Privacy policy

We only collect information you give us. That happens in four places:

• Registering for a course.Your name, email address, and phone number; which course and date you chose; and, where a course has a minimum age, the participant's age, whether they are 18 or older, and — for a minor — the name of the parent or guardian and their consent.
• The contact form. Your name, email address, and your message.
• The “notify me” list for a course with no date yet. Your name, email address, and optionally your phone number, so we can tell you when that course is scheduled.
• The chat assistant.Whatever you type into it. Don't put anything sensitive in there — it's for questions about courses, not for personal details.

We also use your IP address to limit how often our forms can be submitted from one place, which is how we keep spam out. That check happens in memory as the request comes in and the address isn't written to our database.

Course payments are processed by Stripe. Your card number is entered on Stripe's own checkout page and never reaches our servers — we never see it and we can't store it. What we keep is the record that a payment succeeded, the amount, and Stripe's reference for the transaction, which is what lets us confirm your seat and issue a refund.

• To register you for a course and hold your seat.
• To take payment and issue refunds.
• To email you a confirmation, and to reach you if a course is changed, cancelled, or moved.
• To meet the age and supervision rules that apply to firearms and hunter education courses, and to know who to contact if something happens in the field.
• To answer your message, or to tell you when a course you asked about is scheduled.

We do not sell your personal information, and we don't rent or trade our mailing list. We don't send marketing email to people who only registered for a course.

We use a small number of service providers to run the site. They only get what they need to do their job, and they aren't allowed to use it for anything else:

• Supabase — hosts our database and photo storage. Our data is stored in their Canadian region.
• Vercel — hosts the website itself and keeps short-lived server logs.
• Stripe — processes payments.
• Resend — delivers our email (confirmations, course notices, and messages sent through the contact form).
• Anthropic — powers the chat assistant. What you type is sent to them to generate a reply.

Some of these providers are based in the United States, so information handled by them may be stored or processed outside Canada and can be subject to the laws of the country it's in. We may also disclose information where the law requires it.

Our Gear page links to products at retailers like Amazon and Cabela's using affiliate links. These links work by tracking the click: when you follow one, the retailer or its affiliate network — Amazon Associates or Impact, for example — usually sets a cookie in your browser so that if you buy something, the sale is attributed back to us and we're paid a commission.

Clicking one of those links takes you to a third-party website that we don't control. Once you're there, that company's own privacy policy and cookie practices apply, not ours — including whatever it does with your browsing and purchase history. If you want to know what a retailer collects, read their policy on their site. You can also block or clear third-party cookies in your browser settings; doing so doesn't affect your ability to use this site or buy from the retailer.

What we get back from these programs is a report of commissions and, at most, anonymous summaries — which product was bought and what we earned. We are not told who you are, and we can't connect an affiliate purchase to you or to your registration with us. See our affiliate disclosure for more on how this works.

We don't run advertising trackers and we don't use an analytics service that profiles you across sites. The only cookie this site sets is a login cookie for our own staff when they sign in to manage courses, and Stripe may set cookies on its checkout page to process your payment securely. Third-party cookies set through affiliate links are covered in the section above.

Our gallery includes photos taken during courses and outings. If you or your child appears in one and you'd rather they didn't, email us and we'll take it down — no explanation needed.

Some of our courses are open to minors, and a parent or guardian registers on their behalf and provides consent. We collect a young participant's age and, where required, the guardian's name — nothing more than that. This site isn't directed at children registering themselves.

• Registration and payment records: about 7 years after the course, which is what our tax and insurance record-keeping requires.
• “Notify me” signups:until we've told you the course is scheduled, or until you ask us to remove you — whichever comes first.
• Contact form messages: kept in our email as long as the conversation is useful, then deleted.
• Chat conversations: not saved to our database at all.

The site runs over HTTPS, our database requires authentication and isn't publicly reachable, and the pages used to manage courses and registrations are password-protected. No system is perfect, but access is limited to the people who need it to run the Academy.

Under Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act and Canada's federal privacy law, you can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it if it's wrong, ask us to delete it, or withdraw a consent you've given. Email info@outdooracademy.ca and we'll respond within 30 days.

Two honest limits: we may need to confirm who you are before handing over a record, and we may have to keep a registration or payment record for the retention period above even after you ask us to delete it, because tax and liability rules require it. If that applies, we'll tell you what we kept and why.

If we change how we handle personal information, we'll update this page and move the “last updated” date at the top. Material changes will be explained here rather than made quietly.

Alberta Outdoors Academy Ltd.
200-200 Carnegie Drive, St. Albert, AB T8N 5A7
info@outdooracademy.ca
(780) 245-2840