Privacy Policy

Who we are

Redsilicon is an IT, network and security systems business based in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, working on-site across Durham Region and Clarington. In this policy, “we” and “us” mean Redsilicon, and “the site” means redsilicon.ca.

We’re the organisation responsible for the personal information described here. If you want to reach us about anything on this page, the contact details are at the bottom.

What this website collects

This is a static website. It has no accounts, no shopping cart and no advertising. In practice that means:

• Usage analytics. Google Analytics tells us how many people visit, how they found us and which pages lead to a phone call. Microsoft Clarity shows how pages are actually used: what gets read, where people get stuck. Metricool feeds the same kind of visit counts into the dashboard we already use for social media reporting. Between the three, four cookies are set — Metricool doesn’t add any of its own. There’s a full section on all three below, because we’d rather explain it than bury it.
• Server logs. Our hosting provider records standard technical information for every request: IP address, timestamp, the page requested, browser type: for security, abuse prevention and diagnosing faults. This is automatic and applies to any website you visit.
• What you send us through a form. The contact and partner enquiry forms ask for your name, company, phone number or email address, and whatever you write in the message field. You choose what goes in there.

What we don’t do: we don’t run ads, we haven’t linked our analytics to any advertising account, we don’t build remarketing audiences, we don’t sell or share your information, and we don’t combine what you type into a form with what the analytics tools record. If any of that changes, this page changes before it does.

We don’t ask for, and you shouldn’t send us, payment card details, passwords, health information or government ID through this website.

Why we use it, and what we do with it

If you contact us, we use your details to reply, to quote the work, and to keep a record of the conversation so the next person you speak to isn’t starting from nothing. If you become a client, we keep the contact and site information needed to deliver and support the work, which for cabling and security jobs includes things like site addresses, network diagrams and equipment lists.

We don’t use your information for automated decision-making, and we don’t profile you.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell your information, and we don’t share it for anyone else’s marketing. There are only four situations where it leaves us:

• Service providers who run our systems: website hosting, email, analytics (Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and Metricool), Google Maps for the service-area map, and the software we use to schedule and invoice work. They process information on our instructions to provide those services, not for their own purposes.
• Monitoring stations, where you’ve bought a monitored alarm or camera service. Delivering that service requires sharing your site details and key-holder list with the central station, and we’ll tell you which one before it goes live.
• Trades and partners, only where a job needs them and only with your agreement: for example passing your site address to an electrician working alongside us.
• Where the law requires it, such as a valid court order.

Where your information is held

Our website hosting, email and analytics are provided by companies that operate globally, so information may be processed on servers outside Canada, including in the United States. Information held in another country is subject to that country’s laws, which can include lawful access by its authorities. This is normal for any business using mainstream cloud services, and we mention it because you’re entitled to know rather than because it’s unusual.

How long we keep it

Enquiries that don’t turn into work are kept while they might still be useful and then deleted. Records relating to work we’ve actually done are kept considerably longer: installation documentation is genuinely useful to whoever services the system in five years, and tax and business records have their own retention requirements under Canadian law.

If you want your enquiry deleted, ask and we’ll delete it.

How we protect it

Access is limited to people who need it. Accounts use multi-factor authentication, devices are encrypted, and the site is served over HTTPS. That said , and we’d rather say this than not, no method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Analytics, in plain terms

Three tools, doing different jobs.

Google Analytics 4

This is the counting one: how many people visited, which page they landed on, whether they arrived from a search, a link or by typing the address, roughly what part of the world they’re in, and whether they tapped the phone number. That last one is the only thing we treat as a conversion, because for this business a phone call is the point.

It works from a random ID stored in a cookie, not from your name. We don’t upload customer lists to it, we haven’t connected it to Google Ads, and we’ve not enabled the features that would let Google use this data for ad personalisation. Google truncates IP addresses before storing them, so we never see a full one in the reports.

Microsoft Clarity

Clarity does two things worth understanding, because the second one surprises people:

• Heatmaps: aggregate pictures of where people click and how far down a page they scroll.
• Session recordings: a reconstruction of an individual visit: mouse movement, scrolling, clicks and which pages were viewed, played back like a video.

A recording is not a video of your screen and it isn’t a webcam. It’s a replay of interactions with our own pages, rebuilt from the page’s structure. It stops at the edge of our site: nothing about your other tabs, files or activity is visible to us.

Text you type is masked. Form fields are obscured before anything leaves your browser, so what you enter into a contact form isn’t readable in a recording. We use this to fix confusing pages, not to watch people.

Metricool

Metricool is the dashboard we already use for social media scheduling and reporting. This connects the same account’s Web Analytics section to redsilicon.ca, so it counts visits, referrers and page views — the same kind of thing Google Analytics does, feeding a tool we already check daily rather than a separate report to remember.

It doesn’t use cookies. Per Metricool’s own documentation, its tracking script connects to Metricool’s server with JavaScript rather than storing anything in your browser: no cookie, no ID left behind between visits. It reads your IP address only for the length of that connection, to know where to send the response, and doesn’t store it.

Clarity is operated by Microsoft, Analytics by Google, and the web-traffic counter by Metricool S.L. (Spain). All three process this data as our service providers, on servers that may be outside Canada, and each has its own privacy statement covering what it does with it. If you’d rather not be measured at all, the opt-outs below work site-wide.

The map on the home page

The service-area map is embedded from Google Maps. It is the only third-party content on this site that isn’t analytics, and it works differently from the rest of the page, so it’s worth its own paragraph.

It doesn’t load until you scroll to it. Until then it costs you nothing: no request, no cookie, no data. If you never reach that part of the page, Google never hears from your browser on our account.

When it does load, your browser contacts Google directly to fetch the map tiles. Google receives your IP address and may set its own cookies, in the same way it would if you opened Google Maps yourself. That happens between you and Google; we don’t see it and we don’t receive anything from it. The map shows a region, not an address: there is no pin on a building, because we don’t work from one.

Blocking third-party content, or blocking Google, removes the map and changes nothing else on the page. The towns we cover are listed in text beside it for exactly that reason.

Cookies

Four of ours, all analytics, all first-party. None of them carries your name, your email or anything you typed into a form:

• _ga and _ga_5EGJQX99PM: Google Analytics. A random ID so a returning visitor isn’t counted as a new person, and a session marker. Up to two years.
• _clck: Clarity. A random visitor ID, same purpose. One year.
• _clsk: Clarity. Groups the pages you view into a single session. One day.

Metricool sets none of its own. Its tracker doesn’t use cookies at all — see Metricool above.

Google may also set cookies of its own when the home page map loads, which only happens if you scroll to it. Those are Google’s, governed by Google’s privacy policy rather than this one: see the map above.

There’s no consent banner: under Canadian privacy law, analytics of this kind can run on clear notice rather than a click-through, and we think a page that explains it properly is more use to you than a button most people dismiss without reading. If that changes, or if we ever add advertising cookies, this page changes first and a banner comes with it.

To opt out: any of these work, and nothing on the site stops working if you use them.

• Turn on “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control in your browser. Clarity honours both.
• Install Google’s official Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, which blocks Google Analytics on every site you visit.
• Block cookies for this site, or browse in a private window.
• Block third-party frames or Google domains in your browser or an extension. The map disappears; nothing else changes.
• Metricool’s tracker doesn’t use cookies to begin with, so blocking cookies won’t stop it — block tracker.metricool.com in your browser or an extension if you want to opt out of it specifically.

The client portal is a separate system and uses its own cookies to keep you signed in. It has its own terms, which you’ll see when you log in.

Your rights

Under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), you can:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you, and get a copy of it.
• Ask us to correct anything that’s wrong.
• Withdraw consent for us to use it, subject to legal and contractual limits : we can’t monitor an alarm without your key-holder list.
• Ask us to delete it, where we’re not required to keep it.
• Opt out of analytics entirely: see cookies.
• Complain to us, and if we don’t resolve it, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Email info@redsilicon.ca and we’ll respond within 30 days, which is what PIPEDA requires. There’s no charge.

Children

This is a business website and isn’t directed at children. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Changes to this policy

When this changes, the “last reviewed” date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects how we handle information you’ve already given us, we’ll tell you directly rather than relying on you noticing a date.

Contact

Questions, requests or complaints about privacy:
info@redsilicon.ca · (416) 492-3589
Redsilicon, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

We’re a service-area business, so there’s no public street address : we work at your premises. Post can be arranged if you need to send something physically; ask and we’ll give you an address.