Privacy Policy

ANIML Health Inc. ("ANIML Health", "we", "us") provides ARC (Animal Research Companion), software for running veterinary clinical trials. This policy explains what personal information we collect through the ARC website at arcvet.io, the ARC application and our related services, why we collect it, who can see it, where it is kept, and the choices and rights you have.

If you have a question or a request about your personal information, write to our Privacy Officer at we.care@animl.health.

Our two roles

We handle personal information in two different capacities, and it matters which one applies.

• Information about you as a user of ARC or a visitor to our website. When you visit the website, ask to create an account, or use ARC, we decide how that information is used. We are responsible for it under Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, where it applies, Quebec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (Law 25).
• Study records that organizations keep in ARC. Clinics, hospitals, universities, research groups and contract research organizations ("customer organizations") use ARC to keep the records of their studies, including information about animal owners. The customer organization decides what it collects and why, and is responsible for it. We hold and process those records on its behalf and on its instructions, under our agreement with it. If you are an animal owner whose information was entered into ARC by a clinic, please contact that clinic first; we will help it answer your request.

What we collect

When you have an account

• Your name, work email address, organization, role in studies, country, province or territory, and time zone.
• How you sign in: email sign-in links and codes, passkeys and authenticator apps. We store only what is needed to check them; we never receive the private key of a passkey.
• Billing details for organizations: a billing contact, address, tax region, invoices and records of payments. ARC does not take or store card numbers.

When you use ARC

• What you do in the application, as the audit trail of a regulated study requires: who created or changed a record, when, from which address, and the reason given. This record cannot be edited.
• Sign-in activity and security information: times, IP addresses, browser type, and failed attempts.
• Messages, files, images and comments you post, and your display preferences.

What customer organizations record in their studies

• Clinical information about animal patients: signalment, examinations, measurements, samples, images, adverse events, treatments and outcomes.
• Where a site records them: animal owners' names and contact details, and owners' consent, including signatures.
• Microchip numbers are never imported from practice systems.

When you visit the website

• What you send us through a form, such as a request for a pilot or a sandbox, a request to create an account, or a request to run ARC on your own servers. A request sent through the website's "Talk to us" form is emailed to us and is not stored on the website.
• Standard server logs (IP address, browser type and the page requested), kept for security.
• If you accept analytics cookies on the website: Google Analytics records the pages you visit there, how you arrived, your browser and device type, and an approximate location derived from your IP address. It does not run inside the ARC application, and it is never loaded on the private onboarding links organizations share.

We do not use advertising trackers, and we do not use analytics inside the ARC application.

How we use it

• To provide ARC: create accounts, sign people in, show each person what their role allows, keep records, and run the features customer organizations use.
• To keep ARC secure: verify sign-ins, detect and stop misuse, investigate incidents, and keep the audit trail.
• To send the emails the service needs: sign-in links, invitations, notifications you choose, and, on behalf of a site, consent links and messages to animal owners.
• To bill customer organizations, using counts of usage (such as active studies, patients, users and storage), not the content of their records.
• To understand, in aggregate, how visitors use the public website, if they accept analytics cookies.
• To answer questions and provide support.
• To meet legal, tax and regulatory obligations.

We do not sell personal information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use customer organizations' study records to train artificial-intelligence models. Records an organization sends to Hachiko for a summary are used to write that summary.

Who can see it

Inside ARC. Access follows each person's role in each study. Animal owners' names and contact details, and animal names, are visible only to the staff of the site that enrolled the animal. Coordinating centres, monitors and sponsors work from de-identified records.

Our service providers. We use a small number of providers to run ARC, under contracts that limit their use of the information to providing their service to us:

Services you or your organization choose. If you sign in with Google or Microsoft, they confirm who you are. If your organization connects its practice management system (for example Instinct or Shepherd), ARC sends that system the searches your staff make, which can include an animal's or owner's name, and receives the patient details it returns. If your organization keeps its files in its own storage, they are stored there.

Hachiko summaries, only if your organization turns them on. An administrator of a customer organization may turn on summaries by Hachiko, a service of ANI-ML that writes summaries of clinical-record PDFs. It is off unless that administrator turns it on and accepts that the records sent are processed in the United States. Once it is on, when a member of that organization's staff asks for a summary of a document, ARC sends ANI-ML's Hachiko service, in the United States (Amazon Web Services, US East):

• the PDF of that one record, which can include the owner's and the animal's names, contact details and clinical history;
• the prompt the staff member wrote or chose, and the kind and language of summary asked for.

ARC does not send the file's name, and sends nothing else about the organization's people or studies. Hachiko returns a written summary, which ARC keeps with the document, visible only to those in that organization who may see the document. The organization can turn summaries off at any time. Nothing of an organization that does not turn it on is ever sent to Hachiko. ARC's sandbox server never sends anything to Hachiko: it uses a built-in stand-in that writes fictional summaries.

When the law requires it. We disclose personal information when required by law, such as by a court order, or where needed to protect people's safety or our legal rights. If ANIML Health is ever sold or merged, personal information may pass to the new owner, who must keep it under the same protections.

Where it is kept

ARC keeps its records in Canada (Amazon Web Services, Canada Central) by default. Two exceptions:

• Emails pass through SendGrid in the United States on their way to you. These include sign-in links, invitations, and emails a site sends to an animal owner, which name the owner's own animal.
• A customer organization may choose to keep its files in storage it controls, in a location it chooses.
• A customer organization that turns on Hachiko summaries has the records it chooses to summarize processed by ANI-ML's Hachiko service in the United States (see "Who can see it").

Information processed outside Canada may be accessible to the courts and authorities of that country.

How we protect it

• Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest. Animal owners' details and other identifying information are also encrypted with keys managed in Amazon's key management service.
• Access controls enforced in the database itself, not only in the application, so each person can read only what their role allows.
• A second sign-in factor (a passkey or an authenticator app), which organizations can require for all their members.
• A tamper-evident audit trail, regular backups and restore tests.
• Staff access only as needed, with emergency access recorded.

No system can be guaranteed secure. If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify the affected customer organizations, people and authorities as the law requires.

Cookies and browser storage

ARC uses one essential cookie, which keeps you signed in. It cannot be read by scripts on the page and ends when you sign out or your session expires. Your browser also keeps your display preferences, such as light or dark mode, your answer to the analytics question and, before you have an account, your progress through the walkthrough.

On the public website only, and only if you choose Accept, Google Analytics sets its own cookies (names starting with _ga) to count visits; they last up to two years. Until you accept, none are set. You can change your choice at any time with Cookie settings at the foot of the website. We use no advertising cookies.

How long we keep it

• Accounts: for as long as the account is active. After an account is closed we delete or de-identify its profile once it is no longer needed, except where the records of a study must keep it (see below).
• Study records: for as long as the customer organization's agreement and its retention settings require. Deleting a study's records takes two people at the customer organization. The audit trail of a regulated study keeps the names of the people who made each change for as long as the study's records are kept, because the law requires it.
• Backups: database backups for up to 35 days, and earlier versions of files for up to 90 days.
• Server and security logs: up to one year.
• Requests to create an account that are not completed: about a day.
• Invoices and payment records: as long as tax law requires, generally six years.
• Website analytics: Google keeps it for the period set in our Analytics account, which we set to 14 months.
• Hachiko summaries: kept in ARC with the document they were made from, and deleted with it.

Your rights

You can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, and to know how it has been used and disclosed. You can withdraw your consent to uses that are not needed to provide the service or meet a legal obligation, although that may mean we cannot provide parts of the service. In Quebec, you may also ask us to stop disseminating your information and, where the law provides, to receive it in a structured, commonly used technological format.

Write to we.care@animl.health. We answer within 30 days. For study records kept by a customer organization, we will pass your request to that organization and help it respond.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, in Quebec, the Commission d'accès à l'information.

Children

ARC is for professionals. It is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

We will post changes on this page with a new effective date. If a change is significant, we will also tell the administrators of customer organizations before it takes effect.

Contact

Privacy Officer
ANIML Health Inc.
we.care@animl.health

See also our Terms of Service.