Privacy Statement

The City of Pickering is committed to protecting your privacy and personal information, whether you are browsing for information or conducting business online through pickering.ca.  

The City of Pickering gathers and uses information as follows:

• Access to the City’s website and its features usually do not require providing any personal information.
• The City of Pickering does not collect your personal information unless you choose to use and receive online products and services that require it. 
• For transactions with government organizations involving credit cards, government systems use up-to-date security protocols to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of information and systems. Service providers under contract to provide online services on behalf of the government must follow the practices required of the City of Pickering.
• This website contains links to other sites. We are not responsible for the content and the privacy practices of other websites and encourage you to examine each site's privacy policy and make your own decisions regarding the accuracy, reliability and correctness of material and information found.
• We use software that receives and records the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer that has contacted our website; however, we do not link these addresses with the identity of individuals visiting our site.

What kind of information is collected?

When you browse or download information from pickering.ca, our servers collect limited amounts of standard information for traffic monitoring and statistical purposes. The information is analyzed for operational trends, performance, and for ways to improve our site. The City of Pickering cannot identify you from this information.

We collect the following standard types of information:

• Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers being used to access our sites
• operating systems and the types and versions of browsers used to access our sites
• Internet Service Providers used by visitors to our sites
• dates and times users access our sites
• pages visited
• keywords users enter into our search engine
• names and sizes of files requested

Cookies

The City of Pickering website uses cookies to capture summary information on visitor usage patterns. This computer code tracks "traffic" to determine the effectiveness of a given web page in meeting service needs. A cookie contains no information that personally identifies visitors to the web site, and the City does not have access to a visitor’s browsing path after leaving pickering.ca. Please read the Cookies Policy by GHD Digital for details.

Analytics

The City uses the web analytics services of Google Analytics to help analyze the use of our website. These tools use cookies to collect and generate information about your visits to our sites (including your IP address) that is transmitted to their servers in an anonymous form for processing. Analyzing patterns of website activity can help inform improvements to the visitor experience.

The use of these tools does not allow us or our analytics service providers to identify individuals.

You can opt-out of analytics activity by setting your browser to notify you when a cookie is sent and block analytics cookies if desired. Please consult your browser’s Help Menu for instructions.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

GA4 offers enhanced privacy benefits, designed with a privacy-centric approach, ensuring better compliance with data protection regulations. It utilizes advanced anonymization techniques, such as IP anonymization by default, which helps to protect the privacy of our website visitors. Additionally, GA4 provides granular data controls, allowing us to manage the data collection and retention policies more effectively. These features will enable us to gather valuable insights into the website experience while respecting user privacy.

Read Privacy Policy for Govstack by GHD Digital

Corporate Records - Privacy & Access to Information

The creation, collection, use and disposition of all corporate records, regardless of medium (e.g. electronic, paper, video, etc.), are governed by the rules set out in the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 1990 (MFIPPA). View details.