2023 ESG Report
1.0 General information about this notice
This notice is to provide our customers (“you”) with information about how we use interest-based advertising to provide tailored advertisements to you on Loblaw and third party websites and mobile applications.
“Interest-based advertisements” are advertisements for products, deals, and special offers from us or our clients tailored to you based on how you shop. It is important to us that you receive advertisements relating to our products and services or third party products and services that are relevant to you.
We deliver interest-based advertisements to your device using unique identifiers assigned to your device, browser, or mobile application and through partnership with external publishing, broadcast and content, media, and advertising companies.
This notice is governed by the Loblaw Privacy Policy. If there is any inconsistency between this notice and the Loblaw Privacy Policy, the Loblaw Privacy Policy will prevail.
Examples of Interest-Based Advertisements:
2.0 What information do we collect?
We may deliver interest-based advertisements to you on our websites, mobile applications and other third party properties such as social media platforms. To do this, we and third party advertising partners that we engage may use unique identifiers assigned to your device, browser or mobile application as well as your hashed (de-identified) email address or phone number to collect information about your visits to our websites and mobile applications, third party websites and mobile applications, and/or broadcast and digital media such as connected TV and streaming media.
The information we collect includes:
Products, web pages or advertisements you scrolled over or clicked on or viewed on websites or mobile applications; and
Products and services you purchased online on our websites and mobile applications and offline in our stores using your PC Optimum account.
For more information on how we collect your personal information, please visit the Loblaw Privacy Policy and review the section “What types of personal information do we collect, and how?”.
3.0 How do we use this information?
We may use your grocery, cosmetics, apparel, and household goods purchasing history, for interest-based advertising purposes.
We will not use personal information that may be considered sensitive (e.g., personal health information, personal financial information, sensitive product information, i.e., data about your personal lifestyle choices or products which may be of an intimate nature such as weight, political or religious affiliations, etc.) for interest-based advertising purposes, without your express consent.
By leveraging various technologies, including machine learning tools, we use this information to place you in general interest and purchase categories (e.g., beauty buyers, coffee buyers, organic product buyers), which helps us determine what types of advertisements may be of interest to you and then serve you with these advertisements. We may draw inferences from items you purchase online and/or in-store and use these inferences to gain insights into the effectiveness of media campaigns and how well our products or third party products sell to a certain general interest group.
We may also leverage tools such as data clean rooms offered by service providers in partnership with third party advertising partners to measure and improve the effectiveness of media campaigns and determine to which PC Optimum members we can serve ads on third party websites. Personal information is de-identified via hashing prior to uploading to a data clean room to ensure that your personal information is not exposed as part of this process.
For more information on how we use your personal information, please visit the Loblaw Privacy Policy and review the section “How do we use personal information?”, For more information on the types of technologies we use, review the section “How We Collect Personal Information”.
4.0 How do we share this information?
We may share your personal information within our group of companies for the purposes described in this notice or as detailed in the Loblaw Privacy Policy, and in accordance with applicable law. We also share limited de-identified personal information (e.g., hashed email address) with our advertising service providers, such as social media and other properties that serve interest-based ads, for the purposes of reaching you with relevant advertisements through their advertising platforms.
We do not sell your personal information to any organization or person; the only exception to this would be if we sell or transfer any part of our business. It is important to note that our client advertisers on whose behalf we may serve interest-based advertising will never receive personal information about our customers since they only need to know that they are reaching the right customers at the right time and place to make their advertising relevant; and whether their advertising campaign was effective (e.g., the percentage of customers that have received their advertising, in which city or location the ad campaign was most successful, estimated sales conversion).
For more information on how we share your personal information, please visit the Loblaw Privacy Policy and review the section “How do we share personal information?”.
5.0 What are your privacy choices?
You can manage your privacy preferences by changing your browser settings on your device, and/or using third party unsubscribe functionality (e.g., via Google or Facebook) to change your preferences within their platforms. Please note that disabling, blocking or deleting some of these technologies, such as cookies, may cause you to lose the functionality of certain features on our websites and mobile applications.
You can also opt-out from receiving interest-based advertising from our client advertisers and us by changing your settings in your PC Optimum account, or by contacting our Customer Relations Centre at 1-800-296-2332 or Loblaw Privacy Office at loblawprivacy@loblaw.ca. (Open in a new tab)
It may take some time for all of our records to reflect changes in your preferences. For example, if you request that you not receive interest-based advertising, your preference may not be captured for an advertising campaign already in progress.
For more information on how to manage your privacy choices, please visit the Loblaw Privacy Policy and review the section “How do I change my privacy choices?”.
6.0 Who can you contact with questions about this notice?
If you have privacy questions relating to this notice, you can contact our Loblaw Privacy Office at loblawprivacy@loblaw.ca(Open in a new tab).
