Privacy Policy

Aquasonics Artistic Swimming Club (“Aquasonics”, “the club”, “we”) is a not-for-profit society incorporated in British Columbia under the Societies Act. We run artistic swimming programs out of municipal pools in Coquitlam and Surrey, and we are governed by a volunteer board of parents and members.

This policy covers this website, bcaquasonics.com, and the personal information the club handles through it. Registration itself happens on a Google Form, and swimmers in summer programs are also covered by the BC Summer Swimming Association’s policy — both are explained in section 7.

The full policy is below, because the law and your rights deserve the detail. But in plain terms:

• The club is volunteer-run. We collect as little as we can, and we have no commercial interest in your data.
• This website has no database. The two forms on it send an email to a club inbox and nothing more.
• We never sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
• Google Analytics sets cookies to tell us which pages are working. You can turn it off — see section 6.
• Photographs of swimmers are published only with consent, and you can ask us to take one down at any time — see section 9.
• You can ask to see, correct or delete what we hold about you. Email president@bcaquasonics.com.

The club is governed by British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). This matters and is often misunderstood: PIPA applies to non-profit organizations in BC, not only to businesses. The federal law people tend to name first, PIPEDA, applies to organizations engaged in commercial activity, which is largely not what a volunteer swim club does. PIPA is therefore our operative statute, and it is the one this policy is written against.

Under PIPA, personal information means information about an identifiable individual. A name, an email address, a swimmer’s age, a photograph in which someone can be recognised, and in some circumstances an IP address, all qualify.

Information you choose to give us. There are two forms on this site, and both do the same thing: they send an email to a club inbox. Nothing is stored in a database, because the site does not have one.

• The “Start here” form on the home page collects your email address, the program you are interested in, and your swimmer’s age range — not their date of birth, and not their name. It then sends you on to the registration form. We keep the answers so that if you abandon registration partway, the registrar can follow up rather than lose you silently.
• The “Notify me” form on pages we have not finished building collects your email address and the name of the page you were on, so we can tell you when it is live.

Information collected automatically. Like nearly every website, this one records some technical information about visits:

• Google Analytics 4 — which pages are visited, roughly where in the world from, and which links are clicked, including registration buttons and policy downloads. This is the only thing on the site that sets cookies. Full detail in section 6.
• Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights — page views and page-loading performance. These set no cookies and do not track visitors across other websites.
• Server logs — our host records standard request information, including IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting. These are kept briefly and are not used to build any profile of you.

We collect personal information only for purposes a reasonable person would consider appropriate: answering your enquiry, registering a swimmer, running programs and competitions, keeping people safe in and around the pool, meeting our obligations to the sport’s governing bodies, and understanding whether this website is doing its job.

Under PIPA, consent can be express or implied. When you type your email into a form asking us to contact you, your consent to that use is implied by the act itself. Where the purpose is less obvious — publishing a photograph of your child, for instance — we ask for express written consent instead.

You can withdraw consent at any time by writing to us. We will explain what that means in practice before acting on it, because some withdrawals limit what we can offer: we cannot, for example, enter a swimmer in a sanctioned competition without sharing their registration details with the governing body.

On email specifically: we send you only what you asked for. We do not add enquiry addresses to a mailing list, and any club newsletter is opt-in with an unsubscribe link in every message.

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep. This site uses them in one place, and embeds one thing that uses its own.

How to turn analytics off. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, or install Google’s official Analytics opt-out add-on. Any ordinary content blocker will also stop it. Nothing on this site breaks if you do — the club gets less insight, and you lose nothing.

We do not use advertising cookies, we do not run advertising on this site, and we have disabled the cross-device advertising features that Google Analytics offers.

Registration. Registering a swimmer happens on a Google Form, not on this website. What you enter there is collected by Google on the club’s behalf and delivered to the club registrar. That form asks for considerably more than this site does — swimmer and parent names, contact details, birthdate, emergency contacts and relevant medical information — because the club genuinely needs those things to run a safe program and enter swimmers in competition.

Governing bodies. Competitive and summer registration requires the club to share swimmer details with the organisations that sanction the sport, including Canada Artistic Swimming, its provincial counterpart, and the BC Summer Swimming Association for summer programs. Those bodies handle that information under their own privacy policies. BCSSA’s applies to summer-program registrants in addition to this one, and is published on our policies page.

Coaches and volunteers. Coaches receive the information they need to coach your swimmer safely — medical notes and emergency contacts in particular. Board members and volunteers see personal information only where their role requires it.

Most of our swimmers are children — our recreational programs start at age five. We take that seriously.

• Where a swimmer is a minor, consent is given by a parent or guardian, not by the child.
• This website is written for parents and does not knowingly collect personal information directly from children. The one form that touches a child’s details asks only for an age range, and is plainly addressed to the adult filling it in.
• If you believe a child has given us personal information without your consent, email us and we will delete it.

The photographs on this site are of real Aquasonics swimmers. A recognisable image of a person is personal information, so we treat it that way.

• Photographs and video of swimmers are published only where consent has been given, through the club and BCSSA Media Release and Waiver.
• That consent covers use in club promotional material, on this website and on the club’s social media, and the disclosure of basic details — first and last name, age, hometown, results — to local and provincial media alongside those images.
• One limit worth stating plainly, because it surprises people: the waiver notes that consent is not required for information, photographs and video collected by observation at a public sporting event, and neither the club nor BCSSA can restrict photography at public competitions by spectators or media.

To have a photograph removed, email president@bcaquasonics.com describing the image and where it appears. You do not need to give a reason, and withdrawing photo consent has no effect on your swimmer’s place in any program. We will remove it from this website and from club-controlled social media promptly. Material already published by third-party media is outside our control, though we will help you approach them where we can.

We use a small number of service providers to run the website and its email. They process information on our instructions and for no purpose of their own:

• Vercel — hosts this website and serves it worldwide.
• Google — Analytics, the registration form, and the embedded training calendars.
• Twilio SendGrid — delivers the email the site’s two forms generate.

Information processed outside Canada. These providers are US-based, so information handled through this website may be stored or processed in the United States and is subject to the laws there, including lawful access by US authorities. BC’s PIPA permits this for private-sector and non-profit organizations; we tell you because you should know, not because we are asking you to waive anything.

Beyond that, we disclose personal information only to the governing bodies described in section 7, where you have consented, or where PIPA permits or requires it — for example in an emergency threatening someone’s life, health or safety, or where the law compels us. We do not sell personal information to anyone, ever.

We keep personal information only as long as it serves the purpose it was collected for, with two firm rules:

• Where we have used personal information to make a decision that directly affects someone, PIPA requires us to keep it for at least one year, so that person has a real opportunity to ask to see it.
• Registration records are kept while a swimmer is a member, and afterwards for as long as we need them for legal, insurance or accounting reasons.

Enquiry emails from the two forms on this site live in a club inbox and are cleared out once they are dealt with. “Notify me” addresses are used for that one announcement and then deleted.

We use security measures appropriate to how sensitive the information is: club accounts are protected by strong authentication, access is limited to the board members and coaches whose roles require it, and the website is served entirely over an encrypted connection.

We will not pretend to more than that. Aquasonics is a volunteer-run club, not a bank, and no organisation can promise that information transmitted over the internet is perfectly secure. What we can promise is that we collect as little as possible, that we do not keep what we no longer need, and that if a breach ever occurred that could cause you significant harm, we would tell you.

Under PIPA you have the right to ask us:

• What we hold about you, how we have used it, and who we have disclosed it to.
• To correct it if it is wrong or incomplete.
• To delete it, or to withdraw a consent you gave earlier.

Make the request in writing to president@bcaquasonics.com, with enough detail for us to find what you are asking about. We will respond within 30 business days, or tell you in writing if we need an extension and why. There is no charge for a straightforward request; if a request is large enough that a minimal fee applies, we will tell you the cost first and ask whether you want to proceed.

The right of access has narrow limits set by PIPA — for example, we may not be able to release information that would reveal personal information about somebody else. If we refuse a request in whole or in part, we will tell you in writing, give our reasons, and tell you how to take it further.

Start with us. The club designates one person responsible for privacy compliance, and every question, correction or complaint should go to them first:

If we cannot resolve your concern, you have the right to complain to the province’s independent regulator, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia. You do not need our permission, and you do not need a lawyer.

We will update this policy when the law changes or when we change how we handle personal information. The effective date at the top of the page always tells you which version you are reading. If a change materially affects how we use information you have already given us, we will do more than quietly update the page — we will tell members directly.