Personal information

In order to provide you products and services of interest to you as well as ongoing support, we collect certain personal information. This may be during the application process; when communicating with you in our stores, online and over the phone; and when you browse the Internet. We may also gather information about you from third parties, such as creditors or credit reporting agencies.

What is personal information?

Your personal information includes data that can identify you. Here are some examples:

• Your name, address, email address and phone number
• Information about the Bell products you subscribe to
• Your service usage details, such as call records or data usage
• Account information, such as your account status or method of payment
• Health and biometric information, if provided

To protect your privacy, we remove details that can identify you personally whenever possible.

Learn about de-identifying data

Why do we gather personal information?

We collect personal information so we can:

• Establish a business relationship with you, for example to confirm your identity
• Ensure that your services are working correctly
• Understand your needs and preferences to recommend products, services and discounts that might interest you
• Understand how you use our products and services and how we can improve our offering
• Manage and develop our business, for example, monitoring usage volumes to plan for our networks, and tracking product sales to measure their success
• Meet legal and regulatory requirements, such as collecting information to comply with a CRTC regulation

Sharing your information

To get a better idea of your needs and how we can fulfill them, we sometimes share information between our companies.¹ We only disclose personal information with parties outside our family of companies and suppliers when we are required to or when you have given express consent for us to do so.

These third parties are carefully selected partners acting on our behalf. We only disclose as much information as they need for a specific purpose, such as shipping you a new phone or providing network service while you’re roaming. When using your personal information, we require the companies and their employees to uphold our privacy standards. See our Privacy Policy (PDF) for more information.

If our partners store or process your personal information outside Canada, they are legally bound to protect your data using strict privacy safeguards.

1-“Our companies” refers to the following organizations and brands: AAA Alarm Systems Ltd., Alarm Force Industries Inc. (Bell Smart Home, Bell Business Security and Automation), Axia, Bell Aliant, Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu LP (Bell TV), Bell Media, Bell Mobility, Bell MTS, Cablevision du Nord, DMTS, Epic Communications, KMTS, Lucky Mobile, Maskatel, NorthernTel, Northwestel Inc., Ontera, Solo Mobile, Télébec, The Source and Virgin Plus.

Publicly available information

Information that is publicly available may be collected and disclosed, such as a directory listing of your name, address and phone number. If you prefer not to have your listing information provided to select organizations, please contact us .

Location data

Your location information is confidential and we do not use it for any purpose without your express consent. However, we may use generalized location information to assist in analyzing our networks.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that your web browser creates as you use the Internet. The information they store does not personally identify who you are, but does allow a website to remember your actions or preferences – for instance, remembering the items you added to your shopping cart, or the preference you set to stay logged in to your account.

Information from cookies helps us provide a better web experience by telling us about the people who visit our sites and how they use them, such as:

• How often our websites are visited, from where and on what device or browser – this helps us ensure you can access our sites when and how you want to, on your preferred device
• What content on a site is popular and how visitors interact with it – knowing what is clicked on or shared helps us offer you useful information up front

While information we gather with cookies does not personally identify you, with your permission we are able to identify you if you sign in to one of our websites or apps.

Cookies are also used by our advertising partners to display ads that are relevant to you. For example, after visiting a Bell website, you may see an ad for Bell while browsing another website.

You can always disable cookies in your browser settings.

Read our Cookie Policy (PDF) for more information.

De-identifying data

De-identifying data means removing information that could link the data back to you as an individual. If personal information is properly de-identified so that it can no longer be linked to you, the information is no longer considered personal.

To protect your privacy, we de-identify data where possible. We do this by:

• Removing details such as your name, government identification numbers (e.g. driver’s licence number) and other direct identifiers, as well as data that can identify you indirectly, such as your date of birth or gender
• Transforming details so they no longer identify you personally, such as storing just the first three letters rather than your full postal code, or using an age range rather than your date of birth