At Avalanche Canada, we are committed to providing our users with exceptional service. Providing this service involves the collection, use and disclosure of some personal information about our users. Protecting this personal information is one of our highest priorities.
When you use the Avalanche Canada website, even if you’re just looking at our products, we receive information from you that tells us the type of device you’re using and your IP address.
If you have questions about this policy, feel free to contact us at support@avalanche.ca.
Basic Information
You don’t have to create an account to use some of our service features, such as searching and viewing public avalanche forecasts, weather forecasts or Mountain Information Network (MIN) submissions. If you do choose to submit to the MIN you must create an account so we are able to provide our services to you. Creating an account means you must provide some personal data, or you can link your Avalanche Canada account to a third-party network.
Mountain Information Network
Avalanche Canada’s MIN is publicly accessible, and any information submitted is immediately viewable and searchable by anyone around the world.
The viewable information includes a small portion of your profile.
If you are registered with an email account, the first section of your email address (the part before the “@”) will be public on any MIN submission. If you are registered with a third-party social network, then your public display name from that network will be made public with your MIN submission
The MIN was designed to help backcountry users make good decisions in avalanche terrain. The information submitted to this network can be critical for someone’s decision-making process. For this reason, we encourage transparency when submitting information. But if you prefer to be anonymous, you are able to register with an email or social media account that does not identify you.
You are responsible for your MIN submissions and other information you provide through our services. You should think carefully about what you make public, especially if it is information that is sensitive in any way.
In addition to providing your public information to the world directly on Avalanche Canada, we also have application programming interfaces (API) to make that information available to other websites. We cannot ensure that these other websites have the same privacy policies as Avalanche Canada, or will use your submissions in a manner similar to Avalanche Canada.
Deletion
Any data submitted to the MIN can be removed upon request by contacting support@avalanche.ca.
Keep in mind that consumers of our API such as search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, such as your profile information and public MIN submissions, even after you have deleted the information from our services or deactivated your account. This includes any sharing on social media services.
Other Information Collected
Service Providers
We engage service providers to perform functions and provide services to us in the United States, Canada and other countries. For example, we use a variety of third-party services to help operate our services, such as hosting our various blogs and wikis, and to help us understand the use of our services, such as Google Analytics.
To read more about how Google uses data when you use our products, see https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.
Cookies
A cookie is a small piece of data that is stored on your computer or mobile device. Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and to operate our services. Cookies are not required for many parts of our services such as searching and looking at public profiles. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, many browsers’ settings can be set to decline cookies or alert you when a website is attempting to place a cookie on your computer. However, some of our services may not function properly if you disable cookies. When your browser or device allows it, we use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our services, and to monitor and aggregate usage patterns. Cookies are also used to personalize and otherwise operate our services such as providing account security, personalizing the content we show you including ads, and remembering your language preferences.
Log Data
We receive information when you view content on or otherwise interact with our services, even if you have not created an account. We refer to this as “log data.” This log data includes information such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, limited device information and cookie information. We use this log data to operate our services, ensure their reliable and robust performance, and help determine the efficacy of our products.