PRIVACY POLICY
Privacy Policy
SP Consulting ("we", "us") protects your personal information in accordance with British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) and Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
01
Scope
This policy applies to the spconsulting.ca website and to the consultation and immigration consulting services provided through it.
Our office is in Vancouver, British Columbia, and our handling of personal information is governed by BC's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). Where information crosses provincial or national borders, Canada's federal PIPEDA applies as well.
If you contacted us through our Korea branch, the rights given to you by Korean privacy law continue to apply.
02
What we collect
We collect only what we need in order to provide the service.
Required — your name, phone number, email address, how you found us, your time zone (Korea or Vancouver), and your preferred time for a call.
Optional — a Korean phone number, the type of enquiry, when you expect to arrive in Canada, and the details of your question.
Collected automatically — your IP address, browser information (User-Agent), campaign parameters such as utm tags, and the page you came from. We use these only to prevent abuse and to understand how people find us. We do not use them to build advertising profiles.
If you make a payment we collect the payer's name, email and phone number. **Card numbers and CVC are entered only on our payment provider's page (Stripe). They never reach our servers and we do not store them.**
We do not ask for sensitive information such as race, religion or health. Documents needed for an actual immigration application are collected through a secure channel after a service agreement is signed.
03
Why we collect it
- To receive your enquiry and assign a consultant
- To give you advice on immigration, visas, study and business immigration, and to reply to you
- To keep a record of our correspondence and follow up with you
- To enter into and carry out a service agreement, to invoice and to issue receipts
- To keep records for responding to enquiries and resolving disputes
- To produce statistics that do not identify individuals, and to improve our service
04
Consent and withdrawing it
We obtain your consent before collecting, using or disclosing your personal information. Submitting the consultation form is taken as consent to the handling described in this policy.
You may withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us at the address in section 12. Records we are required by law to keep, and information needed to carry out an agreement already in place, may be retained for the applicable period after you withdraw.
If you withdraw consent we may not be able to continue advising you or providing the service.
05
Service providers and transfers outside Canada
We use the providers below to deliver the service. Some of them store data outside Canada, which means the information may be accessible to the courts and authorities of those countries. We disclose this to you in advance as PIPEDA requires.
| Provider | What they do for us | Where data is handled |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudways / DigitalOcean | Website hosting and data storage | Canada or United States |
| Twilio SendGrid | Sending confirmation emails | United States |
| Stripe | Processing service payments | United States and Ireland |
| Google (Analytics · Tag Manager) | Website usage statistics | United States |
| cic.spconsulting.ca (internal enquiry system) | Receiving and assigning enquiries | Republic of Korea |
06
Disclosure to others
Apart from the providers listed in section 5, we do not sell or disclose your personal information to third parties.
There are two exceptions.
Where you have expressly agreed. For example, submitting documents to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) or a provincial government for your application, or sharing information with an employer, school or lawyer working on your file.
Where the law requires it, or where a court or law enforcement body makes a lawful request.
07
How long we keep it
Enquiries that do not lead to an agreement are kept for three years from our last contact with you, and then destroyed. Immigration decisions take a long time to make, and people often come back to us a year or two after their first question.
As PIPA requires, personal information we used to make a decision about you is kept for at least one year, so that you have the opportunity to see the basis for that decision.
Client files, once a service agreement is in place, are kept for the period required by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants (CICC). That period is set out in the service agreement.
Once the retention period ends we destroy the information promptly and in a way that cannot be reversed.
08
How we protect it
We take reasonable steps to protect personal information against loss, theft, unauthorised access and alteration.
These include encryption in transit (HTTPS), restricting access to those who need it, storing administrator passwords as hashes, limiting login attempts, and preventing execution of files in upload directories.
Payment details go directly to our payment provider without passing through our servers, and we do not store card numbers.
No transmission over the internet is completely secure. We provide a reasonable level of protection, but we cannot guarantee absolute security.
09
Cookies and similar technologies
Language cookie (sp_lang) — remembers the language you chose, kept for one year.
Popup dismissal — if you choose "do not show again", that choice is stored in your browser's local storage. It is not sent to our servers.
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager — collect usage statistics such as pages viewed, time on page and how you arrived.
You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. If you do, some features will not work as intended — your language choice will not be remembered, for instance.
10
Your rights
- To ask for access to the personal information we hold about you
- To ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete
- To withdraw consent and ask us to stop processing
- To ask how your information has been used and to whom it has been disclosed
- To challenge our handling of your personal information
11
Marketing email
In line with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), we send marketing email such as seminar invitations only to people who have consented to receive it.
Messages directly related to a service you asked for — a confirmation of your enquiry, or an update on your file — are not marketing messages.
Every marketing email identifies the sender and includes an unsubscribe link. We action unsubscribe requests within 10 business days.
12
Privacy Officer and how to reach us
As PIPA requires, we have designated a person responsible for our handling of personal information.
Privacy Officer
Email: info@spconsulting.ca
Address: 1177 W Hastings St #1750, Vancouver, BC V6E 2K3, Canada
Phone: +1 604-569-1269
We respond to access and correction requests within 30 days. If we need longer, we will tell you why and when to expect our response.
13
If you are not satisfied
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please tell our Privacy Officer first.
If our response does not resolve the matter, you may complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia at www.oipc.bc.ca
For matters involving transfers across borders you may also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at www.priv.gc.ca
14
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the law or our service changes. We will post significant changes on the website at least seven days before they take effect.
Effective date: 3 September 2026
A happier move to Canada, made together with SP Consulting.
Ask us anything about immigrating to Canada. We treat every client’s move as if it were our own.