Our Philosophy

The Chef Alliance and our affiliated companies ("The Chef Alliance”) respect your privacy concerns of the information you share with us.  Therefore, we have established a Privacy Policy that sets how we will treat your personal information.
 

What Our Privacy Policy Covers

* Our Privacy Policy covers how The Chef Alliance treats personal information that we collect and receive including information relating to your needs for services and membership offered by the Chef Alliance or by its members.
* Personal information is information about you that is personally identifiable like your name, address, email address, or phone number, and that is not otherwise publicly available.
* When dealing with The Chef Alliance, you can be secure in the knowledge that we will only use personal information in accordance with this policy.  Our policy should not be interpreted as extending to The Chef Alliance members.  You should inquire about the Privacy Policy of any member of The Chef Alliance you are in contact with, as they are not bound by this Privacy Policy and may have their own Privacy Policy.


Information Collection and Use
 
    General

        * Your personal information is collected when you contact The Chef Alliance or its members or sign up for any services, product or information from The Chef Alliance.  Personal information is also collected when you enter any contest or promotion.  We may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies to ensure that it is accurate and complete.
        * When you contact The Chef Alliance, we ask for information such as your name, address, telephone number, fax number, email address, zip or postal code, occupation and industry. Once you contact The Chef Alliance or sign up for any products you are not anonymous to us.

    Information Collection, Sharing and Disclosure

         a) Collection

           * We collect the information you provide to us as well as information regarding your contact with us and information regarding your visit to our website.
            * The Chef Alliance will limit the collection of personal information to that which is necessary for the purposes identified by The Chef Alliance.  The Chef Alliance will collect personal information by fair and lawful means, including from credit bureaus, employers or personal references, or other third parties who represent that they have the right to disclose the information.

        b) Use

        * The Chef Alliance will not use or disclose personal information for purposes other than those for which it was collected, except with the consent of the individual or as required or permitted by law. The Chef Alliance will retain personal information only as long as necessary for the fulfillment of those purposes.
            * We will use the information you provide to us for the following purposes:

                * To identify individuals;
                * For Chefs, to establish, maintain, communicate and renew membership in the Chef Alliance;
                * To advertise, develop, enhance and provide marketing services and products;
               *  to measure and improve the effectiveness of The Chef Alliance’s services, products and marketing endeavours;
                * To run contests, select entrants, and choose prize winners;
               * To respond to your questions or the comments you e-mail to us;
                * To provide you with newsletters or other information about our personal chef services, and specials offered independently by our members.
               * To distribute to sponsors and advertisers who run the contests and/or for purposes of marketing by our sponsors and advertisers;
               * To keep aggregate information on Website use.
                * To meet legal and regulatory requirements.

        * We also may share this information with our Web designer and sponsors. We collect the following non-identifiable information when you visit our Web site:

                * Your Internet Service Provider (ISP)
                * Time of your visit
               * Pages you visited
               * Your Web Browser

        *We do not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or non-affiliated companies except to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:

                  * We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with us under confidentiality agreements.  You can rest assured that these companies cannot in turn share the information we give with anyone else.
                  * We respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims;
                  * To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of the law in accordance with our common law and statutory duties.
                  * Terms of use of our website resources, our products and services or as otherwise required by law.
                  * We transfer information about you if we are acquired by or merged with another company.  In this event, we will notify you before information about you is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

        *c) Disclosure
        The Chef Alliance may disclose an individual's personal information to:
            * a third party who in the reasonable judgment of the Chef Alliance is seeking the information as an agent of the individual;
                * a third party involved in supplying the individual with the Chef Alliance products or services;
               * a third party engaged by the Chef Alliance to perform functions on its behalf;
                * a third party engaged by the Chef Alliance for the development, enhancement, marketing or provision of any of the Chef Alliance's products or services;
               * a third party engaged by the Chef Alliance to collect the member's or non-member's account;
              * a credit reporting agency;
              * a public authority or agent of a public authority if, in the reasonable judgment of the Chef Alliance, it appears that there is imminent danger to life or property which could be avoided or minimized by disclosure of the information; or
                * a third party or parties, where the individual consents to such disclosure or disclosure is required or permitted by law.


Web site Privacy Policies

    Usage Tracking

    * Our site may automatically record some general information about your visit, which we use for statistical analysis to help make our site more useful to visitors. This information might include the:

            * Internet domain for your Internet service provider, such as 'company.com' or 'service.ca' and the IP address of the computer accessing the Web site, such as 'ppp-55';
           * type of browser you are using, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape;
          * type of operating system you are using, such as Windows or Macintosh;
           * date and time you visit our site and Web pages that you visit on our site, along with the address of the previous Web site you were visiting, if you linked to us from another Web site.

    Cookies

    * We also use "cookies" that identify you as a return visitor and which can help us tailor information to suit your individual preferences. A cookie is a piece of data that a Web site can send to your browser, which may then store the cookie on your hard drive. The goal is to save you time and provide you with a more meaningful visit and to measure Web site activity. Cookies do not contain any personally identifying information. Many browsers, however, allow you to disable cookie collection if you wish, or inform you when a cookie is being stored on your hard drive.

    Online transactions

    * We protect the security of your transactions on our Web site by using Thawte SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Web server certificates that offer secure communications by encrypting all data going to and from The Chef Alliance Web site. Thawte has checked and verified the Chef Alliance registration documents and the site's registered domain name.

    External Links

    * This policy discloses the privacy practices for our Web site. However, our site contains links to other sites. Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy and security policies of the new site. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of all Web sites you visit.
 

Confidentiality and Security

* The Chef Alliance will protect your  personal information by security safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information.
* Your personal information is only shown to employees who we believe reasonably need to come into contact with that information to provide products or services to you or in order to do their jobs.


Changes to this Privacy Policy

* We may update this policy.  If we do so, we will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to your email address that we have on record or by placing a notice on our corporate site.


Your Consent

*By using this Web site or any product or service we provide, you consent to the terms of our Privacy Policy.  The application of the Chef Alliance’s Privacy Policy is subject to the requirements and provisions of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act ((Canada)), the regulations enacted thereunder, and other applicable legislation or regulation.


Additional Information

We want to ensure that your information is always accurate.  So if you need to update or make corrections to any of the information you have provided, please send the update to personalinformationupdate@thechefalliance.com.  We will make reasonable efforts to incorporate the changes in your Personal Information that we hold as soon as practicable.

For more information regarding the Chef Alliance’s Privacy Policy, please contact the Chef Alliance Privacy Officer privacyofficer@thechefalliance.com. Access requests, inquiries or complaints may also be sent by email to the email address above.