Privacy
This policy covers one kind of service: ordering an Ontario driving record from the Ministry of Transportation on your behalf - the 3-year driver record, the 5-year driver record or the CVOR driver abstract. It is short because the service collects very little.
What we collect, and why
| What | Why | What happens without it |
|---|---|---|
| Ontario driver's licence number | It is the only identifier the ministry needs to find any of the three records | No order is possible |
| Email address | Your receipt, your order status, and reaching you if something is wrong | No order is possible |
| Province or state of residence | To refuse orders we cannot lawfully serve, before you pay | No order is possible |
| Confirmation that your payment went through | To know you paid | No order is possible |
That is the complete list. We do not collect your name, your date of birth, your address, or a copy of any document, because the ministry does not need them for these records and so neither do we. The 5-year record is posted by the ministry to the address it already holds for your licence; we never ask for that address and never see it.
The one record that passes through us
The ministry emails the 3-year record to you and posts the 5-year record to you; neither ever passes through us. The CVOR driver abstract is different: the ministry shows it on screen to whoever orders it, so our system saves the PDF and emails it to the address on your order. That file exists in our systems for the seconds between the ministry issuing it and our email provider accepting the message. It is not written to our database, not kept on disk, not opened, read, scored or summarised, and we cannot resend it - if you lose the email, the ministry has to issue the record again. The email provider holds the message, with the attachment, for as long as it holds any message we send.
What we do not collect
No analytics, no advertising pixels and no tracking of any kind on our public pages. We do not know which pages you read before ordering and we have chosen not to find out.
Your card details are never collected by us at all. Payment is taken on our payment processor's own page, and we receive only a confirmation that it succeeded.
Who we share it with
- The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, through ServiceOntario: the licence number, because that is the order. This is the point of the service.
- Our payment processor: your email and the amount, to take the payment.
- Our email provider: your email address and the receipt, and, for the CVOR driver abstract only, the PDF we send you.
- Our hosting provider: it holds the data in a form it cannot read.
We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for advertising. We have no arrangement of any kind under which anyone receives your data for their own purposes.
Where your data is, and what that means
Your information is stored and processed in the United States, where it may be accessed by courts, law enforcement and national security authorities under US law. No contract we sign with a provider changes that.
Canada's federal privacy law requires that you be told this at the point of collection rather than after it, so it appears on the form as well as here. Your consent to the transfer is not what is required; being told is.
How long we keep it
The licence number is deleted 30 days after your order closes, by a scheduled job rather than by anyone remembering. The order record — reference, amounts, dates, status history — is kept longer, because a card dispute can be raised up to 540 days later and we would otherwise be unable to answer one.
Your rights
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or complain about how we have handled it. Email [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days.
Two honest limits. We cannot delete what we no longer have, and after 30 days the licence number is already gone. And we cannot change your driving record: it belongs to the Ministry of Transportation, and correcting one runs through the ministry and the courts. What to do when your record is wrong explains who is responsible for what.
If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Children
This service is not directed at children. Ontario issues driver's licences from age 16, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger.
Where we do not operate
We do not accept orders from customers in Quebec, because Quebec's Law 25 attaches obligations we are not currently set up to meet. We would rather refuse than half-meet them.
Changes
If we change this policy in a way that affects what we collect or who we share it with, we will say so here with the date. The policy that applies to your order is the one published when you placed it.
One more thing
DriversAbstract is a private company, not a government agency, and not affiliated with or endorsed by ServiceOntario or the Ministry of Transportation. You can order any of these records directly from the ministry for its own fee, and every page here shows you that fee and links you to it.