Home / Privacy
Privacy at MacSailing
We collect only what we need to run safe, well-organised programs, and we protect it carefully. This page explains what we collect, why, who sees it and how long we keep it. It follows British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
What we collect
- About you, the person booking: name, email, phone, postal code, and how you heard about us (optional).
- About each participant (child or adult): name, birthday, and, when you give them, health, allergy and care notes, swimming ability, emergency contacts, the people allowed to pick up a child, whether a child aged 10 or older may sign out alone, and photo consent (yes or no).
- About your bookings: what you booked, dates, payments and refunds (amounts only), credits, attendance, skills progress and certificates.
- Waivers: who agreed, for which participant, which version and when.
- When you visit our website: if you say OK to cookies, Google Analytics and Meta measure which pages and ads lead to bookings. They never receive your name, email, phone or anything about your children.
- When you use Ask Mac, our website's automated assistant: your questions and its answers, after email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers are removed, and the page you asked on. Never your name, address, IP address or a cookie. Ask Mac runs on Anthropic's service, which doesn't use your questions to train its models. We keep them for 90 days to improve our answers, then delete them. Please don't type personal or health details there.
We never see or store your card number. Payments are handled entirely by Square.
Why we use it
- To run your programs safely: class lists, health and allergy alerts for coaches, and pickup checks.
- To take payment, send confirmations, prepare you for your course, and issue certificates.
- To reach you quickly about your booking on the day, for example a wind hold, an early pickup or a late return, by email and text message to the phone number you gave us.
- To report Sail Canada program results where a course leads to Sail Canada certification.
- To improve our programs and understand which advertising works.
- To send news and offers, only if you agree. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Who sees it
- You: your own family's or your own details and bookings.
- Your coaches: a participant's health, care and pickup details only on the days they coach that participant.
- Our office and managers: what they need to run bookings and programs. Staff who can see health details use two-step sign-in.
- Service providers we use: Square (payments), Brevo (email and text messages), Supabase (our database, stored in Canada), Vercel (website hosting), Better Stack (checking that the website is up; no personal information), Google (email, analytics), Meta (advertising measurement, with your cookie consent) and Anthropic (Ask Mac: only the questions typed into it, with personal details removed). Some of them process information outside Canada; each is bound to protect it.
- Sail Canada (Checklick): names and program results for Sail Canada certified courses.
- No one else. We never sell your information.
How long we keep it
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Bookings, payments and refunds | 7 years (tax and accounting) |
| Waivers and incident reports | Until the participant turns 21, or 7 years, whichever is later |
| Health, allergy and care notes | Until 1 year after the participant's last program, then deleted |
| Pickup people and emergency contacts | Until 1 year after the participant's last program |
| Skills progress and certificates | As long as the account is open (it's your sailing record) |
| Marketing consent | Until you unsubscribe |
| Website analytics (with consent) | As set in Google Analytics and Meta (Google Analytics: 14 months) |
Your choices and rights
- See or correct your information: sign in to your account, or email us.
- Delete: ask us to delete your account. We remove what we can and keep only what the law requires (e.g. payment records).
- Cookies: choose "No thanks" in the cookie notice, or change it any time with "Cookie settings" at the bottom of every page.
- Questions or concerns: our Privacy Officer is MacSailing's General Manager. Email info@macsailing.com, attention: Privacy Officer. If we can't resolve it, you can contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC.
Last updated: October 28, 2026