Who we are
Walrus Benefits (“Walrus”, “we”) helps employers design, price and place group benefits plans. We are responsible for the personal information we collect, and our Privacy Officer is accountable for how we handle it.
What we collect
- Contact and company details: company name, province and industry, and the name, work email and phone number of the person we deal with.
- Employee census information: such as age or date of birth, gender, salary, province and coverage type (single, couple or family), and, when an employer provides them, employee names and contact details.
- Health-related information: group-level answers, such as how many employees are on disability, whether a plan member has had large claims, and the group’s claims experience; and, when employees enrol, the information the insurer requires, including details about their dependants.
- Documents you upload: such as plan booklets, renewals, census files and claims reports.
- Technical information: when you request an estimate we record the time and may keep a one-way, scrambled version of your IP address to help us detect abuse. Older estimates may still hold your IP address and browser details until we remove them. When you sign an application electronically, we record the time and your IP address as evidence of the signature. The estimate tool uses a short-lived security cookie and keeps your answers in your browser until you close the tab. Once you give us your contact details, we also record which step of the estimate you reached, so an advisor can follow up. If you sign in to the client portal, cookies keep you signed in.
- Website visits: we count visits to the public pages of our website with Vercel Web Analytics. It does not use cookies and does not identify you: it records the page viewed, the website that referred you, and general details such as the country, browser and type of device, not who you are. It is not used on signed-in or private pages, such as the client portal or your application and enrolment links.
Why we use it
- To prepare your estimate and show you plan options.
- To contact you about your estimate, your application or your plan.
- To market your plan to insurers and obtain firm proposals, when you ask us to.
- To apply for, set up, enrol, service and renew your group plan.
- To keep the records that the law and our regulators require, and to protect our services from fraud and abuse.
We do not sell personal information.
Who we share it with
Our advisors and client-service staff can access client records to prepare estimates and service plans. We also share information with the people and organizations below:
- Insurers we approach to price your plan, and the insurer you choose to provide it.
- Your employer’s plan administrator, for the enrolment information needed to run the plan.
- If an independent broker introduced you to us or works on your plan with us, that broker, for the plans they are involved in.
- Service providers in Canada and the United States that host, store, send or process information for us, such as cloud hosting, database, email and document processing providers. When you upload a plan booklet in the estimate tool, it is read by our AI provider, Anthropic, in the United States. Our website is hosted by Vercel, in the United States, which also provides the visit counts described above.
- Regulators and others, where the law requires or allows it.
Information processed or stored outside Canada is subject to the laws of that country and may be accessible to its courts and authorities.
How long we keep it
We keep personal information for as long as we need it for the purposes above, and for any longer period the law or our regulators require. When it is no longer needed, it is deleted or made anonymous.
Your rights and choices
You can ask for access to or correction of your information and we will respond within 30 days. Some records must be kept for regulatory reasons. We may need to confirm your identity before we respond.
You can withdraw your consent, subject to legal and contractual limits. If you do, we may not be able to prepare an estimate or service your plan. If your employer gave us your information, you can also contact your plan administrator.
To make a request or ask a question, email our Privacy Officer at callum@walrusbenefits.com. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.