Privacy Policy

Who we are

Kolben Chemicals International Ltd. ("Kolben", "we") runs kolbenchemicals.com, a bilingual business-to-business catalogue of automotive chemicals sold in Canada. We are responsible for the personal information described here (its "controller" under the GDPR).

Privacy Officer

As Quebec law requires, our Privacy Officer is in charge of protecting personal information at Kolben. Send privacy questions, requests and complaints to kolbenchemical@gmail.com.

What we collect

We collect only what you enter in one of our three forms:

• Contact: inquiry type, name, company, email, phone (optional), province, message and your consent to be contacted.
• Become a Distributor: company, contact name, role, email, phone, province, business type, expected volume and message.
• Where to Buy (supplier request): name, email, phone, province, product interests and message.

Apart from the technical data described under "Cookies and analytics" and the IP address our form provider receives when you send a form, we collect nothing else. We don’t make automated decisions about you or profile you. The forms are optional, but we can't reply without the details they ask for.

Why we use it

We use your information only to:

• answer your inquiry;
• evaluate your distributor application;
• connect you with a supplier of Kolben products.

We don't sell personal information or use it for promotion.

Legal basis

In Canada, we rely on your consent, which you give by sending a form (and, on the contact form, by ticking the consent box).

Under the GDPR, we rely on:

• your consent, for the contact form;
• steps you ask us to take before a possible contract, for distributor applications and supplier requests;
• our legitimate interests in answering business inquiries and running a secure website.

If you withdraw your consent, we stop using your information for that purpose from then on.

Service providers

We use three service providers:

• Web3Forms (Web3Creative, India) receives each form you send, checks it for spam with CleanTalk and Akismet (which receive your IP address and email address), and emails it to us.
• Google hosts our inbox (Gmail) and serves the site's fonts (Google Fonts); loading them sends your IP address to Google.
• Cloudflare hosts and protects the site and provides Cloudflare Web Analytics.

We don't share your information with anyone else, including distributors, unless you agree or the law requires it.

Processing outside Canada

Our providers may store or process your information outside Quebec and Canada, including in the United States, India and the European Union. There, it is subject to local law and may be accessed by courts, law enforcement or national security authorities.

Transfers out of the European Union rely on our providers' safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses or the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.

Cookies and analytics

Our pages set no cookies. The site stores only your language choice in your browser, in local storage under the name kolbenLang. It holds no personal information, isn't used for tracking, and you can clear it at any time.

Cloudflare Web Analytics counts visits without cookies and doesn't track individuals. To serve and protect the site, Cloudflare processes technical data such as your IP address, and may set a strictly necessary security cookie if it needs to check that traffic is legitimate.

Email and CASL

We have no newsletter and send no promotional email. As CASL requires, we won't send you commercial electronic messages without your consent.

How long we keep it

We keep your information only as long as we need it to answer you and manage our business relationship, then delete it: at the latest 24 months after our last contact, unless the law requires us to keep it longer. Our form provider, Web3Forms, keeps its own copy of each submission for up to 3 years.

How we protect it

The site runs only over HTTPS, so form data is encrypted in transit. Only the people who handle inquiries can read our inbox. If a privacy breach puts you at risk of serious harm, we'll notify you and the authorities as the law requires.

Your rights

Depending on the law that applies to you, you have the right to:

• access your information and learn how we use it;
• correct it if it's wrong or incomplete;
• withdraw your consent at any time;
• have it deleted;
• restrict how we use it;
• receive it in a structured, commonly used format, or have it sent to another organization (portability);
• object to uses based on our legitimate interests.

To use a right, email kolbenchemical@gmail.com. We reply within 30 days, free of charge, and may first ask you to confirm your identity.

Complaints

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain at any time to:

• Canada: the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca)
• Quebec: the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec (cai.gouv.qc.ca)
• European Union: the data protection authority where you live or work, or ours, the Lower Saxony authority (LfD Niedersachsen, lfd.niedersachsen.de)

Changes to this policy

We'll post any change to this policy on this page and update the date at the top.