Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Otonomy Solutions Ltd. (Otonomy), we have a few fundamental principles:

We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

Hello! We are the people behind a variety of products and services designed to empower current and future small business owners to control their future. Our mission is to remove the barriers for buying and selling small businesses within Canada by creating an unparalleled, online platform experience that will educate, facilitate and drive the successful transition of small business ownership. We believe we can change the way Canadians view small business ownership.

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

Our website (otonomy.ca);
Our other Otonomy products, services, and features that are available on or through our websites; and
Other users’ websites that use our Services, while you are logged in to your account with us.

This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at Otonomy.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

Basic account information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for an Otonomy account to provide an email address and password, along with their name. You may provide us with more information — like your address and other information you want to share to achieve one of our badge levels and unlock all data on the site — but we don’t require that information to create an account.
Public profile information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have an account, your first name is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or a “Biography” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
Payment and contact information: If you list a business for sale through us, we will collect information to process those payments and you will provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made. All credit card data is stored with our payment provider Stripe. You can read more about their policies here.
Non-Public information: You might provide us with additional private information about you, such as your address, that is non-public and that we keep private from other site users.
Public Business Information: If you chose to list your business on our site, we will collect the information you provide to build that listing. For example, the name of your business and business address. That information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include
Communications with us (hi there!): You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our team members about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, online form, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).
Job applicant information: If you apply for a job with us — awesome! You may provide us with information like your name, contact information, resume or CV, and work authorization verification as part of the application process.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

Log information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services — for example, when you create or make changes to your listing.
Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about when you edit your profile and what edits you’ve made — in other words, who did what and when. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, support document searches, and other parts of our Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, get insights on how people use our Services so we can make our Services better, and understand and make predictions about user retention.
Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
Interactions with other users’ sites: We collect some information about your interactions with other users’ sites while you are logged in to your account with us, such as your “Likes” and the fact that you commented on a particular post so that we can, for example, recommend listings we think may interest you.
Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Otonomy uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and deliver targeted ads.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you connect your account to a social media service (like Twitter) through our social media sharing feature, we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information, friends list) via the authorization procedures for that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and what options are available.

Third-party services may also give us information, like mailing addresses for individuals who are not yet our users (but we hope will be!). We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.

How and Why We Use Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Services. For example, to set up and maintain your account, provide customer service, process payments and orders, and verify user information.
To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services. For example, by providing automatic upgrades and new versions of our Services. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our Services so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them create and manage websites more efficiently or make our Services easier to use.
To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing. For example, by targeting our marketing messages to groups of our users (like those who have a particular plan with us or have been users for a certain length of time), advertising our Services, analyzing the results of our marketing campaigns (like how many people purchased a paid plan after receiving a marketing message), and understanding and forecasting user retention.
To protect our Services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Otonomy and others, which may result in us, for example, declining a transaction or terminating Services.
To fix problems with our Services. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our Services and recommending content for your reading pleasure.
To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our services, or keep you up to date on Otonomy; texting you to verify your account or payment; or calling you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)
To recruit and hire new Otonomy Team Members. For example, by evaluating job applicants and communicating with them.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below:

Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g., by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services)); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); other third-party tools that help us manage operations. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other formal governmental request.
To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Otonomy, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Otonomy goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so.
Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.
Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.

That means information like your public profile, comments on our support or community sites, other content that you make public on our website are all available to others. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to otonomy.ca, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to our website and investigate issues if something goes wrong.

As another example, when you delete a for sale listing from our site, it stays in your Trash folder for thirty days in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content, because starting from scratch is no fun. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain in our backups and caches until purged.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to use a strong, unique password for your account with us and not share your login information with anyone.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services — for example, full access to all listing details and our messaging system – will not be available to you.
Opt-out of marketing communications: You may opt-out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt-out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, Otonomy does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Otonomy’s website, with the drawback that certain features of Otonomy.ca may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, you can close your account by contacting us by email if you no longer want to use our Services. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above — for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, you can contact us via email. These are the fastest ways to get a response to your inquiry.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Otonomy may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Otonomy encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to our Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage or sending you a notification through email or your message centre). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Change log

*Portions of this Privacy Policy have been adapted under a Creative Commons Sharealike licence from Automattic.com. We appreciate their willingness to share with the world at large!