This Privacy Policy describes our privacy practices as they relate to personal information. Personal information means any information about an identifiable individual.
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We respect your privacy. We protect your personal information under Canada’s Privacy Act.
This Privacy Policy explains how CMHC collects, uses and protects your personal information when you:
Please read this notice together with any other privacy notice that may apply to a specific CMHC product, program or service.
This summary explains how CMHC handles your personal information and outlines your privacy rights and choices.
The type of personal information depends on how you interact with us. It may include:
We may collect your personal information:
We may use your personal information to:
We may share your personal information with:
Some of these organizations may be located outside your province or outside Canada.
You may have rights under privacy laws, including the right to:
You can contact us to ask questions, make requests or raise concerns about your privacy. Email us at PrivacyOffice@cmhc-schl.gc.ca.
Protecting your personal information is important to us. CMHC has adopted strong standards and practices to protect it.
We value and respect the personal information entrusted to us. We make sure you can understand how we collect, use and share your information.
We limit the personal information we collect, use, share and store to what is necessary for our purposes and allowed under the Privacy Act.
We ensure all CMHC employees understand their responsibilities when handling personal information and when responding to requests in a timely, transparent and effective way.
We consider your privacy when we design and improve our products and services. We aim to follow Privacy by Design principles in accordance with the Privacy Act.
We bring together effective information‑management practices across CMHC to protect and govern personal information responsibly.
In some cases, our service providers need access to your personal information. They can only use it to provide services on our behalf unless they are legally obligated to disclose it to the authorities.
We give you choices about your personal information and we provide guidance on how to manage it. Our Privacy Office responds to privacy concerns and our Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Office helps you access or correct your personal information.
We may share your personal information without your consent when permitted or required by applicable law.
The personal information we collect includes but is not limited to:
For a full description of the types of personal information we collect, please read Info Source (Sources of Federal Government and Employee Information).
CMHC collects personal information that is directly related to its programs and activities. We work with partners in industry, all levels of government and communities across Canada to support role in shaping housing solutions.
For example, when you:
When we collect your personal information from you, we inform you through a privacy notice of the purposes of collection, how your information will be used and of your rights under the Privacy Act.
For example, we may collect your personal information from:
We collect information about how you use our website. This information is not usually linked to your identity. However, it may be linked in certain circumstances, such as when cookies are used. When this happens, we treat it as personal information.
The information we collect includes:
When you browse our website, we track your activities to infer your interests based on pages you have visited. We may do so to know what your interests are, to promote our products and services to you and to offer you products or services that are more relevant to you.
Cookies are files that a website automatically creates and stores on your computer to collect information on your web browsing activities. Like most websites, we use first-party cookies to improve your user experience.
Our website creates cookies that allow us to recognize you the next time you visit our website.
For example, we can know if you have already completed a survey, so we do not ask you to do it again. These cookies are called persistent cookies, because they stay in your browser after you have closed your session.
We also use third-party cookies for marketing purposes. These cookies allow us to:
For example, if you visit a page about business loans, an alphanumeric code that identifies you will be added to a list of users who are interested in financing solutions. This code will also be stored in a cookie on your computer. As a result, you may see a CMHC ad about financing solutions on a different website.
CMHC uses a consent management platform on its digital properties to support transparency and user choice with respect to cookies and similar tracking technologies. Through this mechanism, users are provided with information about the use of non-essential cookies and are given the ability to accept, reject or manage their consent preferences.
The platform helps operationalize those preferences by controlling the deployment of certain tracking technologies in accordance with the user’s selections. In doing so, it supports CMHC’s privacy practices by helping limit the collection of data, including certain information that may constitute personal information, where the required consent has not been obtained.
Additionally, you may adjust your browser settings to manage and/or delete cookies as you wish. Please consult your browser’s Help Menu for instructions.
Digital analytics tools typically make your data anonymous by removing part of your IP address.
Digital analytics tools rely on cookies to collect information. Cookies used by digital analytics tools will expire 2 years after your last visit to our website. For more information, consult the Google Analytics website and its privacy policy.
When you interact with us through social media, you give information to social media companies and not to us. This information is covered by each platform’s own privacy policy. Keep in mind that information you publish on social media can be seen by others.
We use your personal information or disclose it to third parties for the purpose for which the information was originally obtained or compiled, for a use consistent with that purpose or for a purpose permitted under the Privacy Act. Examples of use include the following:
We use your personal information to identify you.
We use your personal information to register you, for example, for an event.
We use your personal information to communicate with you and to answer your questions about our products or services.
When you apply for a loan, apply to one of our programs or request a specific service from CMHC, we use your personal information as part of our due diligence to determine whether you meet the requirements. This may include the validation of your credit worthiness, your identity, your age, your assets and your liabilities.
We use your personal information to provide tailored advice and direct you towards the most appropriate resources, products and services upon request. This way, we make sure our advice, resources, products and services are best suited to your profile.
To analyze how you use our website, social media presence and email newsletters and to improve your experience.
We collect and analyze data about web traffic and visits on our website, as well as interactions with our social media accounts and email newsletters. This is called digital analytics. Digital analytics allow us to:
If you have signed up to receive updates from us, we may send you promotional emails, newsletter, social media ads or other electronic messages.
We also use cookies to publish ads that target our users based on pages they have visited. You may see our ads when you browse the Web even though you never subscribed to anything. If this is a concern for you, there are things you can do to disable cookies in Section 8.2 below.
To offer you products and services that meet your needs.
We use your personal information to offer you advice or other opportunities for CMHC products or services you may be eligible for.
We use your personal information to evaluate your job application and to contact you if needed.
We comply with the Privacy Act. In some cases, the law allows us to use your personal information for other purposes than those listed above. For example, we can use personal information to detect and prevent fraud or to comply with court orders.
We take the responsibility of protecting your information seriously. We develop our website, products and services with privacy as a priority and incorporate strong security practices to safeguard your information.
Most of your personal information is stored in Canada, In some cases, it may be stored outside Canada if we use third-party service providers to store and/or process it.
We take the safeguarding of your personal information seriously. We have implemented security policies and practices in the interest of protecting your information as user or visitor to our website from unauthorized access, improper use, alteration, unlawful or accidental destruction and accidental loss. CMHC’s security infrastructure is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications.
We have implemented robust access and monitoring controls across all systems that store personal information, fully integrating these safeguards into our operational and business practices.
Additionally, CMHC employs a suite of privacy assessment tools, including privacy impact assessments, third-party privacy assessments and IT initiative-specific privacy assessments, to identify and evaluate privacy risks and to develop effective recommendations for mitigation and remediation.
While we have taken reasonable efforts to protect the confidentiality and integrity of your personal information, CMHC cannot guarantee the security of electronic systems or email and cannot be held responsible for unauthorized or unintended access that is beyond our control. CMHC also cannot guarantee, warrant, or represent in any way that the personal information you provide will be transmitted securely or protected completely against interception, loss, misuse or alteration, and we strongly recommend that you use appropriate discretion before transmitting sensitive personal information electronically.
Although at a minimum, personal information that has been used for an administrative purpose is retained for at least 2 years in compliance with the Privacy Act, we may retain your personal information for as long as necessary to accomplish our business purpose and compliance needs in accordance with our retention and disposition schedules in place for all our records.
Our employees or representatives may view your personal information for their work or for the reasons why we collected this information in the first place.
They will not view your personal information for any other reason.
Our service providers may need to handle your personal information (i.e. access, process or store). They are not authorized to disclose your personal information for any reason other than providing the services we ask for, or if they have a legal obligation to do so. Examples of services we obtain from our service providers include but are not limited to the following:
Although we strive to ensure personal information is stored in Canada, exceptionally some personal information may be stored by our service providers outside of Canada. As such, service providers may exceptionally be required to disclose or access your personal information outside of Canada. In all cases, our service providers handle and safeguard your personal information pursuant to strict contractual obligations in accordance with applicable law.
With your consent or as otherwise permitted by the Privacy Act we may communicate your personal information to relevant third parties, including for example, if we receive a court order to communicate your personal information; or, if disclosure is necessary for the protection of public interest; or, to collect money you owe us (deficiencies owed through legal judgement).
To unsubscribe, please advise CMHC at any time by email at contactcentre@cmhc.ca, or click on the “Unsubscribe” function included in specific emails. Please note that you will need to unsubscribe directly from each CMHC tool. Choosing to unsubscribe from one of CMHC’s mailing lists will not affect other email communications that you may receive from us or your access to our services and products.
You can control cookies in the following ways:
To do so, please contact the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Office or visit the Access to Information Online Request Service.
In some exceptional cases, we might be unable to give you access to your personal information. For example, if we cannot dissociate your personal information from:
You can ask us to make corrections to personal information that we have that is not accurate. If we do not make these corrections, you can ask us to add annotations to your personal information to explain why certain corrections you asked were not made. Finally, you can ask us to notify certain persons about these corrections or annotations. To do so, please contact the ATIP Office or complete a Personal Information Request Form and submit to our ATIP office.
You can express your privacy concerns by calling us or writing to us.
To file a privacy complaint, you must send an email to our ATIP Office.
This ensures that we keep a record of your complaint. Our ATIP Office will respond to you as soon as possible.
If you are not satisfied with how we respond to your complaint, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
To learn more about CMHC's functions and related information holdings, you can consult our Info Source (Sources of Federal Government and Employee Information). This resource also provides descriptions (known as “Personal Information Banks") of CMHC's programs and activities that use personal information to make decisions affecting individuals or store personal information in a way that is organized.
To get more information about how we manage Privacy at CMHC, you can review the annual reports about our administration of the Privacy Act.
We did our best to make this policy as easy to read and understand as possible. Here are a few more things you should know:
Because privacy concerns, business and legal requirements continually evolve, we may need to change this Privacy Policy in the future, with or without notice.
What if the policy has changed since your last visit?
If you visit our website or use our online services after our Privacy Policy has changed, you will be governed by the updated version of the Privacy Policy.
This policy is governed by the laws of Ontario and Canada. This policy complies with the Privacy Act of Canada.
For questions or comments about this policy, or to learn more about how we handle your personal information, please contact us by email or mail using the information below:
Email: PrivacyOffice@cmhc-schl.gc.ca
Contact us by mail:
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
CMHC Privacy Office
700 Montreal Road
Ottawa, On K1A 0P7
To access or correct your personal information, or to file a complaint, please contact us by email or mail using the information below:
Email: ATIP-AIPRP@cmhc-schl.gc.ca
Contact us by mail:
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
ATIP Office
700 Montreal Road
Ottawa, On K1A 0P7
Note: The masculine is used without prejudice and only for the sake of readability.
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CMHC protects the privacy of individuals who interact with us electronically or through other means. We protect your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act and other applicable laws.
Our website is open to all visitors. Some sections require you to register before you can access them.
You choose whether to provide personal information to CMHC.
When you provide personal information, you consent to CMHC collecting, using, disclosing, retaining, handling and processing it for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. This applies when you:
Please make sure that the information you provide is true, accurate and complete.
If you do not consent to CMHC collecting, using and disclosing your personal information, we may not be able to provide you with information or services. You may also not be able to access some features of the website or services that require personal information.
If you do not agree with this policy or the Terms and Conditions of Use for this website, you should not provide your personal information to CMHC.
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