Terms & conditions

Our Values

Trust is at the foundation of the YEG Startup Awards  and that includes trusting us to do the right thing with your information. Three main values guide us as we go about business. These values should help you better understand how we think about your information and privacy.

1. Your information belongs to you - We carefully analyze what types of information we need to provide our Awards Show, and we try to limit the information we collect to only what we really need. Where possible, we delete or anonymize this information when we no longer need it. When building and improving our service, our IT team works closely with our smaller organizing committee to build with privacy in mind. In all of this work our guiding principle is that your information belongs to you, and we aim to only use your information to your benefit.
   ‍
2. We protect your information from others - If a third party requests your personal information, we will refuse to share it unless you give us permission or we are legally required. When we are legally required to share your personal information, we will tell you in advance, unless we are legally forbidden.
   ‍
3. We help users and partner meet their privacy obligations - Many of the users and partners using our website do not have the benefit of a dedicated privacy team (us included), and it is important to us to help them meet their privacy obligations. To do this, we try to build our services so they can easily be used in a privacy-friendly way. We also provide detailed FAQs covering the most important topics, and respond to all privacy-related questions we receive (see contact below).

Why we process your information

We generally process your information when we need to do so to fulfill our Awards Show (for example, to process your nomination or vote), or where we or someone we work with needs to use your personal information for a reason closely related to their business (for example, to provide us/you with a service). Canadian law calls these reasons “legitimate interests.” These “legitimate interests” include:

• Preventing risk and fraud in at our Awards Show
  
• Answering questions or providing other types of support
  
• Helping community find and use services we or partners offer
  
• Providing and improving our Awards Show and services
  
• Providing reporting and analytics to better serve you
  
• Testing out features and additional services
  
• Assisting with marketing, advertising, or communications

We only process personal information for these “legitimate interests” after considering the potential risks to your privacy—for example, by providing clear transparency into our privacy practices, offering you control over your personal information where appropriate, limiting the information we keep, limiting what we do with your information, who we send your information to, how long we keep your information, or the technical measures we use to protect your information.

One of the ways in which we are able to help users using our website is by using techniques like “machine learning” to help us improve our services. When we use machine learning, we either: (1) still have a human being involved in the process (and so are not fully automated); or (2) use machine learning in ways that don’t have significant privacy implications (for example, reordering how apps might appear when you visit the app store).
‍

Your rights over your information

We believe you should be able to access and control your personal information no matter where you live. Depending on how you use our website, you may have the right to request access to, correct, amend, delete, port to another service provider, restrict, or object to certain uses of your personal information (for example, direct marketing). We will not charge you more or provide you with a different level of service if you exercise any of these rights.

You can exercise these rights over information we have about you. Please note that if you send us a request relating to your personal information, we have to make sure that it is you before we can respond. In order to do so, we may ask to see documentation verifying your identity, which we will discard after verification.

If you would like to designate an authorized agent to exercise your rights for you, please email us from the email address we have on file for you. If you email us from a different email address, we cannot determine if the request is coming from you and will not be able to accommodate your request. In your email, please include the name and email address of your authorized agent.

If you are not happy with our response to a request, you can contact us to resolve the issue. You also have the right to contact your local data protection or privacy authority at any time.

Finally, because there is no common understanding about what a “Do Not Track” signal is supposed to mean, we don’t respond to those signals in any particular way.

Where we send your information

We are a Edmonton organization (grassroots), but we work with and process data about individuals across the world. To operate our Awards Show and services, we may send your personal information outside of the region, province, or country. This data may be subject to the laws of the countries where we send it. When we send your information across borders, we take steps to protect your information, and we try to only send your information to countries that have strong data protection laws. If you would like more information about where your information might be sent, please contact us.

How we protect your information

Our teams work tirelessly to protect your information, and to ensure the security and integrity of our Awards Show and website. We also have independent auditors assess the security of our data storage and systems that process sensitive information. However, we all know that no method of transmission over the Internet, and method of electronic storage, can be 100% secure. This means we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your personal information.

How you can reach us

If you would like to ask about, make a request relating to, or complain about how we process your personal information, you can contact us by email at hello@yegstartupawards.ca. If you would like to submit a legally binding request to demand someone else’s personal information (for example, if you have a subpoena or court order), please email us to begin the process.‍

YEG Startup Community Awards
ATTN: Dominique Beaupre