Our company is committed to protecting individual privacy and securing the personal information made available to us when you visit. This privacy policy describes what information is made available to our company and how that information is used and retained and provides information on:

Information we receive (when you provide it, visit our website, receive email…)
How this information is used
Sharing of this information
Data retention
Third-party tools and sites
Children and privacy security

If you have any question or suggestion for its improvement, please let us know at info@churchinthecity.ca

Information you give us

You do not have to provide our company with any personal information or create a user account to access information on our website and/or application. However for some services we may need personal information from you such as:

Personal identification information (name, physical address, email address, phone number, connection with our church services…)

Also when you visit our website the following information is automatically received and stored by servers:

IP address

Third-party websites

Our company’s website and/or application might contain links to other websites, our privacy policy applies only to our website so if you click on another website you must read their privacy policy.

How information is used

If you choose to provide us with information we may use that information to contact you, respond to your message or provide information or services you requested.

We use data you provide and automatically generated data for statistical analysis to assess what information is of interest to users and system performance. This allows us to make general improvements to our site. We may also use your information in order to detect, prevent and respond to security issues and harmful activities on our website and/or application.

Sharing of this information

Information you choose to share with our company may be treated as public information.

Our company uses a third-party analytics provider (such as Google Analytics) to analyze data from cookies. The third-party analytics provider does not receive personally identifiable information through these cookies. We have also limited the provider’s ability to see your full IP address.

Within our company we restrict access to personally identifiable information to employees, contractors and vendors subject to non-disclosure requirements who require access to this information in order to perform their official duties and exercise controls to limit what data they can view based on the specific needs of their position.

We do not use or share your information for commercial purposes and except as described above, we do not exchange or otherwise disclose this information.

Link to external websites and third-party

Our website may link to other websites created and maintained by other private and/or public organizations and individuals. When you follow a link to an external site you are leaving our website and are subject to external site’s privacy and security policies. Our company does not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness or completeness of information contained on an external site.

Security

Our company takes reasonable precautions to protect our site and information. For example we restrict access to personally identifiable information to employees, contractors and vendors subject to non-disclosure requirements.

Our company also uses commonly used practices and technical controls to protect the information in our possession or control. These practices and controls include, but are not limited to, encrypting the transfer of personal information over the internet, using firewalls and intrusion detection systems and maintaining strict technical controls and procédures to ensure data integrity.

We periodically review our processes and systems to verify compliance with industry best practices and to ensure the highest level of security for our website.

Updates do this privacy policy

Our company will revise or update this policy from time to time, if we make significant changes to how we handle personal information we will post changes to the policy on our site and change the date at the end.

Updated on: 02/06/2023

Cookie Policy and other similar tracking technologies (GDPR and non GDPR)

When you visit PORTICO app we may send cookies or other similar tracking technologies to your computer or to any other device you use. We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to track user’s preferences and to know how he uses our services.

A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

For further information visit allaboutcookies.org

Cookies are used for user identification and proper assignment of historical user data collected during previous visits.

Both temporary cookie files (session cookies) and persistent cookies are used. Users may delete or remove cookies for the browser at any time or block cookies from being installed on its device. However this may affect the operation of our services or even result in its blocking.

As described above, we use your personal information and data to provide you with targeted advertisements or marketing communications we believe may be of interest to you. For example, general app usage location

For more information about how targeted advertising works, you can visit the Network Advertising Initiative’s (“NAI”) educational page at https://www.networkadvertising.org/understanding-online-advertising/how-does-it-work.

You can opt out of targeted advertising by:

FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=ads
GOOGLE - https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

Additionally, you can opt out of some of these services by visiting the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out portal at: https://optout.aboutads.info/.

We can use different type of cookie or tracking technologies while you are visiting our website and/or application:

Strictly necessary cookies: These types of cookies enable you to access and browse websites and use their features. Without these cookies, services like billing or shopping baskets cannot work properly.
Performance cookies: these cookies collect information and data about how you use our websites and/or application. The data collected can be used to optimize our websites and/or applications. These cookies are used to know where our visitors and users are coming from. These cookies do not collect information that identifies you personally.
Functionality cookies: these cookies allow our website or application to remember your choices. They can be used to memorize your localisation, or your preferences such as language settings or font size.

How to manage cookies?

You can set your browser not to accept cookies and the above website and/or application tells you how to remove cookies from your browser. However some of our websites and/or applications might not work properly without the use of cookies.

Here are some of the main explanation on how to delete cookies on your browser: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647 (Chrome); https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences (Firefox); https://help.opera.com/en/latest/security-and-privacy/ (Opera); https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/17442/windows-internet-explorer-delete-manage-cookies (Internet Explorer); https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/safari/manage-cookies-and-website-data-sfri11471/mac (Safari); and https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10-microsoft-edge-and-privacy (Edge).

For mobile devices, if you don’t want to receive targeted advertising based on your center of interest coming from a mobile application, please check the parameters of the operating system of your mobile device and follow these instructions: 1) iOS Users: to enable “Limited Ad Tracking” follow the instructions given by Apple. 2) Android Users: to enable the option “deactivate ad personalisation”, follow the instructions given by Google on Google Play. 3) You might want to download the DAA mobile AppChoices application to control behavioral advertising online.

Reflection Questions (1 Thessalonians 1)

Click here to join the conversation, and add your comments on this week's Reflection Questions on 1 Thessalonians 1, as part of the sermon series on the letters Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica.