share personal information to the extent necessary to provide our products and services, to fulfill our Identified Purposes, or as we are otherwise required or permitted by law. We may for these reasons disclose your personal information among AutoCanada Inc. and its affiliates, and to third parties such as automobile manufacturers, parts manufacturers, financing companies, credit agencies, payment card processors, government agencies, motor vehicle agencies and other fact collecting and verifying entities.

When you apply or submit a finance application provided by AutoCanada or divisions of AutoCanada, AutoCanada and its dealerships, financing partners, and lenders (“partners”) may disclose your personal information to credit reporting agencies to obtain your credit score and related information from credit reporting agencies to process or fulfill the transaction, to make decisions on whether to extend you credit, and to update your confidential profile for use by AutoCanada for purposes as set out in this Privacy Policy. You may withdraw your consent to AutoCanada and its partners obtaining your credit score or credit report at any time by using the contact information in the “How to Contact Us” section below. Upon your request we will inform you if we have ordered such a report or reports and will give you the name and address of the credit reporting agency that furnished the report or reports in order for you to exercise your rights to access and rectification. You may make such a request by contacting our privacy officer as set out in the “How to Contact Us” section.

We may also transfer personal information to technical support service providers, customer relationship management (CRM) software service providers, and data storage and processing service providers that are assisting us in fulfilling the purposes for which we collected the personal information.

We may also disclose your personal information to a third party in the event of a significant business transaction, such as a merger or reorganization.

Our Use of Cookies and Similar Technologies

Cookies and Other Electronic Technologies. Like most websites, we and our third-party service providers use cookies and similar technologies including web beacons, embedded scripts and e-tags (together referred to as “cookies”) to provide users with a more efficient online user experience when using our Website, and to provide content that is more relevant to the user’s interests and presumed needs.

A cookie is a small data file that is placed on your computer or mobile device by your web browser. It is a tool that stores information about Website visits, recognizes you and your preferences each time you visit the Website, optimizes Website functionality, and enables us to provide our services. Some parts of the Website use cookies to track user traffic patterns.

We may, through cookies, collect and analyze information including, but not limited to: (1) IP address, (2) date and day of access request, (3) pages viewed, (4) time zone difference to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), (5) the standard HTTP-header information, (6) the time spent on each page of our Website or App page, (7) links you have clicked on our Website, (8) the page you visit before and after you come to our Website, (9) browser type, (10) operating system, (11) language, (12) advertising identification number and vendor identifier, (13) usage data including information on how you navigate our Services, and (14) version of browser software.

We and our third-party service providers use cookies for a variety of reasons, including to: provide you with our services and our Website, to enhance our Website’s and our services’ performance, to analyze how users use our Website and services, or to provide you with content that is more relevant to your interests and presumed needs.

The following categories explain the types of cookies we may use and what we may use them for. The information these cookies collect may be anonymized.

STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES. These are essential to enable you to move around the Website and use its features. Without these cookies, the Website may not behave as expected or some of its parts or features may be unusable or inaccessible.
PERFORMANCE COOKIES. These cookies collect information about how users use our Website (e.g., which pages users visit most often, and if users get error messages from web pages). We analyze such information to help us improve how our Website works.
FUNCTIONALITY COOKIES. These cookies allow our Website to remember what choices you make (e.g., your username, language or the region you are in). This helps us provide you with an enhanced, more personalized experience when you access and use our Website.
ADVERTISING AND MARKETING COOKIES. We may use these cookies to: send you advertising and marketing-related material tailored to you and your interests, limit the number of times you see an advertisement, and help measure advertising campaigns’ effectiveness. These cookies are usually placed by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organizations like advertisers. The “interest-based” or “personalized” advertising powered in part by these cookies is usually more relevant to you, but it also generally involves the collection and use of more information about you and your browsing history. There are easy ways to opt out of most or all interest-based or personalized advertising, information about which can be found through various sources available on the Internet, such as allaboutcookies.org or optout.networkadvertising.org.

For information on how to control your cookie settings, see the “How To Control Your Cookie Preferences” section.

There are a variety of ways in which you can control the information collected by cookies and similar technologies when you use our Website. For example, you can control and block the cookies used by the Website by modifying the settings in your browser or on your device that allow you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. You can also adjust your settings so that your browser blocks all cookies or only cookies from third parties. You can also delete cookies that have already been placed on your devices.

However, please note that if you use your browser or device settings to block all cookies, you may not be able to access all or parts of our Website or services.

For more information about how cookies can be managed and deleted, please visit allaboutcookies.org or optout.networkadvertising.org.

Opting Out of Marketing Communications

You can opt out of receiving marketing-related electronic communications from us by clicking the “unsubscribe” link contained in the body of any such e-mail or text message we send you.

You can also opt out by either contacting us directly, or by contacting the AutoCanada store that sent you the message. Information on how to contact us can be found in the “How to Contact Us” section of this Policy, and information on how to contact the AutoCanada subsidiary that sent you the message can be found on their website.

Please note that if you opt out from receiving marketing-related electronic messages, we may still need to send you communications about your use of our services, our products, or other matters.

Retention, Storage, and International Transfer of Personal Information

We only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we collected it, or as permitted or required by law.

We may transfer your personal information to a jurisdiction other than the one in which it was collected, in order to fulfil the purpose for which we collected it, including for processing and storage by service providers. When your personal information is outside of its jurisdiction of origin, it is subject to the laws of the country or province in which it is located, which may have different data protection laws than its originating jurisdiction. Those laws may make your information accessible to law enforcement and national security authorities in that other jurisdiction. We could, for example, be obliged to respond to a subpoena or other mechanism that would give law enforcement officials access to your personal information. For more information about our policies and practices regarding service providers outside of Canada or Quebec, please contact us using the contact information in the “How to Contact Us” section below.

How We Protect Personal Information

We have implemented physical, organizational, contractual, and technological security measures in an effort to protect your personal information from loss or theft, unauthorized access, use, or disclosure.

For example, electronic and paper-based information is maintained under security systems appropriate to sensitivity of the personal information to safeguard personal information that is in the custody or in the control of AutoCanada from unauthorized access, collection, use, disclosure, copying, modification, disposal, or similar risks.

Furthermore, all third parties that obtain personal information from AutoCanada (with respect to financing requests and insurance applications, for example) are contractually required to protect customers' confidentiality in a manner consistent with this policy, and/or as required by law.

Despite these measures, we cannot guarantee that our safeguards will always be effective. A breach of security safeguards can result in such risks as phishing and identity theft. In such cases, we will act promptly to mitigate the risks and to inform you where there is a real risk of significant harm, or as otherwise required by law.

If you have reason to believe that your interaction with us is no longer secure or if you feel that the security of any information that you provided to us or that is under our control has been compromised, please contact us immediately using the contact information in the “How to Contact Us” section below.

Your Rights Regarding Your Personal Information

We expect you to supply us with updates to your personal information when required. We will not routinely update your personal information unless such a process is necessary.

You may make a request to access and review any personal information about you that we have collected, used, or disclosed, and we will provide you with any such personal information to the extent required by applicable laws.

You may also challenge the accuracy or completeness of your personal information in our records. If you demonstrate that your personal information in our records is inaccurate or incomplete, we will correct it as required.

We may require that you provide certain information (such as identification information and the name of your dealership) to fulfill your request to access or correct your personal information. Any such information will be used only for this purpose.

You also may have the right to withdraw your consent to our collection, use, or disclosure of your personal information. If you wish to withdraw your consent, please contact us using the contact information in the “How to Contact Us” section below. We will accommodate your request to withdraw consent, subject to legal or contractual restrictions. In some cases, withdrawal of your consent may mean that we will no longer be able to provide you with certain products or services.

You also may have the right to request that we delete your personal information in certain circumstances (for instance in case of obsolete information or information not justified by Identified Purposes). If you wish to do so, please contact us using the contact information in the “How to Contact Us” section below. We will accommodate your request to delete your personal information, subject to legal or contractual restrictions.

If applicable, you may also have the right to request information about the use of any automated decision system and the impact they may have on you.

We will not charge you any fees to access your personal information in our records without first providing you with an estimate of the approximate fees, if any.

You may also have the right to make a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or the applicable regulatory authority if you object to how we handle your request.

Third-Party Websites and Services

We may provide links to third-party websites for your convenience and information. We may also make opportunities available to you to purchase, subscribe to, or use other products or services from third parties with different privacy practices. Those other websites, products, or services are governed by the privacy statements and policies of the respective third party.

This Privacy Policy does not extend to any websites, products, or services provided by third parties. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of third parties and we encourage you to review all third-party privacy statements prior to using third-party websites, products, or services.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy was last revised as of the date that appears at the top of this page.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When changes are made, they are effective immediately upon publishing of the revised Privacy Policy posted on our Website, unless otherwise noted. We may also communicate any changes made to this Policy by other means, such as through e-mail if we have your e-mail address.

How to Contact Us

All comments, questions, concerns, or requests regarding your personal information or our privacy practices should be sent to our Privacy Officer at:

Privacy Officer
Address: 200 – 15511 123 Ave, Edmonton AB T5V 0C3
Telephone number: (780) 732-3135
Fax number: (780) 732-3152
E-mail address: privacy@autocan.ca

If you need to contact us about anything related to an information security issue, please write to securityincident@autocan.ca.

If your inquiry exclusively pertains to the practices of one of AutoCanada’s stores or collision centres, please contact them directly using the contact information contained on their respective websites.