Privacy of personal information is an important principle to Cherishome Living. We are committed to collecting, using, and disclosing personal information responsibly and only to the extent necessary for the premises, goods, and services we provide. We also try to be open and transparent as to how we handle personal information. This document describes our privacy policy.
Personal information is information about an identifiable individual. Personal information includes information that relates to their personal characteristics (e.g., gender, age, income, home address or phone number, family status), their health (e.g., disabilities) or their activities and views (e.g., religion, politics, opinions expressed by an individual, opinions about an individual). Personal information is to be contrasted with business information (e.g., an individual's business address and telephone number), which is not protected by privacy legislation.
Like all landlords, we collect, use and disclose personal information in order to serve our tenants and operate our property. For our tenants, the primary purpose for collecting personal information is to ensure their safety, security and reasonable enjoyment and that of our other tenants, to ensure they have access to the premises, equipment and services that we have agreed to provide, to preserve our property and to collect rents and other fees. Examples of the type of information we collect for these purposes includes the following:
As a service and convenience for tenants we may maintain public directories of tenants (e.g., by the front door). If you do not wish to be listed in any directories or wish to be described in a particular way, please let us know.
It would be rare for us to collect any personal information without the tenant's express consent, but this might occur in a case of urgency (e.g., the tenant is unavailable), where we believe the tenant would consent if asked and it is impractical to obtain consent (e.g., information provided by a relative about an absent tenant), appropriate public sources (e.g., government, court or tribunal records) or to investigate a breach of the tenancy agreement or contravention of the law.
We subscribe to a consumer reporting service. This service provides information to landlords about prospective tenants. In return, landlords provide information to the service in order for the service to maintain a databank on a tenant's history. We collect your full legal name and date of birth to ensure the accuracy of those records. Having a good tenant history filed with the service will make it easier for you to be accepted as a tenant at other properties in the future. We obtain your consent for using the consumer reporting service in your rental application form and tenancy agreement.
The information described above and the information set out below about prospective tenants can be collected or updated if the tenant is in arrears of rent or fees or wishes to renew a tenancy agreement.
Prospective tenants are requested to complete a rental application form so that we can assess their suitability as tenants and have necessary basic information should they become tenants. This would include the following types of information:
We will then confirm this information and check references and the conduct history of the prospective tenants. This might include following up with other individuals identified during the course of these inquiries as having relevant information (e.g., a person identified by a reference you provided to us). We may also contact a credit agency and/or a consumer reporting service for information about your suitability. We might also check appropriate public sources (e.g., government, court or tribunal records). By completing a rental application form you agree to our collecting this information about your suitability to be a tenant.
For members of the general public, our primary purpose for collecting personal information is to promote the safety of our tenants and the security of our property. For example we may operate security cameras and monitor the presence, vehicles and conduct of visitors and non-tenants on our property. We believe that the collection of this information is implied by the private and residential nature of our property.
Secondly we might gather personal information in the course of marketing our property to prospective tenants. This information is collected either from appropriate public sources (e.g., telephone directories) or directly from the individuals with their consent.
On our website, we only collect, with the exception of cookies (electronic markers identifying computers that have previously visited our website), the personal information you provide and only use that information for the purpose you gave it to us (e.g., to respond to your email message, to provide information about our property and services). Cookies are only used to help you navigate our website and are not used to monitor you.
We may use the services of a property manager. We will share any personal information we collect relevant to a particular property with that property manager but only for the purpose of assisting them in providing services to us. We ask any property manager to have their own privacy policy consistent with both our privacy policy and with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
We understand the importance of protecting personal information. For that reason, we have taken the following steps:
We need to retain personal information for some time to ensure that we can answer any questions you might have about the services provided and for our own accountability to external regulatory bodies. However, we do not want to keep personal information too long in order to protect your privacy.
We keep our tenant files for about ten years. Our tenant and contact directories are much more difficult to systematically destroy, so we remove such information when we can if it does not appear that we will be contacting you again. However, if you ask, we will remove such contact information right away. We keep any personal information relating to our general correspondence with people who are not our tenants for about two years.
We destroy paper files containing personal information by shredding. We destroy electronic information by deleting it and, when the hardware is discarded, we ensure that the hard drive is physically destroyed or completely reformatted.
Our Information Officer can be reached at:
60 Scarsdale Road, Unit #120
North York, ON M3B 2R7
Phone 416-386-9645 Ext .224
Fax 416-386-9645
The Information Officer will attempt to answer any questions or concerns you might have.
If you wish to make a formal complaint about our privacy practices, you may make it in writing to our Information Officer. He/she will acknowledge receipt of your complaint, ensure that it is investigated promptly and that you are provided with a formal decision and reasons in writing.
This policy is made under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. It is a complex Act and provides some additional exceptions to the privacy principles that are too detailed to set out here. There are some rare exceptions to the commitments set out above.
For more general inquiries, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Canada oversees the administration of the privacy legislation in the private sector. The Commissioner also acts as a kind of ombudsman for privacy disputes. The Information and Privacy Commissioner can be reached at:
112 Kent Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 1H3
Phone: (613) 995-8210, Toll-free: 1-800-282-1376
Fax: (613) 947-6850, TTY: (613) 992-9190
www.privcom.gc.ca
