When you create an account

Your email address, home and work phone numbers, and whether you want email in HTML or plain text. If you tell us the account is a corporate one, we also collect your company name, department and position.

When you place an order

Your billing name and address, your shipping name and address if it is different, your phone number, and the contents and total of the order. Payment is handled on the payment provider's own checkout, so the full card number does not pass through or get stored on shopRBC.com. We keep the order record, the card type, and the last four digits so we can identify the payment later.

When you ask us something

Whatever you put in the message, along with your name and email address so we can reply. Quote requests and custom system quotes are kept with your account so we can pick the conversation back up.

When you just browse

Pages you visit, roughly where you are connecting from, your IP address, and what browser and device you are using. This is collected by the analytics and advertising services described in the next section, not typed in by you.

Some cookies are needed for the site to work at all. They keep you signed in, remember what is in your cart, and let the checkout complete. The site will not function without them.

Beyond those, shopRBC.com loads the following third party services, all of which set cookies or collect identifiers:

• Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, to measure traffic and see which pages and products people actually use.
• Meta (Facebook) pixel, to measure the results of our advertising on Facebook and Instagram and to show ads to people who have visited the site.
• Microsoft UET, the equivalent for advertising on Bing and the Microsoft network.
• Google reCAPTCHA, to stop automated abuse of our forms.
• Google Fonts, which serves typefaces used on the site.
• Hellobar, which runs the notice bar at the top of the page.

Being straight about this: the Meta and Microsoft ones are advertising tools. They record what you looked at here so that ads can be targeted to you elsewhere. If you would rather they did not, your browser's tracking protection or an ad blocker will stop them, and the store will still work normally.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information. We share it only where the job requires it:

• Payment processors, to authorize and settle payments. Card details are entered on their checkout, not ours.
• NoFraud, our fraud screening service, to check card orders before they ship. It receives your name, billing and shipping address, email address, phone number, order number and order total, the last four digits of the card, the card type, and the IP address the order came from. It never receives the full card number, the expiry date, or the CVV.
• Shipping carriers, for the name, address and phone number, so they can deliver to you or collect a return.
• Distributors, where an item ships to you directly from a supplier rather than from our building.
• Demand ITS Inc., our sister company, if you ask to be referred for managed or on-site IT services.
• Google, Meta and Microsoft, through the analytics and advertising services listed above.
• Legal authorities, where we are required by law to provide it.

You choose whether to receive our newsletter and whether to receive backorder alerts, and both are settings on your account that you can change at any time. Every marketing email we send has an unsubscribe link in it. Unsubscribing does not stop order confirmations, shipping notices or replies to something you asked us, because those are not marketing.

Order and invoice records are kept for as long as tax and business law requires. Account details are kept while the account is open. Quotes, support messages and return records are kept while they are useful for warranty and service history, and then they go. If you ask us to delete your information we will delete what we are not legally required to keep, and tell you what we had to hold on to.

The site runs over an encrypted connection. Card numbers are handled by the payment provider and are not stored on shopRBC.com. Access to customer records is limited to staff who need it to do their job, and the people looking at your order are our own employees in Ottawa, not an outside call centre.

No system is perfect. If we ever have a breach that puts you at real risk of harm, we will tell you and we will report it, which is what PIPEDA requires.

You can ask what personal information we hold about you and we will tell you. You can ask us to correct anything that is wrong. You can withdraw consent for marketing at any time, and for other uses where the law allows it, though some information we have to keep in order to run the business and meet our tax obligations.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a privacy question, you can take it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.