Privacy Notice
Privacy Notice
THE ROYAL CANADIAN MINT AND PRIVACY
The Royal Canadian Mint (Mint) is a federal Crown corporation and we are committed to a website that respects our visitors’ privacy. All personal information within our control is protected under the Privacy Act and this Privacy Notice explains why and how we collect, use, retain, disclose, and dispose of your personal information. It also explains how you can control your personal information and make informed choices about certain preferences and settings. The Mint does not knowingly solicit or collect personal information, via this website, from children under the age of thirteen (13).
Information We Collect & Create
Your personal information may be required for access to and use of our website or the Mint App, as well as to optimize your online experience. We collect your personal information, including but not limited to: when you visit our website pages, open the App, log-in or update your mint.ca account, purchase our products, enter our contests, subscribe to our electronic newsletters/alerts, provide us with a product review and/or ask a question, respond to our surveys or direct enquiries to us.
The personal information that we collect directly and/or create includes:
- Your Internet Protocol ("IP") address
- Your user ID and passwords: To provide you with access to your mint.ca account and user profile
- Your mint.ca account information: Includes your name, email address, mailing or business address, telephone number, account number, username and password, and payment details. This information tells us who you are, how to contact you, where to ship your purchases and how you will pay for them. Your account information also contains other personal information that you may provide to us on a voluntary basis, such as your birthday (day and month only), language of choice and gender.
- Your Social Security Number (for American customers only): A Social Security Number (SSN) is required by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for U.S. deliveries that equal or exceed USD$2,500 and is collected by the Mint on purchases that equal or exceed $2,500CAD. The Mint does not use the information for any other reason other than as required to comply with U.S. Customs Regulations and to ensure delivery of the shipment of the goods into the U.S. The SSN is disclosed to the Mint’s third party carrier service provider(s) as required and is recorded in U.S. Customs systems. For more information, please visit the U.S. CBP website.
- Your feedback: This consists of insights that you have provided on how we may improve our products and services to meet your needs.
- Your opinions and commentary: Limited personal information is collected on the Mint's behalf by PowerReviews Inc. from site visitors choosing to utilize the product review and Q&A functionality on mint.ca product pages.
- Your email correspondence through this website: Used to respond to your enquiries and general communications of all kinds and is stored in Personal Information Bank entitled PSU 914 (Public Communications). With your permission and otherwise in accordance with Canada's anti-spam legislation, this information may also be used to communicate with you about the Mint and our products and services.
- Your transaction data: Shows us which products and services you have purchased or requested, and the manner in which you paid for them. To help prevent fraud and identity theft, we use a third party service provider to validate the identity of site visitors wishing to make purchases through a limited online authentication process and to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions.
The Mint collects personal information from a third-party service provider to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions on mint.ca. We collect information about credit card users supplied by the third party provider’s network of participating merchants, including such things as device data, IP address, email address, payment information, physical shipping address and billing address.
Use of Personal Information
Any personal information obtained from emails or completed feedback or survey forms may be used in a de-identified and aggregate form to produce statistical reports, as well as for internal audit and/or continuous improvement purposes (see Standard Personal Information Bank PSU 914 (Public Communications)).
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the collection, analysis, measurement and reporting of data about Web traffic and visits for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Information in digital markers may be used for the purpose of web analytics to remember your online interactions with our website and mobile app. For instance, when your computer requests a page on our website, we collect the following types of information for Web analytics purposes:
- The originating IP address
- The date and time of the request
- The type of browser used
- The page(s) visited.
We use Adobe Analytics and the information collected is disclosed to Adobe Systems Incorporated ("Adobe"), an external third party service provider. Your IP address is anonymized prior to being stored on Adobe's servers in order to help safeguard your privacy. As data collected for Web analytics purposes may go outside of Canada to Adobe's servers in the United States of America, it may become subject to the governing legislation of that country, including the USA Patriot Act.
Any personal information used on the Mint's behalf for the purpose of Web analytics may be used for communications and information technology statistical purposes, audit, evaluation, research, planning and reporting. Personal information collected in relation to Web analytics is not used by the Mint to profile identifiable individuals, or in decision making processes that directly affect individuals.
For more information on how your privacy is safeguarded in relation to web analytics, see the Standard on Privacy and Web Analytics.
Online Advertising — The Ads We Show You
The Mint collects and uses information about your web browsing behaviour, such as the pages you have visited, the searches you have made, and your shopping cart activity for the purposes of online advertising. This information is used to select which advertisement about our products and services should be targeted and displayed to you on websites other than the mint.ca.
Our goal is to ensure that our ads are relevant to our customers. The ads we display become more relevant when they are shown to users who are likely to be interested in the product or service we advertise. To this end, we work with companies (our "Service Providers") to market products and services that best reflect your interests and needs, thereby improving your overall website experience. This may involve sharing your personal information with the Service Providers. We and our Service Providers may use cookies or similar technologies in order to provide you with advertising based on your browsing activities and interests. These types of ads are called "interest-based advertising."
You may also receive interest-based ads when you are signed into any personal account you may have with our Service Providers, such as an email account.
Service Providers
Our Service Providers are based in other jurisdictions including the United States of America (USA), which means that the personal information collected may be transmitted outside of Canada, and subject to the governing legislation of the country where it is processed, including the USA Patriot Act.
*For more information about the privacy policies of our Service Providers, please refer to the Opt-Out Options.
Internet Protocol (IP) Address
The IP address is used to connect your computer to the Internet. The Mint uses software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage to, or on our website. This software receives and records the IP address of each computer that contacts our website, the date and time of the visit and the pages visited. We make no attempt to link these addresses with the identities of individuals visiting this site unless an attempt to damage the site has been detected. The aforementioned information may be shared with appropriate law enforcement authorities if suspected criminal activities are detected.
This information is included in Personal Information Bank PSU 939 (Security Incidents and Privacy Breaches). Such information may be used to report and investigate security incidents and to ensure that vulnerabilities are identified and the risk of future occurrences reduced.
Third Party Social Media
The Mint's use of social media serves as an extension of our presence on the Web. Social media accounts are public and are not hosted on our servers. Users who choose to interact with us via social media should read the terms of service and privacy policies of these third-party service providers and those of any applications used to access them. The Mint uses Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Personal information that you provide to us via social media accounts is collected to capture conversations (e.g. questions and answers, comments, "likes", retweets) between you and the Mint. It may be used to respond to inquiries, or for statistical, evaluation and reporting purposes. Comments posted that violate Canadian laws will be deleted and disclosed to law enforcement authorities. Comments that violate the Mint's Terms of Use will also be deleted.
The aforementioned personal information is included in Personal Information Bank PSU 938 (Outreach Activities).
On-line Orders, Payment and Shipment
When you place an order with the Mint, some of your personal information is collected and stored on our servers. You will choose a password, which we will use to protect your account's privacy. Should you forget your password, just follow the prompt to receive a new one. During the check-out process, we will collect payment information, your billing and shipping addresses and information on the products you wish to purchase. We will also ask for your telephone number and email address so that we can contact you should there be a problem with your credit card or order.
When making online payments by credit cards for any Mint products offered online, we use the services of third parties to process online credit-card authorizations and payments on our behalf. Personal information pertaining to your purchases and means of payment may be used to compose a list of purchasers of coins for future solicitation through a direct mail campaign and is included in Personal Information Bank RCM PPU 015 (Order Fulfillment Processing). We also use a third party provider to assist in detecting and preventing fraudulent credit card transactions on mint.ca. The provider uses such things as name, email address, physical shipping address and billing address, payment information, product information, device data and IP address for this purpose. Some of this information may be used by the provider to assist in detecting and preventing fraudulent purchases from other merchants in its network.
As well, we may share elements of your personal information with a third party shipper. In such a case, we will share only your name and shipping address with the shipper in order to ensure the accurate delivery of your order. We select our service providers very carefully and insist that they have privacy and security standards that meet our strict requirements. Shippers are prohibited from using your personal information for any purpose other than to ship your product to you, and they may not share or resell this data.
Loyalty Program
The Masters Club Loyalty program offers Mint customers an opportunity to accumulate and redeem benefits through the pursuit of their ideal coin collection. If you participate in the program, we use the personal information collected and contained in your customer account profile for the purpose of administering the program, including ongoing communication and publicity via email and direct mail, determination of membership level based on past purchases, as well as the determination and allocation of benefits, such as the birthday gift (which is an optional benefit). The Mint utilizes a third party, Lowe Martin, for direct mail campaigns and discloses a limited amount of personal information to Lowe Martin for this purpose. For more information, see the program's Terms and Conditions and Frequently Asked Questions.
Disclosure, Retention and Disposal of Your Personal Information
Personal information collected by the Mint for website security purposes may be disclosed to appropriate law enforcement authorities if suspected criminal activities are detected.
With respect to customer purchases, we disclose limited personal information relating to sales completed in the United States with service providers that calculate sales taxes owing and facilitate our processing of transactions that are tax exempt. Limited customer personal information relating to sales taxes incurred will be disclosed to relevant taxation authorities upon request in accordance with applicable law.
Any personal information collected by the Mint in relation to Web analytics will be retained for a limited period and then disposed of in a secure fashion. We will retain all other personal information collected via our website for a somewhat longer period on our servers. When the retention period for a record containing personal information has expired, we will dispose of it in a secure and permanent manner that accords with the requirements of applicable legislation and policy.
Audience‑Based and Personalized Advertising
If you would like to learn more about our Service Providers' privacy practices, use of cookies and online advertising and/or would like to opt-out of interest-based advertising by our Service Providers, please visit the Opt-Out page.
We use Meta’s (Facebook and Instagram) and Pinterest's cloud-based Custom Audiences, as well as Amazon's Advertiser Audiences to target ads to users of these services. This is done by:
- Uploading customized lists of visitor emails and customers derived from our website, or Mint App users to the applicable companies.
- Uploading "hashed" (i.e. encrypted) data to these companies who then match that data against hashed data from their own holdings.
*Hashed data is a security measure used because it helps to protect the personal information being transmitted. The matched data is added to the applicable Audiences and Mint-related ads are delivered to those individuals the next time that they use the service. Thereafter, the matched and unmatched hashes are deleted by the companies.
On Pinterest, we may target relevant users based on placement, interests, keywords, age, or demographics or by "Custom Audiences" of Pinterest who have interacted with our content before. We may also use Pinterest's "Expanded targeting," which is an ad group setting that enables an ad to be automatically targeted to relevant searches.
*If you wish to limit the advertisements personalized to you, please visit the Opt-Out page for instructions.
We use Twitter's Tailored Audiences service to target ads to Twitter users by:
- Uploading a file containing a list(s) of email addresses, Twitter IDs (user IDs or usernames), or mobile advertising IDs of our existing users/ customers to Twitter. This is done so that the information is matched against a file provided by Twitter that lists individuals who are active on the platform in order to target the matched individuals. To enhance user privacy, lists submitted for matching must include enough entries to result in at least 500 matches.
- Employing a website "tag" to place a "cookie" on the browser of each individual that visits this website. The unique ID of that cookie is recorded so that it can be included in the audience for remarketing on Twitter. As our users visit tag-containing web pages, Twitter conducts a match to determine whether the user is also a Twitter user. The targetable audience that is made available to advertisers in their Twitter Ads account is the subset of visitors who both visited the tag-containing web page and are Twitter users.
*If you do not wish to receive our Twitter-generated advertisements, please visit the Opt-Out page for instructions.
The Use of Cookies for Analytics and Online Advertising
A cookie is a snippet of data stored by a web browser that enables your browsing activity to be collected and used to personalize your online experience when you search for information. These cookies may be set through mint.ca by our advertising partners and may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and to show you relevant ads on other sites.
Adobe Analytics uses cookies to count website visits, analyze web traffic sources, and measure website usage of mint.ca. Cookies can store and provide only the information that was previously deposited in them. They are not able to execute code or access other information stored on the visitors’ computer. These cookies, which are set from Mint.ca, and associated data are secure and used only for our web analytics reports. The data is not available to third parties or other Adobe customers, unless used in aggregated industry reports.
Cookies or similar technologies are used to track your interaction with our advertisements on third-party websites in order to measure ad campaign success rates. For example, we might create a "remarketing" list of visitors to a web page relating to a new coin we have issued. Those visitors would then be shown advertisements relevant to that coin or a similar Mint product while browsing on other. Cookies used by the Mint cannot capture or access files and data stored on your computer.
*If you wish to opt-out of one or more companies' uses of cookies for the purposes of interest-based advertising, please visit the Opt-Out page for instructions.
Right of Access to, and Right to Request Correction of, Your Personal Information
In accordance with the Privacy Act, you have the right to request access to the personal information that the Mint keeps about you, as well as the right to request the correction of that personal information if it contains errors or is outdated.
*To learn more about requests under the Access to Information Act or personal information requests under the Privacy Act, please visit the Access to Information page.
Should you simply wish to update your account information, you can log in to www.mint.ca with your password where you will be able to review or modify your account information at any time. We can also do this on your behalf if you contact our Customer Support Centre.
- 1-800-267-1871 (Canada and US)
- 613-954-2626 (International)
*Note — Our agents will ask for information from you to confirm your identity before discussing or modifying any account information.
Do You Have Questions?
We invite you to contact us with any questions that you may have related to this Notice or regarding our privacy program by contacting our Privacy Office.
If you think your personal information has been mishandled by the Mint or that we have not lived up to our legal obligations under the Privacy Act, and we cannot help you directly resolve your concerns, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to file a formal complaint.
This can be done online or by filling out a form found here and mailing it to:
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
30 Victoria Street
Gatineau, Quebec K1A 1H3
Modifications to this Website Privacy Notice
The Mint reserves the right to change this Notice at any time, without notice or liability to you or any other person, by posting a revised version on this website. Our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information will be governed by the version of the Notice that is posted and in effect at that time. We recommend that you visit our site to periodically review this Notice.