Privacy policy

Who we are

LocalFound is a service of DevPro Software Consulting Inc., #200 - 1965 Broad Street, Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 1Y1, Canada. In this policy "we" and "us" mean DevPro Software Consulting Inc., operating LocalFound.

The person accountable for how we handle personal information is our Privacy Officer, Jim Rennie. You can reach him at privacy@localfound.ca, or by mail at the address above. We follow Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

This policy covers three groups of people, and we treat each differently: businesses we build a site for, the owners who claim those sites, and the people who visit the sites we host. It also covers visitors to localfound.ca itself.

Businesses we build a site for

Before you have heard of us, we may collect information your business has published about itself, build a preview website from it, and email you to offer it.

What we collect, and from where

• From your public Google Maps listing (collected for us by a data-collection service): the business name, category, address, phone number, opening hours, website, rating and number of reviews, public reviews, and photos your business posted on the listing. We keep only the photos the business itself posted, not photos customers uploaded.
• From your business's public Facebook page and Instagram profile, where you have them: the page details, photos from your posts, reviews on your Facebook page, and an email address if you published one there.
• From web search results for your business name: your website address and your social media links.
• Where your listing or pages show it, the name of the person who posted the business's photos, which is often the owner. We use it only to tell which photos are the business's own.

Public reviews include the reviewer's display name as the review site shows it. We do not show reviewers' names on a site until the business has claimed it, and after that we show only a first name and initial.

What we use it for

To build a preview website for your business, and to offer it to you. That is all. We rely on the fact that this is information you published so that customers could find and contact your business, and that a website helps them do exactly that.

The preview is private. The full preview opens only from the link in our email to you. Anyone who finds its address another way sees the layout with placeholder text, not your business's details. It is not listed on search engines.

The email we send you

We send offers only to an email address your business published itself, on its own Facebook page or Instagram profile, and only where nothing next to it says you do not want commercial messages. Every email says who we are, gives our mailing address, and has an unsubscribe link. If you unsubscribe, we stop straight away and keep your address on a do-not-contact list so that we never email it again.

If you do nothing

If you do not claim the site, we delete the preview website about a month after our first email, on the date the email gives you. See how long we keep information for what remains after that.

If you want it gone now

Use "Remove this site" on the preview, which takes it offline immediately, or write to privacy@localfound.ca and we will delete everything we hold about your business. You do not need an account, and it never costs anything. We keep only your email address on our do-not-contact list.

Owners who claim a site

When you claim your site and use LocalFound, we collect:

• Your email address, which is how you sign in (a one-time code, no password), and your phone number only if you choose to give it to us.
• A record of how we verified that you speak for the business, and when you accepted our terms.
• Everything you add or change on your site, including photos you upload. Before we store a photo you upload, we remove the information your camera or phone embedded in the file, such as where the photo was taken. The only thing we keep is which way up the photo goes.
• Your conversations with the site editor. We keep them so the editor can pick up where you left off, and our staff may read them to help you or to fix a problem.
• Support requests you send us, with your browser type, screen size, the page you were on and any recent errors, so that we can reproduce the problem.
• If you register a domain name through us: your name, address, phone number and email, which we pass to the domain registrar because domain rules require them. We do not store them ourselves, and we ask the registrar to keep them out of the public domain directory.
• How much of your monthly editing allowance you have used.

We use this to run your site and your account, to help you when you ask, and to send you messages about your own site and account: new enquiries from your visitors, notices about your domain, and now and then an offer of a plan for your site.

We do not take payments today. If we start, card payments will be handled by a payment processor, and we will never see or store your card number.

Visitors to the websites we host

Each business website we host is the business's own. If you contact a business through the form on its website, the business is responsible for your information. We store your message and forward it to the business by email on its behalf, as its service provider, and we use it for nothing else: no marketing, no profiling, no AI training. The form asks for your name, email, phone number and message, plus any questions the business has added.

To see, correct or erase a message you sent, ask the business first, since it is theirs. You can also write to us and we will help.

We count visits to each site so its owner can see how it is doing: a daily total per site, and totals of clicks on things like the phone number or directions. We do not record who you are, we do not set cookies, and we do not store your IP address with the count. To avoid counting one visit twice, the page remembers that you have been counted until you close the tab.

Our servers see your IP address when you load a page or send a form, as every website's do. We use it to stop abuse, such as a form being flooded with messages, and discard it no more than 25 hours after your last visit.

Pages load their fonts from Google Fonts, so Google receives your IP address when you visit. It sets no cookies.

Visitors to localfound.ca

We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies on localfound.ca. When you sign in, our sign-in provider sets the cookies it needs to keep you signed in. When you open a preview from our email, we set one cookie for a day so the preview recognises the link you came from. The editor remembers small preferences in your browser, such as whether you have seen its introduction.

If you send us something through a form on localfound.ca (a request for a site, a support request, or a copyright report), we keep what you send so that we can answer it. Copyright reports are handled on the copyright page.

How we use AI

We use an AI provider in the United States to write and edit websites. That means the business information described above, including review text and photos, and your conversations with the editor, are sent to that provider to be processed. Its terms do not allow it to use this information to train its models. We do not use AI to make decisions about people.

Who we share information with

We do not sell personal information. We use service providers to run LocalFound:

• Hosting and storage: the servers and database where most of the information on this page is stored, and the network that delivers the websites and their photos.
• Sign-in: signing owners in.
• Email delivery: sending our email.
• AI: writing and editing the websites.
• Data collection: collecting public business listings for us.
• Domain registration: registering domain names owners buy through us. Domain rules also send the registrant's details to the registry for the domain's ending, which may be in another country.

Each uses the information to provide the service described. Some also keep limited records, such as logs and account details, for their own security, fraud prevention, legal and service-improvement purposes, under their own privacy policies. None may sell it or use it for advertising, and our AI provider may not train its models on it. We choose providers whose contracts require them to protect it. Write to us if you would like to know who a particular provider is.

Two services act under their own privacy policies rather than on our behalf: Google Fonts, which serves the fonts our pages use, receives visitors' IP addresses but sets no cookies; and OpenStreetMap, which draws maps and turns a business address into a map location, receives the address and the IP address of whoever loads a map.

Our service providers are in the United States and other countries outside Canada, so your information is stored and processed outside Canada, and while it is there it may be accessible to the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of those countries.

We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to protect our rights or someone's safety.

How long we keep information

• A preview website nobody claims is deleted about a month after our first email, on the date the email gives.
• A site its owner deletes goes offline straight away. After a three-day undo window, the site, its photos and the editor conversations are permanently deleted.
• The business's details, reviews and the other information we collected, messages sent through a site's form, and copies of the emails we sent are kept after a site is deleted, so that we can answer questions about what we did and avoid contacting a business that said no. You can ask us to erase them at any time, and we will.
• Your email address on our do-not-contact list is kept for as long as we send email, so that we never email you again.
• Your owner account is kept until you ask us to close it.
• IP addresses used to stop abuse are kept no more than 25 hours after your last visit.

To have anything on this list erased sooner, write to privacy@localfound.ca.

Your rights

You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, where it came from and who we have shared it with; ask us to correct it; ask us to erase it; and withdraw your consent to anything you agreed to. Write to privacy@localfound.ca. We may need to confirm who you are first. We answer within 30 days, it is free, and if we cannot do something we will tell you why.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (1-800-282-1376). If you live in Quebec, you can also complain to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, and in Alberta or British Columbia to that province's Information and Privacy Commissioner.

Keeping it safe

Information is encrypted on its way to and from our servers, access to it is limited to the people who need it to run LocalFound, and every site owner reaches only their own business. If a breach of our safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will tell you and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as the law requires, and we keep a record of every breach.

Children

LocalFound is a service for businesses. It is not meant for children, and we do not knowingly collect information about them.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we update the date at the top. If a change affects how we use information we already hold, we will email owners before it takes effect.