Privacy Policy

Last Minute Shippers Inc. ("LMS", "we", "us") is a freight forwarder in Mississauga, Ontario. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose and protect personal information when you visit our website, ask us for an estimate or quote, ship with us, or contact us. We follow the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, for residents of Quebec, Quebec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector.

1. Who is responsible

LMS is responsible for the personal information it controls. Our Privacy Officer is accountable for this policy and can be reached at customerservice@lastminuteshippers.com (subject: "Privacy Officer"), by phone at (905) 276-0999, or by mail at 3136 Mavis Road, Unit 200, Mississauga, ON L5C 1T9, Canada.

2. Information we collect

Information you give us

• Contact details: name, email address, phone number, company name and address.
• Shipment details: origin and destination, pickup and delivery addresses and contacts, cargo descriptions, quantities, weights, dimensions, values, dangerous goods answers, and service choices.
• Parties to the shipment: shipper, consignee, notify party and payer details you provide, which may include information about other people. Please tell them you are sharing it with us.
• Documents you upload or sign: commercial invoices, packing lists, permits, identification or residence documents where customs requires them for personal effects, and signed forms.
• Payment information: billing details and records of payments. Card and PayPal payments are processed by the payment provider; we do not store full card numbers.
• Communications: emails, chat messages, call notes and support requests.

Information we create or receive while handling your shipment

• Pickup records and dock receipts: piece counts, weights, dimensions, condition notes and photographs of your cargo and its packaging.
• Records of your acceptances, approvals, acknowledgements and signatures: the document and version, the wording you confirmed, the time, your name and email, and the IP address and browser information your device sends.
• Carrier, customs and tracking information about your shipment.

Information from other sources

• Lead platforms and referral services you used to request a quote from us, which send us your request.
• Our call-answering service, which answers some calls to our number and sends us a summary of the call.
• Carriers, customs brokers and agents handling your shipment.

Information collected automatically

• Technical data: IP address, browser and device type.
• Usage data: pages visited and how you reached our website (for example a referring page or campaign), recorded with your enquiry.
• Cookies, as section 8 explains.
• Email engagement: whether our emails were delivered, opened and whether their links were followed, as section 6 explains.

3. How we use information

• To answer your enquiry and prepare estimates, preliminary rates and quotes.
• To book, transport, store, clear, insure, track and deliver your shipment, and to prepare and send its documents.
• To record what we received, verify cargo, and prepare revised quotes, additional charges, invoices, refunds and credits.
• To communicate with you about your enquiry and shipment, and to follow up where we have not heard back.
• To meet legal obligations, including customs, export reporting, sanctions screening, tax and transportation rules.
• To handle claims and disputes, and to keep records of our agreements.
• To improve our website and services, including through analytics where you allow it.
• To measure our ads: when you contact us or ask for a quote after clicking one of our Google or Meta ads, we send your email address and phone number to Google and Meta in hashed form, with the ad's click ID, so they can count the enquiry; not if you chose "Essential only" in the cookie bar.
• To send promotional messages only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

4. Consent

We collect, use and disclose personal information with your consent, which may be express or implied from the circumstances (for example, when you ask for a quote you consent to our using your details to prepare it and to contact you about it), or where the law permits or requires it without consent. You may withdraw consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual limits; if you do, we may not be able to provide some services.

5. Artificial intelligence and automated tools

We use automated tools, including artificial intelligence services from third-party providers, to:

• sort incoming emails and decide which are new enquiries;
• summarize enquiries and suggest next steps and draft replies for our staff;
• answer general questions in our website chat assistant; and
• calculate preliminary rates from our rate lists and the route and cargo details you give.

Before we send text to an AI service for sorting or summarizing, we remove email addresses and phone numbers where the task does not need them. AI services do not decide whether you get a quote or what it costs: a person at LMS reviews and sends every quote, revised quote, additional charge and final invoice. Preliminary rates are calculated automatically from rate lists, not from your personal characteristics. You can ask us how an automated result about you was produced and ask a person to review it.

6. Email delivery and engagement tracking

We send emails through an email delivery provider. Our emails may contain a small image and links that let the provider tell us whether the email was delivered and opened and which links were followed. We use this to know that important messages reached you, to follow up, and to fix delivery problems. You can prevent it by turning off automatic image loading in your email program; this does not affect the service.

7. Address services

When you type an address in our forms, the text you type and your IP address are sent to Google's address services (Google Maps Platform) to suggest and check addresses. Google handles that information under its own terms and privacy policy. We do not use your device's location to decide where a shipment starts. If the address service is unavailable, you can type the address yourself.

8. Cookies

• Essential cookies keep the website and your shipment pages working and secure. They are always on.
• Analytics (for example Vercel Analytics and, if enabled, PostHog) help us understand how the website is used. They run only if you allow them in the cookie bar.
• Marketing cookies are used only if you allow them.

You can change your choice at any time from the cookie bar or your browser settings.

9. Who we share information with

We share personal information only as needed for the purposes above, with:

• carriers, airlines, shipping lines, trucking companies, couriers, consolidators, warehouses, terminals and overseas agents handling your shipment;
• licensed customs brokers who clear your shipment;
• insurers, when you ask us to arrange cargo insurance;
• payment providers, such as PayPal and our card processor;
• our technology providers, which host our website and database, deliver our email, provide address services, answer calls and provide AI services, and which may use information only to provide their service to us (Google's address service acts under its own terms, as section 7 says);
• government authorities, including the Canada Border Services Agency, the Canada Revenue Agency and Transport Canada, where the law requires, and law enforcement with valid legal authority.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information.

10. Information processed outside Canada

International shipping means that your information goes to carriers, agents and authorities in the countries your shipment passes through and arrives in. Some of our technology providers, including hosting, email delivery, AI and address services, process information in the United States and other countries. Information processed outside Canada is subject to the laws of that country and may be accessible to its courts, law enforcement and national security authorities. We use contracts and other measures to require our providers to protect it. For residents of Quebec, we assess the protection it will receive before it is transferred outside Quebec. A list of our main service providers and where they process information is available from our Privacy Officer.

11. How long we keep information

• Enquiries that do not become shipments: for as long as needed to follow up and answer later questions, then deleted or anonymized, or sooner if you ask us to delete them.
• Shipment, financial and tax records, including quotes, invoices, dock receipts, acceptance and signature records: at least six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to, as the Income Tax Act requires, and longer while a claim or dispute is open.
• Marketing consent records: for as long as we rely on the consent and for the period anti-spam law requires us to prove it.

When information is no longer needed, we delete or anonymize it.

12. Security

We protect personal information with safeguards suited to its sensitivity, including encryption in transit, access controls and sign-in protection for our staff systems, and hosting and email providers that maintain their own security programs. Shipment pages are reached through personal links; please keep yours private. If a breach of security creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as the law requires.

13. Your rights

You may:

• ask for access to the personal information we hold about you;
• ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete information;
• withdraw consent to marketing or analytics at any time;
• ask us to delete information we no longer need to keep (we will explain if the law or an open shipment requires us to keep it);
• ask how an automated result about you was produced and have a person review it; and
• ask for information you gave us in a structured, commonly used technological format.

Contact our Privacy Officer at customerservice@lastminuteshippers.com. We respond within 30 days, and will tell you if we need more time as the law allows. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, in Quebec, the Commission d'accès à l'information.

14. Children

Our services are not directed to people under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

15. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. We post the new version here with its effective date and, for significant changes, tell active customers by email. Where the law requires your consent to a new use of your information, we will ask for it.

16. Contact us