Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-10-20

This Privacy Policy explains how Environmental Remediation Equipment Inc. (E.R.E. Inc.) ("ERE", "we", "us") collects, uses, shares and protects personal information when you visit www.ereinc.com or portal.ereinc.com, chat or talk with us, email us, or buy, rent or have equipment serviced. We handle personal information in line with Québec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

1. Person in charge of personal information

ERE's owner is the person in charge of the protection of personal information. You can reach this person about anything in this policy, including to exercise your rights: sales@ereinc.com (subject "Privacy"), 1-888-287-3732, or by mail to Person in charge of personal information, Environmental Remediation Equipment Inc., 8605 rue du Champ-d'Eau, Saint-Léonard, QC H1P 3B8, Canada.

2. What we collect

• Contact and business details: name, company, job title, email, phone, billing and shipping addresses.
• Quotes, orders, rentals and service: the products you ask about or buy, purchase orders, invoices, rental and service records, and the instruments you register with us (model, serial number, service history).
• Payment information: card payments are processed by our payment providers (Shopify at checkout, Clover on our customer portal). We do not keep full card numbers. Please never give a card number in chat, by email or in a voicemail.
• Communications: emails, website forms, chat messages, phone calls and voicemails, including call recordings, transcripts and call summaries (section 5).
• Portal account: your login and what you see in it (quotes, orders, invoices, instruments, service requests).
• Website and device information: IP address, browser and device, pages viewed, and ad click identifiers, collected through cookies and similar technologies (section 6).
• Business contact information from other sources: for business-to-business prospecting, we obtain professional contact details (name, title, company, business email, city, country) from commercial business databases.

3. Why we use it

• To answer questions, prepare quotes, process and ship orders, manage rentals, calibration, repairs and warranty claims.
• To run your portal account, invoice you, collect payment and manage credit accounts.
• To follow up on quotes, send shipping updates, service and maintenance reminders, and occasionally ask for a review.
• To send marketing emails where CASL allows it (section 8).
• To measure our website and advertising and improve them (section 6).
• To keep our systems secure, prevent fraud, keep accounting records and meet our legal obligations.

We use personal information only for these purposes, or for another purpose with your consent or where the law allows it. We do not sell personal information.

4. Chat assistant and AI

The chat on our website and portal is an AI assistant (Anthropic's Claude) that answers questions and passes your request to a specialist. When you share your contact details in the chat or a form, we email your request to our team, send you an acknowledgment, and add you to our customer systems (Shopify and our Odoo business system) so we can follow up. Web search requests made by the assistant are sent to Brave Search. Chat transcripts are deleted 30 days after the conversation's last activity and chat lead records 90 days after creation; backups are kept 14 days. What you asked for stays in our customer records as long as needed to serve you.

We do not make decisions about you based exclusively on automated processing.

5. Phone calls

Calls to and from our customer-facing lines may be recorded, transcribed and summarized for customer service, training and record keeping. Outside business hours (weekdays 4:30 p.m. to 8 a.m., weekends and statutory holidays) your call is answered by Ellie, an AI phone assistant running on OpenAI, which says it is an AI. Voicemails are transcribed by OpenAI. Recordings are transcribed on ERE's own computers; summaries are produced with Anthropic's Claude. A summary of the call (and, for after-hours calls, its transcript) is added to your customer record; after-hours calls are also emailed to our sales team. If a payment card number is detected in a call, its transcript and summary are withheld. Recordings are deleted from our phone provider's system within 7 days and kept on ERE's systems as long as needed for the purposes above.

6. Cookies, analytics and advertising

Our website uses cookies and similar technologies:

• Needed to run the site (Shopify): basket, checkout, language and security.
• Analytics: Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager measure how the site is used; Microsoft Clarity records how pages are used (clicks, scrolling, page views) to help us fix usability problems.
• Advertising: Google Ads and the Meta pixel measure our ads. When you arrive from a Google ad, we store the ad click identifier in a first-party cookie for 90 days, and if you later request a quote we may send Google that identifier and a hashed (encrypted one-way) copy of your email address so Google can tell us which ads led to quote requests.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, opt out of personalized Google ads at adssettings.google.com, install the Google Analytics opt-out add-on, and manage Meta ad preferences in your Meta account. Blocking needed cookies may stop the basket or checkout from working.

7. Who we share it with

We share personal information only as needed with service providers that work for us under confidentiality and security obligations, mainly:

• Shopify (online store, checkout), Odoo on Odoo.sh (business system, customer portal), Microsoft 365 (email), DigitalOcean (server hosting our chat), Clover (card payments), Brevo and Campaigner (email delivery), Apollo (business contact data);
• Anthropic and OpenAI (AI chat, phone assistant, transcription and summaries), Brave Search (chat web searches);
• 3CX and our phone service providers, including Twilio (phone and text messages);
• Google, Microsoft (Clarity) and Meta (analytics and advertising, section 6);
• carriers, manufacturers (for warranty and repairs) and our professional advisors.

We may also disclose personal information when the law requires or permits it, or as part of a sale or reorganization of our business under confidentiality obligations.

Shopify processes information about your use of our store. Learn how Shopify uses personal information and exercise rights with Shopify at privacy.shopify.com.

8. Marketing emails

We send commercial emails as CASL permits, for example with your consent, to customers who bought from us in the past two years, or to business contacts about matters relevant to their role. To stop receiving them, use the unsubscribe link in the email, reply asking us to stop, or write to us; we act on it within 10 business days. Order, service and account messages are not marketing and continue.

9. Storage outside Québec

Several of our providers store or process information outside Québec, in other provinces of Canada, the United States or the European Union. We use providers that commit to protecting the information they process for us. Information held outside Canada may be accessible to that country's authorities under its laws.

10. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as needed for the purposes above or as the law requires, then destroy or anonymize it. Examples: chat transcripts 30 days and chat lead records 90 days (section 4); accounting and tax records at least six years as tax law requires; customer, instrument and service records for as long as you remain a customer and as needed for warranty and service history.

11. Security

We protect personal information with access limited to staff who need it, encrypted connections, access controls and secure storage. No system is perfectly secure, so please do not send sensitive information (such as card numbers) by chat or email. If a confidentiality incident creates a risk of serious injury, we will notify the Commission d'accès à l'information and the people affected as the law requires.

12. Your rights

You may ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you and give you access to it;
• correct information that is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date;
• withdraw your consent to a use of your information, subject to legal or contractual limits;
• stop disseminating your information or de-index any link to your name, where the law allows;
• provide computerized information you gave us in a structured, commonly used technological format, to you or to someone you name.

Send your request to the person in charge (section 1). We may need to confirm your identity. We answer within 30 days, free of charge (a reasonable fee may apply to transcribe, reproduce or send information). If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. If you live elsewhere, you may have similar rights under your local law; contact us to use them.

13. Children

Our website and services are meant for businesses and adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The current version is always on this page with its "Last updated" date. If we make important changes, we will tell you on the website and, where appropriate, by email.

15. Contact

Questions or requests: sales@ereinc.com (subject "Privacy"), 1-888-287-3732, or Environmental Remediation Equipment Inc., 8605 rue du Champ-d'Eau, Saint-Léonard, QC H1P 3B8, Canada. See also our Terms and Conditions.