Policy of Confidentiality of the Ministère du Conseil exécutif du Québec

Thank you for visiting the site of the Prime Minister of Québec and for reading through our policy of confidentiality. The Prime Minister of Québec's site does not place any cookies on the computer hard drives of visitors. No personal information may be collected without your prior consent.

No one will be able to identify you personally from the information automatically sent between your computer and ours. Such information is gathered only because of the technological requirements inherent to Internet navigation and are used only for statistical purposes.

Information automatically sent

Once you access www.mce.gouv.qc.ca, information will be automatically exchanged between your computer and the server of the government portal, without any doing on your part. The information will not personally identify you. The exchange involves:

• the name of the Internet domain (e.g., "xcompagnie.com" if you use a private Internet-access account, or "université.edu" if you access via a university) and the IP address whereby you access our site (an IP address is a number automatically assigned to your computer by your Internet-access provider whenever you navigate on the Web);
  
• the type of navigator and operating system used to access our site;
  
• the date and time when you access our site;
  
• the pages you visit;
  
• and the address of any site (referring site) that led you to www.mce.gouv.qc.ca.

With this exchange of information, the server can send you a file that will be compatible with your computer equipment. The Ministère also keeps the information needed to keep track of the number of visitors, the pages they most frequently visit, the technology they use, the referring sites they come from, and their country of origin.

If you send us personal information

Pursuant to the Act respecting Access to Documents held by Public Bodies and the Protection of Personal Information, any government department or body requesting personal information about you must show that it needs to collect the information (Article 64). It must also identify itself and inform you (extract from Article 65):

1. "of the name and address of the public body on whose behalf the information is being collected;
2. of the use to which the information will be put;
3. of the categories of persons who will have access to the information;
4. of the fact that a reply is obligatory, or that it is optional;
5. of the consequences for the person concerned or, as the case may be, for the third person, in case of a refusal to reply;
6. of the rights of access and correction provided by law."

If you choose to send us personal information by filling out a form on the Prime Minister of Québec's site, we will use only the information needed to answer your message and act on it. E-mail messages are treated with the same measures of confidentiality as are used for regular mail.

The personal information you send is forwarded to another government body only in cases where your request is addressed to that body or if such forwarding is required by law. The information is in no way used to make user profiles and is not forwarded to any private body.

Links to other sites

The Prime Minister of Québec's site provides links to the government sites of Québec and other jurisdictions, as well as to the sites of certain private organizations. When you visit these sites, they will appear in a new window. Please note that our policy of confidentiality will no longer be protecting the information you exchange. You will be subject to the policy of the site you visit, if it has one.

Do you have any comments or questions? You may at all times use the e-mail box available on all pages of the Prime Minister's site by clicking "Express yourself."

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