ICANS Privacy Notice
iCan Systems Inc. and Smartsettle Resolutions Inc.
Last updated: September 19, 2026 · Replaces the ICANS Privacy Policy dated September 5, 2026
This notice explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, what we do with it, and the rights you have. We have tried to write it in plain language. If anything is unclear, please ask us using the contact details in section 14.
It should be read together with the ICANS Terms of Use, which govern your use of the websites and of any account you open with us, and the ICANS Legal Notice, which sets out who owns the material published on the sites.
1. Who we are
iCan Systems Inc. and Smartsettle Resolutions Inc. (together "ICANS", "we", "us") are companies incorporated in British Columbia, Canada, at 32855 Capilano Place, Abbotsford BC V2S 7B4. We provide the Smartsettle negotiation and collaborative decision-making software.
This notice covers the Smartsettle products, the Smartsettle family of websites (including eNegotiation.org) and Smartsettle user accounts.
Contact Details
- Data protection contact
- Ernest Thiessen, CEO, et@smartsettle.com, 800.595.9840
- Day-to-day enquiries and rights requests
- Barbara Wade, admin@smartsettle.com
- UK representative (Art. 27)
- [NOT YET APPOINTED]
- EU representative (Art. 27)
- [NOT YET APPOINTED]
2. When this notice applies — and when it does not
This notice applies where we decide how and why your information is used. That is the case when you visit our websites, when you contact us, and when you open a Smartsettle account directly with us.
It does not apply where you use Smartsettle through an organization — a university, employer, mediation service or other institution. In that case the organization decides how your information is used and we act on its instructions. Their privacy notice governs, and you should direct questions about your information to them in the first instance. We will still help, and we will pass your request to them.
3. What we collect
Information you give us
- Identity and contact details — your legal name, address, email address and telephone number.
The Smartsettle process ends in a formal settlement document, which requires the parties to identify themselves, so we ask for your legal name.
- Account details — your username, password and the role you hold in a case.
- Case content — what you enter into a negotiation: your stated preferences and priorities, your offers, messages you exchange with the other party, documents you upload, and the resulting settlement record.
- Correspondence — if you email us, we collect your address and your message so that we can reply.
- Payment details — where you pay for a service, your card details are handled by a third-party payment provider and are not stored by us.
Information our web server records
Like any web server, ours keeps standard access logs. These record the pages requested, the date and time, the site you came from if any, your browser and operating system, and your IP address. We use these logs to keep the service running and secure and to investigate faults and misuse. We do not use them to build a profile of you, and we do not use analytics or tracking tools on our websites — see section 10.
Sensitive information
We do not ask for sensitive information — the categories the law calls special category data, such as health, religious belief or trade union membership. But a negotiation is a conversation, and you may choose to enter such information in a message, a preference or an uploaded document. Please share only what you need to. We recommend that sensitive personal information is not sent to us unencrypted by email.
4. Why we use your information, and our legal basis
Data protection law requires us to have a legal basis for each purpose. Ours are set out below.
| Purpose | What this involves | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Providing your account | Creating and administering your account, authenticating you, and giving you access to your cases. | Performance of a contract with you. |
| Running the negotiation | Hosting your case, transmitting your offers and messages to the other participants, running the optimization engine on the preferences you supply, and producing the settlement document. | Performance of a contract with you. Where another participant is not our direct customer, our legitimate interest in operating a negotiation service that necessarily involves more than one party. |
| Supporting you | Answering your questions and providing technical support. | Performance of a contract, or our legitimate interest in helping people who contact us. |
| Taking payment | Processing payments and keeping accounting records. | Performance of a contract, and compliance with a legal obligation for tax and accounting records. |
| Keeping the service secure | Logging access, monitoring for misuse, investigating incidents, and maintaining backups. | Our legitimate interest in keeping the service and its users’ data secure. |
| Improving the service | Understanding from operational and aggregate information how the software is used, so we can improve it. | Our legitimate interest in improving what we offer. |
| Telling you about our work | Sending you updates or information about our products, if you have asked us to. | Your consent, which you can withdraw at any time using the unsubscribe link. |
| Meeting legal obligations | Responding to lawful requests and establishing or defending legal claims. | Compliance with a legal obligation, and our legitimate interest in protecting our position. |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is outweighed by your rights. You can ask us for that assessment, and you can object to the processing — see section 9.
5. What we do not do
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not disclose it to other organizations for their own purposes.
We do not use your case content, or any other personal information you give us, to train, fine-tune or develop artificial intelligence or machine learning models.
Online communications between you and the party you are negotiating with are not reviewed by ICANS or any of our employees, agents or representatives in the ordinary course. It is your choice what to disclose to the other party. Private information you enter during a negotiation remains under your control and is accessible only to those you give access to. You can change or remove your private party information at any time.
6. Who we share information with
We share personal information only as described here.
- Other participants in your case — the other party or parties, and their advisers, see what you choose to share with them through the platform.
- Facilitators — where a facilitator is involved, their access is governed by a separate confidentiality agreement signed before the process begins. The recommended form used by Smartsettle facilitators is available on request.
- Your organization — where you use Smartsettle through an institution, that institution has access to the records it controls.
- Service providers — the suppliers who host our systems, deliver our email and process payments. They act on our instructions and may not use your information for their own purposes.
- Authorities — where we are required or authorized by law to disclose. We review any such request, challenge it where there are reasonable grounds, disclose only what is necessary, and tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.
- A purchaser — if our business or part of it is sold or reorganized, information may transfer with it, subject to the same protections.
Only authorized personnel, trained in the proper handling of customer information, have access to it. Personnel who breach this notice are subject to our disciplinary process.
We maintain pages on public social media platforms. Anything you provide to those platforms is held by them, not on our servers, and is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. We do not embed their tracking content in our own websites.
7. Where your information is held
Our personnel access our systems from Canada.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your information is transferred to Canada. This is permitted without additional safeguards: the European Commission has decided that Canada provides an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred to organizations subject to Canadian federal privacy law in the course of commercial activities, and the United Kingdom recognizes Canada on the same basis. We are such an organization.
Where a supplier we use is located outside a country recognized in this way, we put standard contractual clauses in place to protect the transfer.
8. How long we keep it
Where you use Smartsettle through an organization, that organization sets the retention period and we follow its instructions.
Otherwise:
- You can edit or delete your own profile information at any time. Deleting your profile does not delete case records you were a party to, because those records are shared with the other participants and form part of their record too.
- Case records are kept for as long as any participant’s account remains active. If an account has been inactive for twelve months, we email the account holder and delete the account and its records thirty days later, unless it is used in the meantime.
- Correspondence with us is kept for as long as needed to deal with your query and for a reasonable period afterwards.
- Accounting records are kept for the period required by tax law.
- Web server access logs are kept for a limited period for security and troubleshooting, and are then deleted.
- Information in routine backups is deleted on our ordinary backup cycle, within [CONFIRM] days, and is not actively used in the meantime.
We keep information for longer where the law requires it or where it is needed for a legal claim.
9. Your rights
You have the following rights over your personal information.
- Access — to be told whether we hold information about you and to receive a copy.
- Rectification — to have inaccurate information corrected and incomplete information completed.
- Erasure — to have information deleted in certain circumstances.
- Restriction — to have us pause our use of your information while a dispute about it is resolved.
- Portability — to receive information you gave us in a machine-readable format, or have it sent to another provider.
- Objection — to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and to object at any time to direct marketing.
- Withdrawing consent — where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. This does not affect what we did before you withdrew it.
These rights are not all absolute. In particular, we may not be able to delete a settlement record or the negotiation history behind it, because those records belong to more than one party and may be needed to establish or defend a legal claim. If we cannot do what you have asked, we will explain why.
To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 14. We will respond within one month. There is no charge. We may need to confirm your identity first.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first — we would like the chance to put it right. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority.
- In the United Kingdom: the Information Commissioner’s Office, at ico.org.uk, or by telephone on 0303 123 1113.
- In the European Economic Area: the data protection authority in the country where you live or work, or where the problem occurred.
- In Canada: the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, at priv.gc.ca.
10. Cookies
We use only cookies that are strictly necessary for our websites and the service to work — keeping you signed in, keeping your session secure, and remembering choices you have made while using the site. Because these are strictly necessary, we do not need your consent to set them, and you will not see a cookie banner.
We do not use analytics cookies, advertising cookies, or any cookie that tracks you across websites. We do not embed third-party content that sets tracking cookies on our behalf, and we do not use tracking pixels or web beacons.
If that ever changes, we will ask for your consent before setting anything that is not strictly necessary, and refusing will be as easy as agreeing.
11. Keeping information secure
We limit collection to what we need. We restrict access to authorized personnel who need it for their work and who are bound by confidentiality. We encrypt information in transit, take regular backups, and keep access logs.
We maintain a documented incident response procedure. If something goes wrong and your information is affected in a way that presents a risk to you, we will tell you and the relevant authority as the law requires.
No system is perfectly secure. Please choose a strong, unique password, and do not share your access codes.
12. Children
Smartsettle is not intended for children. Unless expressly permitted, you must be at least 18 to open an account with us directly. If you believe a child has given us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.
13. Automated processing
Smartsettle includes an optimization engine that generates possible agreements from the preferences the parties themselves supply. It suggests; it does not decide. Whether to accept any proposal is always yours, and no proposal binds you unless you accept it. We do not make decisions about you by automated means that produce legal effects or similarly significantly affect you.
If you would like a plain-language explanation of how the optimization works, ask us and we will provide one.
14. How to contact us
For any question about this notice, or to exercise any of your rights, contact Barbara Wade at admin@smartsettle.com. You can also use the contact form at www.smartsettle.com. Our data protection contact is Ernest Thiessen, CEO, at et@smartsettle.com.
15. Changes to this notice
We update this notice from time to time. The date at the top shows when it was last changed. If we make a significant change, we will tell account holders by email rather than relying on you to notice.
Previous versions are available on request.