Privacy policy | Specsavers CA

You have trusted us to take care of your eye health. You can also trust us with your personal information. This Privacy Policy is our statement to demonstrate how we respect, value and are committed to protecting your personal information.

Information about us
What personal information do we collect?
How and why do we use your personal information?
How long do we keep your personal information?
Who do we share personal information with?
How do we process your personal information?
What are cookies and how are they used on this site?
How can I update or change my personal information?
What rights do I have?
What choices do I have?
How do you protect my personal information?
Updating our privacy policy
Contact us

1. Information about us

In this Privacy Policy, references to ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ means (separately and/or collectively) the members of Specsavers Canada Inc. (Specsavers Canada) with a registered address of Suite 101‑3001 Wayburne Drive, Burnaby BC V5G 4W3; Specsavers Optical Group Limited (Guernsey incorporated company number 12294) registered office at La Villiaze, St Andrews, Guernsey, GY6 8YP, each of their subsidiaries, which includes all stores operating under the trade name Specsavers in Canada (to keep things simple we refer to them all as Specsavers); and working in collaboration with your independent optometrist with whom Specsavers Canada has a relevant contractual relationship, process (collect, store, use and disclose) your personal information for the purpose of providing you with eye health care services.

a) Specsavers collects, uses, discloses, and retains personal information including eyewear prescription data for its own purposes (including to manage its relationship with customers, to send marketing messages to customers in compliance with applicable anti‑spam legislation, and to comply with applicable law). In those circumstances, Specsavers does so as custodian of the personal information.

b) Specsavers collects, uses, discloses, and retains certain personal information on behalf of the optometrists who operate in Specsavers stores but are independent from Specsavers. Optometrists are required by law and professional standards to control certain personal information. Your optometrist remains the custodian of that personal information.

In this Privacy Policy, when we refer to ‘you’ or ‘your’, we mean the person whose personal information we collect, use and process. This includes anyone who contacts us in connection with the products and services we provide or who otherwise interacts with us including on our website at www.specsavers.ca (the website) or in store.

2. What personal information do we collect?

We may collect and process the following information about you including:

your name;
your date of birth;
your contact phone numbers (including mobile);
your email and home address;
your relevant health details including (a) current and past health conditions, general health conditions, and glasses and contact lens prescriptions, (b) current medication details, (c) eye health related medical imaging and/or scans, and (d) correspondence between your optometrist and your doctor or ophthalmologist;
your examination and test results;
your payment details; your employment, lifestyle and driving information;
details of any prescription supplied to you by your healthcare professional or medical practitioner;
information that you provide by filling in forms on our website;
details of your visit to the website and any transactions you carry out on the website;
any information you may provide through your participation in a focus group; and
any other information you have voluntarily given us.

We mainly collect this information from you when you give it to us voluntarily, but we may also collect it from other sources if it is necessary and legal to do so. This includes from other healthcare providers, institutions, or people you have authorized to provide information on your behalf (for example, parents or guardians), third‑party service providers, government, tax or law enforcement agencies, and others. We can also combine this information with information we get from public sources.

We may also collect personal information about you from your use of other Specsavers Group websites or services.

3. How and why do we use your personal data?

Your personal data is processed for the following reasons, so that we can provide you with the best possible eye health care and customer experience. We will only process your information if we have a lawful basis (reason) to do so.

To provide you with a professional eye service in the most secure and appropriate way:

To perform eye examinations so we can understand your eye health and any medical conditions
To determine your prescription appropriate to your need for eyewear which may take the form of glasses, contact lenses or both and to dispense your eyewear.
To book your eye tests.
To confirm your appointment. We will send you a confirmation email and/or text message. We will also send a courtesy reminder shortly before the appointment is due.
To contact you about changes to our service that could affect or inconvenience you.
To send you eye test reminders. Changes in your eyesight are usually very gradual, so regular eye tests are important.
To send you eye health communications about looking after your eye health and information about vision correction.
To send you direct marketing communications about our products, offers and discounts by post, email, SMS, telephone, and social media in accordance with applicable legislation.
To send you surveys and feedback requests to help us improve our service to you and make our services and products more relevant to you.
We use data collected through the use of customer surveys, cookies, research and analysis to improve our products and services to you,
We may also carry out analytics on the information we hold about our customers to help us understand who our customers are, how they use our services, purchasing behaviours, and how people interact with us. This enables us to plan and optimize our business ‑ for example, appointment attendance, maximize the effectiveness of our advertising, products, services and understand how our business is performing.
If you are browsing our website, we will not collect any information which will identify you by name. However, we will collect information using cookies or traffic data which uses IP addresses or other numeric identifiers to analyse how people use our website. See our Cookie Policy for more information about cookies and how we use them.
To communicate with you as well as send you healthcare information, details of special offers and discounts which may be relevant to you.
To respond to complaints, queries and any claims made against us.

To fulfil an arrangement we have made with you:

To manage your online account
To process any transactions when you purchase our goods and/or clinical services
To payment card processors to process credit and debit card payments and store payment information or when we are dealing with refunds
To process a third‑party insurance claim after the purchase of our goods and/or clinical services
To provide our products and/or clinical services to you
To meet the obligations we have in our contract with you

There may be time where we have legal or regulatory reason to share and/or process your personal information, which will include the following:

To fulfil a statutory or other legal obligation to process the information, such as for the investigation of crime:
We may need to make your personal information available to other optometrists, medical practitioners, health, and social care providers
Our Regulators may request information when carrying out their functions
Other third parties who have a legal right to access personal data e.g., with a court order, the police, our insurers, third party insurers, external auditors, investigators
Other third parties who authorized to act on your behalf who may request your personal information such as a solicitor or other legal representative
Other companies who provide us with updated personal information e.g., changes to your contact information, deceased indicators
If you choose to exercise your data rights
So we are able to meet our obligations as registered and dispensing optometrists
So we can respond to any complaints or claims we receive from you, regulators or other third parties
We may need to share your information to help prevent and detect fraud
To ensure health and safety of members of the public, our staff, and our customers
We may have to share your personal information to meet our corporate responsibilities including during company mergers and acquisitions.
In line with our rights under applicable data protection laws, there may be times when we will anonymize your personal information which means we would remove details which could be used to identify you such as your name, so that you can no longer be identified. We would then use anonymized information for analytical, statistical, research and publication purposes, and to develop and improve future treatments, core healthcare technologies and related products and medicines.

We rely on your consent and ask you to provide permission to process your data:

To process your personal data within the Specsavers Group of companies
When you enter a Specsavers competition

4. How long do we keep your information?

We, and other members of the Specsavers Group, will keep personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary (or as defined under healthcare laws and regulations which apply).

It may be necessary to keep your personal information to:

Provide products and services, including aftercare services,
Maintain records as needed to satisfy tax and other legal or regulatory requirements,
Protect and defend against claims.

Where there is no longer a legal need to retain your personal information, we will either delete it or anonymize it and use it appropriately.

5. Who do we share personal information with?

We may share your personal information with other members of the Specsavers Group for any of the reasons we have given in this Privacy Policy.

Each store is run by a company within the Specsavers Group. Each optometric clinic located within a Specsavers location is owned by an independent optometrist. When you place an order for products, the custodian of that personal information is the store. When you obtain services from an optometrist, the independent optometric corporation that owns the clinic is the custodian of that personal health information. The optometric corporation obtains support services from the store and the Specsavers Group. As a result of this support relationship, the Specsavers Group will process information on behalf of the store and the optometric corporation, including health information. The Specsavers Group also provides IT, marketing and other services for each store and clinic operating within a Specsavers location and will process personal information relating to those activities.

We may share your personal information with other people when it is necessary to do so, for example with other Canadian Specsavers stores to ensure continuity of retail services regardless of the location you visit, in addition to the following reasons.

We use other organizations to help us process personal information, but they are not allowed to use it for any other purposes. We may use the information we receive from other organizations to add to and improve our databases of customer details.
We may reveal personal information to health authorities, including regulatory bodies or national health bodies.
We may pass personal information to external agencies and organizations, including the police and other law‑enforcement agencies to prevent and detect fraud (including fraudulent transactions) and criminal activity. These external agencies may check the information we give them against public and private databases and may keep a record of those checks to use in future security checks.
If a claim is made, or could be made, against us or other members of the Specsavers Group, we may pass personal information to our insurers.
If we (or substantially all of our assets) are bought or taken over by another organization (or there is a reorganization within our corporate group), personal information we hold about customers will be one of the assets transferred.
We may pass your personal information to others to comply with a legal obligation (including where under a court order), to enforce or apply our terms and conditions of use of website or other agreements we have with you, or to protect our rights, property, and safety or those of our customers, employees, or others.
We may share an anonymized version of your email address to third party social media sites such as Facebook to enable us to display marketing to you via such sites. When we do this, we use a process called "hashing" to protect your information. The process is similar to encryption and means that we scramble the plain text of your email address into a unique and irreversible collection of numbers and letters so that your email address cannot be recognized. When we do this, social media providers are only allowed to use your information to display our marketing to you through their site and not for any of their own purposes. You can update your social media privacy preferences on your own social media accounts.
We may share an anonymized version of your personal information and/or clinical test results (or both) to third party equipment and technology suppliers or research institutions in order to help us (i) provide you with clinical care (including your eye test); (ii) to help those suppliers continually improve their products and test equipment (which means we can provide the best care for you); and (iii) for the purposes of clinical research.

6. How do we process your personal information?

We may share your personal information with other members of the Specsavers Group and organizations who provide services for us. We may share your personal information with a third‑party service provider which could be located or process or store personal information in a country outside of Canada, for example in the United States of America, United Kingdom, a country within the European Union, or another country.

In such circumstances, your personal information will only be shared with the third party where there is business purpose to do so, and after taking prior reasonable steps to make sure your personal information is adequately protected in line with, at minimum, the requirements of Canadian privacy legislation.

It may be, however, that the governments, courts, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies of that country may be able to obtain disclosure of your personal information through the laws of the foreign country.

7. Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are stored on your device when you visit a website.

We may use "cookies" to track your preferences and activities when you visit our website (www.specsavers.ca). They keep a record of your preferences making your subsequent visits to the site more efficient. Cookies may store a variety of information, including the number of times that you access a site, registration information, and the number of times that you view a particular page or other item on the site. Most browsers are designed to accept cookies, but they can be easily modified to block cookies (see your browser's help files for details on how to block cookies, how to know when you have received cookies, and how to disable cookies completely).

You should know, however, that without cookies, some of the website's functions will not be available and you may lose some of the benefits and functionality of the website.

8. How can I update or change the personal information you hold about me?

You can update or change your personal information at your Specsavers store or by contacting customerservice@specsavers.ca

9. What rights do I have?

We will rely on you to ensure that the personal information you provide to us is as accurate, complete, and up to date as necessary for the purposes for which we use the personal information.

You may reasonably request access to your personal information collected by us and information about our use, disclosure, and retention of the personal information by submitting a written request to Specsavers’ Privacy Officer using the contact information noted below. Subject to applicable exceptions and limitations prescribed by applicable law, you will be given reasonable access to your personal information, and you will be entitled to verify the accuracy and completeness of your personal information and have the information corrected as appropriate. You may be required to pay a reasonable fee for access to your personal information.

10. What choices do I have?

We may use your personal information to contact you about our products and services.

If you do not want to receive marketing material, including special offers and discounts, , you can let us know in store, by emailing customerservice@specsavers.ca.

You can choose to stop receiving communications from us by following the unsubscribe link or instructions in the communications we send you.

11. How we protect personal information

We use a variety of security technology and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access and use. Examples of these are shown below

Encryption, meaning that information is hidden so that it cannot be read without special knowledge (such as a password). This is done with a secret code or what is called a ‘cypher’. The hidden information is said to then be ‘encrypted’.
Using a different name for you so we can hide parts of your personal information from view.
Controlling access to systems and networks. This allows us to stop people who are not allowed to view your personal information from getting access to it.
Training our staff so they know how to handle personal information and how and when to report when something goes wrong.
Regular testing of our technology and ways of working, including keeping up to date on the latest security updates.

We have no control over the contents of other websites or resources which are linked to our website. We accept no responsibility for them or the privacy practices they use, or for any loss or damage that may arise from you using those websites or resources.

12. Website and Social Media

Specsavers may maintain accounts on third party social media platforms. Specsavers does not control, and is not responsible for these third parties, their platforms, or their practices. Specsavers is not and cannot be responsible for the privacy practices of any of those social media platforms, or how they treat information about their users. Specsavers cannot and will not be responsible for any breach of security by any third parties or for any actions of any third parties that receive any of the information that is disclosed to us via third party platforms.

Please check with the third‑party websites and social media platforms in order to determine their privacy policies and your rights under them.

13. Updating our Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. Any updates will take effect as soon as they are posted on our website.

14. Contact us

If you have any comments or questions about our Privacy Policy or how we handle your personal information, please contact Specsavers’ Privacy Officer by mail: Specsavers Canada – Privacy Officer, Suite 101‑3001 Wayburne Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada V5G 4W3, or by email: mydata@specsavers.com

Last updated December 2023