Privacy Policy

1. Our Privacy Officer

We have designated a Privacy Officer who is responsible for our compliance with PIPA and for answering questions about this policy. You can reach them at:

2. Information we collect

We collect only the information we need for the purposes described in this policy. Depending on how you interact with us, this may include:

You give us directly

• Contact and account details — name, email, phone number, address, date of birth and emergency contact when you create an account, book a class or appointment, or buy a pass, membership or gift card.
• Purchase and billing records — what you bought, when and how you paid. Card payments are processed by our booking platforms’ payment processors; we do not store full card numbers on our own systems.
• Health information — health history, injuries, pregnancy, and waiver or intake answers you give us so we can teach and treat you safely, and clinical records created by our practitioners (see section 5).
• Program and application information — for teacher trainings, internships, retreats, workshops, the Karmi Exchange Program, the Community Care Fund and scholarships, we may ask about your background, experience, goals, availability and, for need-based programs, your financial circumstances. Retreat participants may also be asked for travel details, dietary needs and emergency contacts.
• Job applications — your résumé, references and related information when you apply to work with us.
• Communications — emails, calls, messages and chat conversations with us, including through the chat assistant on our website.

Collected automatically on our website

• Usage data — your IP address, device and browser type, pages viewed, links clicked, referring site and approximate location, collected through cookies and similar technologies (see section 7).

3. How we use your information

We use personal information to:

• register you for classes, appointments, trainings, workshops and retreats, and manage your account, passes and memberships;
• provide safe, appropriate instruction and care, and keep the clinical records our practitioners are required to maintain;
• process payments, issue receipts and, if you ask us to, submit insurance or ICBC claims on your behalf;
• contact you about your bookings, schedule changes, cancellations and your account;
• assess applications for our programs, scholarships, exchange and community care initiatives, and for employment;
• send newsletters and offers, where you have agreed to receive them (see section 6);
• understand how our website is used, improve it, and measure and deliver our advertising (see section 7);
• keep accounting and tax records, protect the safety of our community, and meet our legal and regulatory obligations.

We will tell you about any new purpose before we use your information for it, and ask for your consent where required. We do not sell or rent your personal information.

4. Consent

We collect, use and disclose personal information with your consent, except where PIPA permits or requires otherwise. Sometimes consent is express — for example, when you tick a box to join our mailing list or sign an intake form. Sometimes it is implied — for example, when you give us your phone number while booking, you consent to us using it to contact you about that booking.

You may withdraw or change your consent at any time by contacting our Privacy Officer, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. We will explain the likely consequences — for instance, we may not be able to provide certain services without information needed to deliver them safely.

5. Health information

Health information is sensitive, and we treat it with extra care. Clinical records for massage therapy, acupuncture, counselling and other treatments are created and kept by our practitioners through our clinic management system and are accessible only to the practitioners involved in your care and the staff who need them to support that care (such as billing). Our practitioners also follow the confidentiality and record-keeping standards of their regulatory colleges or professional associations.

Health information shared for yoga classes (such as injuries or pregnancy) is used only so your teacher can offer safe options, and is shared only with the teachers and staff who need it.

We do not disclose your health information to anyone outside MĀ — including insurers, ICBC, employers or other health providers — without your consent, unless the law requires or permits it (for example, to prevent serious harm or to respond to a court order).

6. Emails & newsletters

We send newsletters, program announcements and offers only to people who have agreed to receive them or where CASL otherwise permits (for example, recent clients). Every marketing email identifies MĀ Wellness & Yoga, includes our contact information and contains an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribe requests are processed promptly, and always within 10 business days.

Unsubscribing from marketing emails won’t stop transactional messages about bookings, payments or your account.

7. Cookies, analytics & advertising

Our website uses cookies and similar technologies. Some are necessary for the site to work (for example, remembering that you have already closed a pop-up). Others help us understand how visitors use the site and measure our advertising:

• Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager — aggregate statistics about visits and how pages are used.
• Google Ads and the Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Pixel — measure the results of our ads and show our ads to people who have visited our site.
• Hotjar — heatmaps and session recordings that show how visitors scroll and click, so we can improve our pages. Hotjar is designed to suppress text you type into form fields.

These tools collect information about your use of our site that may be combined with information those companies already hold. You can limit it by:

• blocking or deleting cookies in your browser settings (some features may not work as a result);
• installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on;
• adjusting your Google ad settings and your Meta ad preferences;
• using Hotjar’s opt-out;
• visiting the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada’s YourAdChoices to opt out of interest-based ads from participating companies.

8. Service providers

We use trusted third-party service providers to run our business. They process personal information on our behalf, only for the services they provide to us, and are required to protect it. Our main providers are:

When you follow a link from our site to book through Mindbody or Jane App, or use Google Forms to apply for a program, that provider’s own privacy policy also applies.

9. Storage outside Canada

Some of our service providers store or process personal information outside Canada, mainly in the United States. While it is outside Canada, your information is subject to the laws of that country and may be accessible to its courts, law enforcement and national security authorities. We choose providers that use reasonable security safeguards, and our obligations under PIPA continue to apply to information they handle for us. If you have questions about how a specific provider handles your information, contact our Privacy Officer.

10. When we share information

Beyond our service providers, we share personal information only:

• with your consent — for example, with an insurer or ICBC when you ask us to bill them directly, or with a retreat partner who needs your details to host you;
• among our teachers, practitioners and staff, on a need-to-know basis, to provide your services;
• where required or permitted by law — for example, in response to a court order or subpoena, to a regulatory college, to collect a debt, or in an emergency that threatens someone’s life, health or safety;
• to a buyer or successor if all or part of our business is sold or transferred, in which case the information will continue to be protected in line with this policy.

11. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes it was collected for, or as the law requires, and then securely destroy or de-identify it. In particular:

• Clinical records are kept for the periods set by our practitioners’ regulatory colleges — for example, at least 16 years after the last visit for massage therapy and acupuncture records (longer for clients who were minors).
• Financial and tax records are kept for at least six years, as required by the Canada Revenue Agency.
• Information used to make a decision about you (such as a scholarship or program application) is kept for at least one year after the decision, so you have a reasonable opportunity to request access to it, as PIPA requires.
• Mailing list details are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them.

12. Security

We protect personal information with reasonable physical, technical and administrative safeguards, including password-protected and access-restricted systems, encrypted connections on our website, secure storage of any paper records, and limiting access to staff who need it for their work. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we take care to protect your information and review our practices regularly. If a privacy breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and, where appropriate, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia.

13. Your rights

Under PIPA, you have the right to:

• access the personal information we hold about you, and learn how it has been used and to whom it has been disclosed;
• ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete;
• withdraw your consent to our collection, use or disclosure of your information, as described in section 4.

To make a request, write to our Privacy Officer (email is fine) with enough detail for us to identify you and the information you are asking about. We may need to verify your identity. We will respond within 30 days as defined by PIPA (which excludes Saturdays and holidays), or let you know if we need more time and why. We may charge a minimal fee for access requests; if so, we will give you an estimate first. In limited cases the law allows or requires us to refuse access — for example, where disclosure would reveal someone else’s personal information — and we will explain our reasons in writing.

14. Young people

Our website is intended for adults. Where we offer classes or treatments to young people, we generally collect information from and seek consent through a parent or legal guardian, unless the young person is able to consent on their own behalf.

15. Questions & complaints

If you have a question or concern about how we handle your personal information, please contact our Privacy Officer first — we will look into it and respond. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia:

16. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in our services, the tools we use, or the law. The current version will always be posted on this page with its effective date.

Effective September 25, 2026