Privacy Policy

Who we are

Victoria Guitar Society is a British Columbia non-profit society and Canadian registered charity. We are responsible for personal information under our control. Our Privacy Officer can be reached at victoriaguitarsociety@gmail.com.

Website analytics

We use Google Analytics by default to understand which pages are useful. Google Analytics may process your device and browser information, approximate location derived from your IP address, pages visited, referring page, and interactions with the site. We use this information to understand site usage and improve our programs and content; we do not use it for personalized advertising. You can disable analytics at any time using Privacy choices in the site footer.

Google may process this information outside Canada under its own privacy and security terms. We disable Google signals and advertising personalization in our site configuration. Analytics reports and event-level data are retained only as long as reasonably needed for these purposes and are subject to the retention settings in our Google Analytics property.

Analytics preference and local storage

Analytics is enabled by default. You can disable it at any time without losing any site functionality. Your choice is stored in your browser’s local storage so the site can remember and honour it on later visits. This preference is not used to track you.

Links and services operated by others

Our site links to services such as Google Maps, Google Calendar, CanadaHelps, Mailchimp, Jotform, ticket providers, social networks, and performer websites. Those services receive information only when you choose to visit them and apply their own privacy policies.

Access, correction, questions, and complaints

You may ask about personal information under our control, request access or correction where applicable, withdraw consent, or raise a privacy concern by contacting our Privacy Officer at victoriaguitarsociety@gmail.com. We may need to verify your identity before responding to an access request.

Policy changes

We may update this policy when our practices or legal obligations change. The effective date above identifies the current version.

AI assistant

The optional VGS AI assistant uses OpenAI to answer questions about published VGS information. When you send a message, the current conversation is sent to OpenAI through our AWS-hosted service. When you start voice mode, your browser asks for microphone permission and connects audio to OpenAI. Please avoid sharing sensitive personal information.

VGS does not save chat messages, voice captions or audio recordings. Text conversations and captions remain in the open chat and are cleared when it is closed. To limit abuse, our service processes your network address into a keyed identifier that changes daily; the address itself is not saved in application records or logs. Temporary usage counters and completed voice connection records are scheduled for deletion after one day; unfinished connection records may remain until resolved. Operational logs contain technical request identifiers, status, timing and failures without message content, network addresses or audio. Logs and failed scheduled-cleanup records are retained for up to 14 days. OpenAI processes requests under its API data policies, including any applicable security and abuse-monitoring retention.

When analytics is enabled, Google Analytics receives chat openings and closings, text or voice selections, message and response counts, errors, link categories, and approximate voice duration. Chat messages, audio, captions and voice connection identifiers are not included in these analytics events. You can disable analytics at any time using Privacy choices; this does not prevent use of the assistant.