Privacy Policy

1. Who this policy covers

This policy explains how Hughes Mechanical Consulting (“we”, “us”, “our”) handles personal information collected through this website, hughesmech.ca, and through the inquiries and correspondence that follow from it.

We are a mechanical engineering consulting practice based in Vancouver, British Columbia, working across British Columbia and Alberta. We handle personal information in accordance with Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), and with Alberta’s PIPA where it applies to work in that province.

“Personal information” means information about an identifiable individual. It does not include business contact information used solely to communicate with you in a professional capacity, which several privacy statutes treat differently — though in practice we protect it the same way.

2. What personal information we collect

What you send us

The project inquiry form on our home page asks for:

• Name — required, so we know who we are replying to.
• Email address — required, so we can reply.
• Company — optional.
• Phone number — optional.
• Project type — optional, chosen from a list.
• Project details — required. Whatever you choose to tell us about the building, the program and the schedule.

The form also carries one hidden field that is never shown to you and must stay empty. It exists only to catch automated spam, and anything typed into it is discarded.

If you call, email or write to us instead, we collect whatever you provide in that message — and, in the ordinary course of a project, the correspondence, drawings, site information and contact details needed to carry out the work.

What is recorded automatically

Like almost every website, this one is delivered by a hosting provider — Netlify — that keeps technical server logs. Those logs typically record the IP address of the device making a request, the browser and operating system it reports, the pages or files requested, the date and time, and the page that referred you. We use this only to keep the site running, secure and reasonably fast. We do not use it to build a profile of you, and we do not try to identify individual visitors from it.

Cookies, analytics and tracking

This site sets no cookies of its own. It runs no analytics package, no advertising or remarketing tags, no social media pixels, and no cross-site tracking of any kind. Nothing is stored in your browser to follow you between visits or between sites.

The site does load fonts and a small number of animation libraries from the third-party networks listed in section 5. Requesting a file from another server necessarily reveals your IP address to that server, and those providers keep their own logs under their own policies. We have no access to them.

3. Why we collect it, and what we do with it

We collect personal information for these purposes and no others:

• To answer your inquiry, and to have the conversation that follows it.
• To prepare proposals, fee estimates and scopes of work.
• To carry out mechanical design work and administer the resulting project, including corresponding with owners, contractors, architects and authorities having jurisdiction as the work requires.
• To keep the business records a professional practice is expected — and in some cases legally required — to keep, including for tax, insurance and professional liability purposes.
• To keep this website available, secure and working.

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent, trade or otherwise disclose it for anyone else’s marketing. We do not send marketing email to people who have only made an inquiry.

If we ever want to use your information for a purpose not described here, we will identify that purpose and ask for your consent before doing so.

4. Your consent

Sending us an inquiry, an email or a phone call is your consent to us using the information in it for the purposes in section 3. Where the information is sensitive, or the purpose is one you would not reasonably expect, we will ask for express consent.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the details in section 12. Withdrawal is subject to legal and contractual limits and to reasonable notice: if we are mid-project, we may be unable to continue the work without the information, and we may still have to keep certain records for the retention periods described in section 6. We will tell you plainly if that is the case.

5. Who we share it with

We share personal information only where it is necessary, and only with these categories of recipient:

• Project participants. On an active project, the owners, general contractors, mechanical trades, architects, other consultants and permitting authorities who need the information to do their part of the work.
• Service providers. Organisations that operate parts of this website and our correspondence on our behalf. They may only use the information to provide that service to us.
• Professional advisers. Our accountants, insurers and legal advisers, where required.
• Where the law requires it. In response to a valid legal demand — a court order, subpoena, or a lawful request from a government or regulatory authority — or where disclosure is otherwise permitted or required by law.

The service providers behind this website are:

• Netlify (Netlify, Inc.), which hosts this website. It serves these pages, keeps the server logs described in section 2, and receives and stores submissions from the inquiry form before forwarding them to us by email. Netlify’s privacy policy.
• Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Corporation), which carries and stores our email, including the correspondence between us and anything the inquiry form forwards to us. Microsoft’s privacy statement.
• Google Fonts (Google LLC), which serves the two typefaces this site is set in. Google’s privacy policy.
• Cloudflare (cdnjs), jsDelivr and unpkg, public content delivery networks that serve the animation and 3D libraries used by the drawings on the home page.

Information stored outside Canada

Several of those providers operate servers in the United States and other countries. Personal information you send us may therefore be stored or processed outside Canada, where it is subject to the laws of the country it is held in — including lawful access by the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of that country. By using this site or sending us an inquiry, you consent to that transfer. If you would rather not have your information leave Canada, contact us by telephone at 778-837-3834 instead of using the form.

6. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, or as long as we are required to keep it. These are the periods we work to:

• Project records — 16 years from the completion of the project. This covers correspondence, drawings, specifications and the contact details attached to them. The period follows British Columbia’s ultimate limitation period of 15 years, plus a year, because a mechanical design can be called into question long after a building opens; it also covers the minimum retention of project documentation required of us as engineering professionals in British Columbia.
• Financial records — 7 years from the end of the year they relate to. Invoices, payments and the business records that go with them, kept for tax purposes.
• Inquiries that did not become projects — 24 months from our last contact with you. After that they are deleted.
• Website server logs — about 30 days, then discarded. This one is not ours to set: the logs sit with Netlify and the period is theirs.

Where a record falls under more than one of these, the longest period applies. You can ask us to delete something sooner, and we will if no legal or professional obligation requires us to keep it — see section 8.

When information is no longer needed for any of those purposes, we destroy, erase or anonymise it.

7. How we protect it

This site is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection, so what you type into the inquiry form is encrypted in transit. Access to inquiries, correspondence and project files is limited to the people in the practice who need it to do the work, and to the service providers in section 5 acting on our instructions. Accounts are protected by passwords and, where the provider offers it, multi-factor authentication.

No method of transmitting or storing information is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Please do not send anything highly sensitive through a web form or unencrypted email. If a breach of security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as the law requires.

8. Your rights

Subject to the limited exceptions in the applicable privacy legislation, you have the right to:

• Know whether we hold personal information about you, what we hold, what we have used it for, and who we have disclosed it to.
• Access that information and receive a copy of it.
• Correct it if it is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Withdraw consent to our continued use of it, on the terms in section 4.
• Ask us to delete information we no longer have a lawful or professional reason to keep.
• Complain about how we have handled it, to us or to a regulator.

To exercise any of these, write to us using the details in section 12. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we release information, so that we do not disclose it to the wrong person. We will respond within 30 days, and if we need longer we will tell you why and give you a new date. Access is free in ordinary cases; if a request is unusually costly to fulfil we will give you an estimate first and let you decide whether to proceed.

There are narrow circumstances in which the law requires or permits us to refuse access — for example, where releasing the information would reveal personal information about someone else, or where it is subject to solicitor-client privilege. If we refuse, we will tell you why in writing and explain how to complain.

9. Links to other websites

Our Working Relationships page links to the websites of the general contractors, trades and design professionals we work with. Those sites are not ours. We do not control them and we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices. When you follow a link off this site, the policy that applies is theirs, and it is worth reading.

10. Children’s privacy

This is a business-to-business website for commercial and institutional construction projects. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of majority. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as our practices, our service providers or the law change. The current version is always the one posted here, and the “last updated” date at the top of the page tells you when it last changed. If a change materially affects how we handle information we already hold about you, we will take reasonable steps to tell you directly.

12. How to contact us

Questions about this policy, requests for access or correction, and complaints all go to the same place. Allan Hughes, Principal, is responsible for personal information at Hughes Mechanical Consulting.

• Email allan@hughesmech.ca
• Phone 778-837-3834
• Post
  Hughes Mechanical Consulting
  2401-1188 Quebec St
  Vancouver, BC V6A 4B3
  Canada

We take complaints seriously and will investigate any you bring to us. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take the matter to the regulator:

• Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — priv.gc.ca, 1-800-282-1376.
• Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia — oipc.bc.ca, 250-387-5629.