Privacy Policy

Purpose

The Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST) respects your privacy and is committed to safeguarding the integrity of your personal information. We recognize and value the trust that individuals place in us when providing us with personal information, and we are committed to safeguarding the privacy and security of personal information we may collect from visitors to our websites and/or the individuals to whom we provide services.

This policy (Privacy Policy) governs CAWST's activities that are subject to the provisions of applicable privacy laws. However, as a not-for-profit organization, please note that certain of CAWST's activities may not be subject to applicable privacy laws in all instances.

This Privacy Policy aims to help you understand our personal information collection, usage and disclosure practices by explaining:

1. Who are we and what we do
2. What personal information we collect about you
3. How we obtain the personal information about you
4. How we use your personal information
5. Who we share your personal information with
6. Which countries we transfer your personal information to
7. How long will we keep your personal information
8. How we protect your personal information
9. What rights you have in relation to your personal Information
10. Who is the data controller for your personal information
11. How we use cookies and similar technologies
12. How you can contact us
13. How we will update this privacy policy

Your Consent

By providing us with your personal information (whether via one of our websites, by email, in person or over the phone), you agree to the processing of your personal information as set out in this Privacy Policy. Further notices highlighting certain uses we wish to make of your personal information, together with the ability to opt in or out of selected uses, may also be provided to you when we collect personal information from you.

Please note: This Privacy Policy does not apply to, and CAWST is not responsible for, any third-party websites which may be accessible through links from this website. If you follow a link to any of these third- party websites, they will have their own privacy policies, and you will need to check these policies before you submit any personal information to them.

1. Who Are We and What We Do

CAWST is a Canadian charity and licensed engineering firm founded in 2001. We address the global need for safe drinking water and sanitation by building local knowledge and skills on household solutions people can implement themselves.

2. What Personal Information We Collect About You

Your personal information is any information about you as an identifiable individual. It includes information that can be used, on its own or in combination with other information, to identify you.

We may collect and process different types of personal information in the course of operating our organization and providing our services. These include:

• Basic personal details, such as your name;

• Contact information, such as your telephone number and mailing or email address;

• Payment information, which is collected indirectly through our service providers (either Stripe, CAF America, Canada Helps, or Square, depending on the activity undertaken);

• Demographic information such, as your address, residence, preferences or interests, gender, and age-range;

• Website usage and other technical data, such as details about your visits to our websites or information collected through cookies and other tracking technologies;

• Recruitment related personal information, such as your resume, your education and employment history, details of professional memberships and other information relevant for potential volunteer and career opportunities with CAWST;

• Personal information that you may provide to us in the course of registering for and attending workshops or events, including your job title and description, your implementation of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects, and your affiliation with an organization;

• Any other personal information relating to you that you may provide.

3. How We Obtain the Personal Information About You

We may collect or receive your personal information in a number of different ways:

• Where you provide it to us directly, for example, by corresponding with us by email, using the subscribe or contact us link on our website, through our online chat portal, or via other direct interactions with us;

• Where you use or view our website via your browser's cookies;

• Through publicly available sources, for example, when you interact with us on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram;

• Through third-party sources, such as (a) when you sign up for a training session with one of our Training Partners or (b) when you provide information to a third-party platform made available on our website or elsewhere. Specifically:

  1. Collection of personal information through our Training Partners

     We partner with certain organizations, groups or individuals (Training Partners) to offer members of the public access to CAWST's workshops and educational content through Training Partners in their local areas. Through these partnerships, we collect the personal information you provide when you register for a workshop by submitting a CAWST Training Application form through one of our Training Partners.

  2. Collection of personal information through third-party service providers

     Please see subsection 6(b) of this Privacy Policy for a list of third-party service providers we currently partner with, who may collect your personal information on our behalf to better allow us to provide you with our resources and services.

4. How We Use Your Personal Information

We will only use your personal information where we are permitted to do so by applicable law. Under EU and UK data protection law, the use of personal information must be justified under one of a number of legal grounds. The principal legal grounds that justify our use of your personal information are:

• Contract performance: where your information is necessary to enter into or perform a contract with you.

• Legal obligation: where we need to use your personal information to comply with our legal obligations.

• Legitimate interests: where we use your personal information to achieve a legitimate interest and our reasons for using it outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights.

• Legal claims: where your information is necessary for us to defend, prosecute or make a claim against you, us or a third party.

• Consent: where you have consented to our use of your information (you will have been presented with a consent form or other means of consenting in relation to the use of your personal information and may withdraw your consent through an unsubscribe option or similar means of withdrawing consent).

We may use your personal information in the following ways. In each case, we note the grounds that we rely on to use your personal information.

• To facilitate your enrolment in, and to provide you with access to, our training workshops, educational content, and other services.

• To help us improve our WASH workshops and educational content.

• To process your membership with CAWST.

• To process donations made to CAWST. We use third-party service providers ( such as Stripe, CAF America, or Canada Helps, depending on the type of donation made) to process donations made to CAWST. Your payment information is encrypted by these service providers and CAWST does not have access to any of your payment information.

• To issue a charitable tax receipt for your donation.

• To process your online purchases of CAWST merchandise. We use Square, a third-party service provider, to process your payment when you shop online from our website. Your payment information is encrypted by Square and CAWST does not have access to any of your payment information.

• To facilitate your use of our websites and to ensure content is relevant. We collect your personal information to respond to enquiries or requests you may make and to ensure that content from our websites is presented in the most effective manner for you and your device.

• To communicate with you. When you communicate with us by email, through our contact us page, through our online chat portal, by phone, or otherwise, we collect your personal information to better respond to your inquiries. We will typically keep a record of your communication and will retain it in compliance with applicable laws (as explained in section 7 of this Privacy Policy).

• To publish your experiences with CAWST. With your express permission, we collect your name and what you choose to tell us about your experiences using CAWST's training and services to share those experiences on our website, our blog or on social media. We will let you know where we will be publishing your testimonial before you agree to the use of your personal information in this way.

• For marketing purposes. We collect your personal information to provide you with details of new services, workshops, updates and invites to seminars and events where you have chosen to receive these. We will provide you with an option to unsubscribe or opt-out of further communication on any electronic marketing communication sent to you, or you may opt out by contacting us as set out in section 12 below;

• To facilitate career and volunteer opportunities. We collect your personal information to allow us to process applications for employment or volunteer opportunities submitted on our website and to assess your suitability for any position for which you may apply at CAWST.

• To fulfill our legal, regulatory, or risk management obligations. We may collect your personal information to enforce our legal rights, comply with our legal or regulatory reporting obligations and/or protect the rights of third parties.

• To inform you of changes. In the event that we undergo a reorganization, we may need to transfer some or all of your personal information to the relevant third party (or its advisors) as part of any due diligence process or transfer to that reorganized entity or third party your personal information for the same purposes as set out in this Privacy Policy or for the purpose of analyzing any proposed reorganization.

• In any other way as described when you provide us with your personal information.

5. Who We Share Your Personal Information With

We may share your personal information with a variety of the following categories of third parties:

• Our professional advisors (e.g. legal, financial, business, risk management or other advisors), bankers and auditors;

• Our insurers and insurance brokers;

• Our Training Partners; and

• Third-party service providers, as outlined in section 6.

We may also share your personal information to:

• Comply with our legal or regulatory requirements, which may include disclosing your personal information to government, regulatory or law enforcement agencies in connection with enquiries, proceedings or investigations by such parties anywhere in the world or where compelled to do so. Where permitted, or unless doing so would prejudice the prevention or detection of a crime, we will direct any such request to you or notify you before responding;

• If we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property, or safety of CAWST, our employees, service users or any others.

• For the purpose disclosed by us when you provide us with the personal information.

• For other purposes where we have obtained your consent to do so.

6. Which Countries We Transfer Your Personal Information To

Although CAWST is a Canadian charity, we may transfer your personal information outside of Canada when (a) you register for a CAWST workshop through one of our Training Partners or (b) we use service providers for the operation and management of our website:

1. Training Partners

   CAWST partners with Training Partners around the globe to offer educational content and WASH workshops in different regions. Your personal information will only be accessible by CAWST and the Training Partner through which you have registered to take the workshop.

   We have data protection agreements in place with our Training Partners to protect the confidentiality and security of information (including personal information) shared with them.

2. Service Providers

   We may share your personal information to third-party service providers to better allow us to provide you with our resources and services.

   Third-party platforms or service providers used for the operation of the website may also collect, use, and disclose your personal information. While some of these third-party platforms may collect personal information on CAWST’s behalf, they may also collect additional personal information about you or the devices that you use to access the website. We do not control these third-party platforms or websites and note that they may have their own privacy policies that outline how they process your personal information. Information about how these platforms process personal information can usually be found in their respective privacy policies and cookies policies on their websites. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of our third-party service providers so you may understand how they collect, use, and disclose your information. Our current service providers include:

   • Stripe, located in the US and Ireland, for payment processing;

   • CAF America, located in the US, for payment processing;

   • Canada Helps, located in Canada, for processing cryptocurrency;

   • Square, located in the US, for payment processing;

   • Better Impact, located in the US, for processing personal information when you apply to volunteer with CAWST;

   • SmartRecruiters, located in the US, for processing personal information when you apply for a job with CAWST;

   • Google, located in the US, for website analytics, forms, maps, and SPAM protection

   • Auth0, a subsidiary of Okta located in the US, for site registration and login

   • Bettermode Technology, located in Canada, for discussion forum functionality

   • Microsoft, located in the US, for registration forms and analytics

   • Amazon, located in the US, for server hosting

   We have agreements in place with these service providers to protect the confidentiality and security of information (including personal information) shared with them. Should you choose to sign up for a CAWST account via a third party (such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Microsoft Account) you consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information by those third parties.

   CAWST has and will invest in new data management systems and software solutions on a routine basis to provide you with our resources and services. As data processing technologies continually evolve, more systems and software solutions use “cloud-based” delivery models, where data processing and storage functionality is delivered from outside CAWST's premises and through the internet or similar connections to the service provider, and where CAWST does not host the system or software solution within its physical premises. While CAWST maintains its responsibility for the protection of this data and the personal information contained within it, the collection, use, disclosure, processing and storage of personal information may actually occur outside of Canada, as indicated in the above list of CAWST's service providers.

   In those circumstances, the governments, courts, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies of the above countries may be able to obtain access to your personal information through the laws of the foreign country. We encourage you to review the privacy policies associated with these third parties to understand where your personal information may be processed, stored or transferred.

   By submitting your personal information or engaging with our website, you consent to the collection of your personal information by these third-party service providers for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.

   If you have any questions about the collection of your personal information by the above service providers, please contact our Privacy Officer at privacy@cawst.org or contact us using the contact details below in section 12.

7. How Long Will We Keep Your Personal Information

We will retain your personal information for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purpose for which this information was collected and any other permitted linked purpose. If your personal information is used for two purposes, we will retain it until the purpose with the latest period expires. However, we will stop using it for the purpose with a shorter period once that period expires. Our retention periods are also based on our business needs and good practice.

8. How We Protect Your Personal Information

We recognize that information security is an integral element of data privacy. While no data transmission (including over the Internet or any website) can be guaranteed to be secure from intrusion, we implement a range of commercially reasonable physical, technical and procedural measures to help protect personal information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, alteration or destruction in accordance with data protection law requirements.

Information that you provide to us is stored on our or our service providers' secure servers and accessed and used subject to our security policies and standards, or those agreed with our service providers.

Everyone at CAWST, and any third-party service providers or Training Partners we may engage to process personal information on our behalf (for the purposes listed above), are also contractually obligated to respect the confidentiality of personal information.

Alongside our role, please also note that where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our websites or online services, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential and for complying with any other security procedures that we notify you of. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

9. What Rights You Have In Relation To Your Personal Information

If you have any questions about our use of your personal information, you should first contact us via the details provided in section 12 below. Under certain circumstances, and in accordance with applicable data protection laws, you may have the right to require us to:

• provide you with further details on the use we make of your information;

• provide you with further details on how we have disclosed your information, and to whom;

• provide you with a copy of information that we hold about you;

• update any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold;

• delete any personal information that we no longer have a lawful ground to use;

• where processing is based on consent, to withdraw your consent so that we stop that particular processing;

• object to any processing based on the legitimate interests ground unless our reasons for undertaking that processing outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights; and

• restrict how we use your information while a complaint is being investigated.

You may also ask us not to process your personal information for marketing purposes. We will inform you if we intend to disclose your information to any third-party service provider for this purpose. You can unsubscribe to receiving marking communications from us at the bottom of our marketing emails or by contacting us at privacy@cawst.org.

We are also required to take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information remains accurate. In order to assist us with this, please let us know of any changes to the personal information that you have provided to us by contacting us at privacy@cawst.org.

While it is our policy to respect the rights of individuals, please be aware that your exercise of these rights is subject to certain exemptions to safeguard the public interest (e.g. the prevention or detection of crime), our interests (e.g. the maintenance of legal privilege) and some of these rights may be limited (for example the right to withdraw consent) where we are required or permitted by law to continue processing your personal information to defend our legal rights or meet our legal and regulatory obligations.

If you contact us to exercise any of these rights, we will check your entitlement and respond in most cases within a month.

If you are not satisfied with our use of your personal information or our response to any exercise of these rights, you have the right to complain to the relevant data protection regulator.

10. Who Is The Data Controller For Your Personal Information

Where we collect your personal information indirectly from, or sent to, service providers or our Training Partners, we are the data controller for your personal information.

11. How We Use Cookies And Similar Technologies

When you visit our website, we may send a cookie to your computer. This is a small data file stored by your computer to help improve functionality or tailor information to provide visitors with more relevant pages. We may also analyze website traffic to identify what visitors find most interesting so we can tailor our websites accordingly.

12. How You Can Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or how we process your personal information, please contact us by sending an email to privacy@cawst.org or by writing to:

Privacy Officer CAWST B12, 6020 - 2 Street SE, Calgary Alberta, T2H 2L8 Canada

13. How We Will Update This Privacy Policy

We may change the content of our website and how we use cookies without notice. Consequently, our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy may change from time to time in the future. We encourage you to review these policies when you visit the website to stay informed of how we are using your personal information.