Privacy Policy

Who we are

CemeteryIQ is cemetery management software for cemetery operators in Ontario: municipalities, churches and religious organizations, volunteer and trustee boards, not-for-profits and private operators alike. Ontario regulatory requirements are built into it. It is operated from Ontario, Canada.

This policy covers the CemeteryIQ application and these pages. It does not cover a cemetery operator’s own website, or how an operator handles information outside CemeteryIQ. You can reach us about anything here at support@cemeteryiq.com.

Two kinds of information, treated differently

Cemetery records. Names, addresses and contact details of interment rights holders; names, dates and burial locations of deceased people; family and next-of-kin contacts; sales, transfers and payments; and documents and photographs uploaded by the cemetery. These are the operator’s records. The operator enters them, decides what goes into them, and is responsible for them. We hold them on the operator’s behalf and use them only to provide the service.

Account information. Information about the people who sign in to use the software: name, email address, a one-way scrambled form of their password, when they last signed in, who invited them, and a log of actions taken in the system. We use this to run accounts, keep them secure, and answer support questions.

Failed sign-in attempts. When someone gets a password wrong, we record the email address that was tried and the network address (IP) the attempt came from, so that repeated guessing can be slowed down. Nothing else is recorded, it is used for nothing else, and it is deleted once it is too old to count, which is about fifteen minutes.

If you are a rights holder or a family member

We are not the cemetery. If you want to see, correct or ask about a record concerning you or a relative, contact the cemetery operator directly. They decide what the record says and whether it can be changed. We cannot make that decision for them, and in most cases we are not permitted to.

Which privacy law covers them depends on who they are. A municipality is subject to the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. A church, a volunteer board, a not-for-profit or a company may be subject to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and some small operators may not fall under either. None of that changes where your request goes: it goes to the operator, and we will help them answer it.

Some cemetery records are public by law

Ontario requires every cemetery operator to keep a register and to let the public inspect it.

A cemetery operator shall maintain a register in which the operator shall enter, (a) the name and address of each interment rights holder or scattering rights holder and the location of the lot or scattering ground to which the rights pertain ... (c) the name of each person whose remains are interred or scattered in the cemetery, the location where the remains were interred or scattered and the date ... A cemetery or crematorium operator, as the case may be, shall make a register mentioned in subsection (1) or (2) available for inspection by the public without charge.

O. Reg. 30/11, s. 110 (1) and (4), under the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act, 2002

This is the operator’s legal obligation, not a choice we or they made. It means some of the information in CemeteryIQ, including the name and address of a living rights holder, must be available for anyone to inspect. Today an operator meets that duty in whatever form they already use, usually a register in the cemetery office.

A public search page is planned as part of CemeteryIQ. It does not exist yet. When it is built, the operator will control which fields appear on it, and this page will be updated before it goes live.

Where the information is kept

In Canada. The database is hosted in Canada (Central), near Montreal. The application itself, uploaded documents and photographs, and our error logs are hosted in Toronto.

We do not use any analytics service, advertising platform or error-tracking service. The full list of companies involved in running CemeteryIQ, and where each one operates, is on the sub-processors page.

Cookies and browser storage

CemeteryIQ sets only the cookies it needs in order to work: one that keeps you signed in, and two used by the sign-in process itself. That is all of them.

There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, and no tracking of any kind, on the application or on these pages. We do not use Google Analytics or anything like it. Nothing here follows you to another website.

The application also keeps a little information in your own browser to make it pleasant to use, such as the records you looked at most recently and how you last sorted a table. That stays on your device, is never sent to us, and clearing your browsing data removes it.

Who can see it

The operator’s own users, as the operator decides.

Us, when we need to. A CemeteryIQ support account may exist inside a cemetery’s records so that we can help with setup and support. It appears in the operator’s own list of users, and the operator can deactivate it themselves at any time.

Nobody else. We do not sell personal information, we do not rent or trade it, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not share it with anyone other than the service providers listed on the sub-processors page, who host it on our behalf.

We may disclose information where we are legally required to, for example in response to a court order. Where we are permitted to tell the operator first, we will.

How long we keep it

We keep an operator’s records for as long as they use CemeteryIQ. If they stop, they can ask us for a complete copy of everything, and we delete what we hold afterwards.

Cemetery operators have their own retention duties, and they are longer than most. O. Reg. 30/11 requires contracts to be kept for six years, requires records that are made available to the public to be kept for as long as the operator holds a licence, and requires public records to be transferred to a municipal, religious or public archive if a cemetery ceases to operate. The export exists partly so that an operator can meet those obligations rather than be trapped by us.

Keeping it secure

Traffic between a browser and CemeteryIQ is encrypted. A password travels over that encrypted connection when someone signs in, and is never written down anywhere in readable form: what we keep is a one-way bcrypt hash, which cannot be turned back into the password. When an account is created it has no password at all. The person sets their own through a one-time link, so nobody else, including us, ever knows it.

Each operator’s information is separated by the application, and every request is limited to the operator of the person who is signed in. No system is perfectly secure and we do not claim that ours is.

If something goes wrong

If personal information in our care is lost, or is accessed by someone who should not have it, we will tell the affected operator promptly and do what the law requires of us.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The date at the top of this page says when it last changed. If a change is significant, we will let operators know.

Contact

Questions, concerns or complaints about privacy: support@cemeteryiq.com.