Privacy Policy

BC Education Savings (“we”, “us”) is an independent RESP information service. We are not a government agency and are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Government of Canada or the Government of British Columbia. This policy explains how we handle personal information in line with Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).

Information we collect

• Answers to our qualification questions (for example, whether you are expecting or have a child under 12 months, your trimester or your child’s date of birth, whether your child has an RESP, and your province).
• If you qualify and choose to submit: your first and last name, mobile phone number, email address and postal code.
• Your consent choice, the wording you agreed to, and the date and time of consent.
• Technical information such as the page address you arrived on, the referring site, advertising campaign parameters and advertising click identifiers.

If you do not meet the requirements of the form, we do not collect your contact details.

How we use it

• To have an RESP Specialist contact you by phone, text or email about RESP options in Canada, as you requested.
• To check that requests are genuine and to prevent duplicate, fraudulent or automated submissions.
• To measure and improve our advertising and this website.

Sharing

With your consent, we share your request with RESP Specialists and partner organizations who provide RESP information. We use service providers for hosting, data storage and analytics, who may process information outside British Columbia, including in the United States. We do not sell your personal information.

Your choices

You can withdraw consent and opt out of contact at any time by replying STOP to a text message, using the unsubscribe link in an email, or asking the person who calls you. You may also request access to or correction of your personal information, or ask us to delete it, by contacting us.

Retention and security

We keep personal information only as long as needed for the purposes above or as required by law, and protect it with reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards.

Cookies

Cookies are small files stored by your browser. We also use session storage (information held for a browser tab), campaign parameters in page addresses and a randomly generated session identifier. These technologies are not all cookies, but can help link activity during a visit. The following describes our current website; planned advertising tools are identified separately.

• Internal website analytics — fsid: a random identifier in session storage groups events such as a page visit, a form step, a disqualification and a completed request. Our internal analytics records the identifier, event, time and, when available, campaign source. These event records do not include your name, phone number or email address, although the identifier is not a guarantee of anonymity. This helps us understand where visitors leave the form and improve the website. The browser identifier lasts for the tab’s session, normally until that tab or window closes.
• Campaign attribution — attr: session storage remembers the first landing page address, referring page and any utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content and utm_term parameters. These indicate the source, medium, campaign, ad content or search term associated with a visit. The browser copy lasts for the tab’s session. If you submit a qualifying request, this information is also saved with the request, including while phone verification is incomplete, so we can understand which campaigns generated requests.
• Advertising click identifiers — fbclid and _fbc: only when advertising tracking is permitted, attribution may capture a Facebook click identifier and read an existing _fbc cookie, saving its value as fbc. These values can identify an ad click and may be saved with a qualifying request. When advertising is refused or consent is unresolved in a consent region, we do not capture or submit these identifiers. Campaign parameters remain separate from advertising identifiers. Page query strings are removed before the Pixel initializes.

Account sign-in storage: for advisors and administrators who sign in, our authentication provider stores a session under an sb-…-auth-token key in local storage to keep the account signed in and refresh its session. This is for account access, not advertising, and is not created just by answering the public qualification questions. Local storage can persist across browser visits; there is no fixed browser-storage deletion period in our application. Signing out or clearing site storage removes the local sign-in information; expired or revoked credentials may require a new sign-in.

Retention after a visit: closing a tab or clearing browser storage does not delete information already saved on our servers. Our application does not define an automatic deletion period for internal analytics records or campaign and click identifiers attached to requests. We do not claim that these records expire when the browser session ends. Hosting-provider log and backup retention is separate and is not specified by this application. You may contact our Privacy Officer to request deletion of identifiable information, subject to any legal retention requirements. Any defined retention schedule will be reflected here before it is introduced.

Managing your choices: visitors in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland see an advertising consent banner; the banner also appears when we cannot establish the visitor’s country. Advertising is blocked there until acceptance. Elsewhere ordinary advertising measurement is enabled unless refused; we honor Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track. Accepting or rejecting is equally easy. Use “Cookie settings” in the footer to change your choice at any time. Opening settings does not change an existing choice. Withdrawal stops new advertising events immediately, including in other open tabs; previously blocked events are not replayed. Internal analytics and non-advertising campaign attribution remain separate. Consent to receive a call or text does not authorize advertising tracking. Browser settings can clear or block storage, which may affect the form or sign-in. Clearing browser data does not delete records already received by us or Meta. For information or deletion requests, contact privacy@bceducationsavings.ca.

Advertising choice records: local storage keys bces-advertising-consent-v1 and bces-advertising-consent-v1-history hold a random visitor identifier, choice, time, country when known, and the exact notice and its version. Withdrawal adds a new record without deleting earlier acceptance evidence. These records persist until site storage is cleared; no automatic expiry is configured. A session-only meta-lead-… record stores a random event identifier, time, region and permission evidence for a reported completion, preventing duplicate reporting in the same tab. It expires with the tab’s session. No consent history or lead record is sent to Meta.

Third-party tools currently used: internal analytics and request records are processed through our hosting and data-storage providers. Website fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, so your browser sends Google a request containing technical information such as your IP address and browser details. Google Fonts is not an advertising Pixel. See Google’s Privacy Policy for its handling of those requests.

Meta Pixel: when advertising is permitted, Pixel 2247296198864004 sends a public landing-page visit (“PageView”) and a completed request (“Lead”) only after successful SMS verification to Meta Platforms for advertising measurement and optimization. It does not report incomplete requests, qualification steps, disqualifications, advisor/admin activity, or direct visits to the confirmation page as leads. We do not send names, phone numbers, email addresses, child details, form answers or financial information, and do not enable advanced matching, automatic form collection or server-side Meta reporting. Meta receives the page address without query parameters, IP address, browser/device information, event time, and permitted advertising identifiers. The Pixel can use _fbp and _fbc cookies, generally lasting 90 days; Meta’s retention of received data is separate and governed by its policies, not a deletion timer in our application. See Meta’s Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. Google Analytics and third-party tag managers are not installed.

Before tracking changes go live: this policy must reflect added tools, recipients, data, events, purposes, retention and choice controls before publication. Advertising measurement does not establish that Meta attributed or can optimize toward a request; Meta may restrict events for certain website categories.

Contact

For privacy questions or requests, contact our Privacy Officer at privacy@bceducationsavings.ca.