Draft, not yet reviewed. This policy has not been reviewed by a lawyer and is not yet in effect. It may change before PriceWarden is released.
Privacy policy
In brief. An account here starts as an email address. Beyond that we hold what you choose to give us: a province and postal code for true totals, the plan you are on, the terms you accepted, and, if you use price protection, the purchases you record and any receipt photos you add to them. Barcodes are read on your phone and the camera picture stays there; a receipt photo leaves the phone only when you attach it to a purchase. Nothing is sold, and neither the app nor this website contains analytics, advertising or tracking code. Deleting your account in the app removes all of it.
1. Who is responsible
[OPERATOR NAME] operates PriceWarden and is accountable for the personal information this policy covers. Questions about it go to support@pricewarden.drbyte.org.
2. What we hold, and what for
| Information | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Email address | Your account is identified by it. Sign-in codes go to it, and so will the alerts you ask for once alerts exist, and our answers when you contact us. |
| Province and postal code, if you enter them | The province sets the sales taxes in a true total. The postal code is for estimating shipping and finding offers close to you. |
| Your watchlist, once the app has one | Each product you save, the offer you saved it with (store, price, shipping, tax, duties and total at that time) and any alerts on it, so that prices can be checked and alerts sent. |
| Alert and email choices, once alerts exist | Which alerts are on, where they go and when, and any unsubscribe. Canada's anti-spam law obliges us to record consent and to act on an unsubscribe. |
| Price protection: purchases you record | For each purchase you add: the product, the store, the price you paid and the date, plus the price checks and price drops found for it and any claim you mark as made or refunded. These are what let us tell you that a price fell while the store would still adjust it. The time zone and quiet hours you set decide when such a notice may reach you. See section 3. |
| Price protection: receipt photos you add | A photo of a receipt, taken or picked by you and attached to a purchase, and the lines read from it, so the purchase details can be filled in and you have the receipt at hand when you claim. |
| Your plan, and the purchase records Apple or Google send us | So you get the plan you paid for. The store tells us the product, transaction number, dates and renewal status. We never receive a card number or billing address. |
| Which version of the terms you accepted, and when | To be able to show which document an agreement covered. |
| Sign-in codes and session tokens | For signing in and staying signed in. Codes and refresh tokens are kept only as one-way hashes. A session records the platform (Android or iOS), not an identifier for the device. |
| Push notification tokens, once push alerts are added | Issued for the app on your device by Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (and, on iPhone, Apple's push service), so an alert can be delivered there. Only if you allow notifications. |
| Web server logs, which include IP addresses | For keeping the service up and looking into abuse. They are removed automatically after 14 days. |
Nothing else is collected. We never ask for your name, street address, phone number or contacts, and the app never asks for your location.
Scans and searches. A barcode number you scan, or the words you search for, are sent to our server to look the product up. The product joins PriceWarden's shared catalogue without any note of who looked for it. Only what you save to your own watchlist or record as a purchase is stored with your account.
3. Price protection
Price protection is a part of PriceWarden that watches the price of things you have already bought, and tells you when a store's own price adjustment policy would give you money back. It runs as a separate service on the same server, with its own database. It knows your account only by its number: it never receives your email address, and the app signs in to it with a short-lived pass issued for it alone, which cannot be used to change or delete your account.
- It holds the purchases, receipt photos, price checks, price drops, claims, time zone and quiet hours described in section 2.
- Receipt photos are stored on our server, read there by open-source text recognition software (they are not sent to any other company), and shown back to you only through links that stop working after a few minutes.
- A purchase and its receipt photo are kept until you delete the purchase or your account. A receipt photo not attached to any purchase is deleted after 48 hours. Individual price checks are deleted after 90 days; a price drop keeps its own copy of the price and date that prove it.
- Deleting your account deletes everything price protection holds for you as well (section 11).
4. The camera and your photos
The camera is requested the first time you scan, and again only if you photograph a receipt.
Scanning. The picture is read on your phone to find the barcode, and only the barcode number is sent anywhere. Nothing from the camera is saved or uploaded. You can say no to the camera and type the number, or search, instead.
Receipts. When you photograph a receipt, or choose one from your photo library, for a price-protection purchase, that one image is uploaded to our server and kept as section 3 describes. Nothing else in your library is read. You can record a purchase without a receipt photo.
On Android the barcode reader may be Google's ML Kit, which works on the phone. According to Google, ML Kit may download model updates and report statistics about how well it reads, and does not send camera images.
5. Where product and price data comes from
Product details, offers and prices come from product databases, stores and price data services; exchange rates come from the Bank of Canada. Our server asks for them, not your phone. A request carries the barcode, product or search words concerned and, where the answer depends on location (shipping, or stock at nearby stores), a postal code or province. It never carries your name, email address or account. The about page explains how these requests are made.
6. Affiliate links
Some store links are affiliate links: when you buy after following one, the store or an affiliate network may pay PriceWarden a commission. The link identifies PriceWarden, not you, and we add nothing about you to it. The store's page opens in your browser, where the store or network may use cookies or similar means to note that you came from PriceWarden and credit a purchase. Their own privacy policies govern that.
Commission reports tell us what was bought, from which store, when and for how much, but not by whom. More in the affiliate disclosure.
7. Paid plans
Apple sells paid plans through the App Store and Google through Google Play. They take payment and confirm to us that a purchase is valid; your payment details stay with them. Cancelling is done in your App Store or Google Play account settings.
8. Email and notifications
Today PriceWarden sends one kind of email: a sign-in code, and only when you ask for one (or, in its place, a notice that the address belongs to an account deleted in the last seven days). It sends no alerts yet, and no marketing.
Alerts are planned. When they arrive, they will be sent only because you set them up; each alert email will name PriceWarden and [OPERATOR NAME], give our contact address and carry a one-step unsubscribe link, acted on at once and always within the 10 business days Canada's anti-spam law allows; and you will be able to switch alerts off in the app, and push alerts in your phone's settings as well. This section will be updated before they are switched on.
9. Things we never do
- Sell or rent personal information.
- Put analytics, advertising, crash-reporting or tracking software in the app, or collect an advertising identifier.
- Set cookies on this website, or load anything on it from another site.
- Follow you across other apps and websites, or profile you beyond the settings you chose.
10. Who else sees it
Only the providers PriceWarden cannot run without, each receiving no more than its job requires:
| Provider | What it gets |
|---|---|
| Resend | Delivers our email: it is given the address to send to and the message itself (sign-in codes now, alerts later). |
| Our email forwarding provider | The mail you send to our support address, on its way to us. |
| Apple, Google | They sell paid plans and confirm purchases to us. When push alerts are added they will also carry them (Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, Apple Push Notification service). |
| Product and price data providers | The barcode, product or search words, and sometimes a postal code or province. Never who is asking. |
| Stores and affiliate networks | What your browser sends when you choose to open one of their pages, plus the code that identifies PriceWarden. |
| hosting.com | The server our databases, and the receipt photos, are kept on. |
The product data providers, price data providers and affiliate networks will be named individually here before the app is released. Price protection is part of PriceWarden, run by us on our own server, not another company.
Beyond these, we share nothing unless a law obliges us to. The server is located in the United States, so your information is stored there and authorities there may obtain it under United States law. Email and support providers may handle messages in other countries. Should PriceWarden pass to a new owner, your information would go with it, still under this policy until you were notified of a change.
11. How long we keep it
An account lasts until you delete it. Deletion removes, at once, your province and postal code, watchlist, alert settings, plan and store purchase records, push tokens and sessions, and everything price protection holds for you: purchases, receipt photos, price checks, drops, claims and settings. The app asks price protection to delete its part first. If that request cannot get through (no connection at that moment, say), or the account was deleted by writing to us, we remove the price-protection data by hand; an automatic clean-up is being built. Your email address is the one thing kept a little longer: for seven days, so the same address cannot open a new account straight away, and then it is deleted too. The delete-account page sets this out in full.
A sign-in code is deleted after it expires, ten minutes after it is sent. A session unused for 90 days expires. Push tokens go when you sign out or the push service says they are no longer valid. Price-protection retention is in section 3. Server logs go after 14 days. There are no database backups yet; once there are, this section will state how long deleted information may survive in them.
12. Your rights
Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and similar laws elsewhere, let you ask what we hold about you, have it corrected, and withdraw consent. Your province, postal code and price-protection purchases can be changed or deleted in the app whenever you like. To remove everything, use Account > Delete account in the app; without the app, the delete-account page says how to ask us. For any other request, email support@pricewarden.drbyte.org and you will have an answer within 30 days.
If our answer does not satisfy you, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
13. Security
The app talks to our server over encrypted connections. Because sign-in codes and refresh tokens are kept only as hashes, someone holding a copy of the database still could not use them to get into your account. The databases cannot be reached from the internet, and receipt photos are served only through short-lived signed links. We cannot promise that nothing will ever go wrong, and no one honestly can.
14. Children
PriceWarden is meant for adults and older teenagers: account holders must be 13 or older, and we do not knowingly hold information about younger children. If you think a child under 13 has an account, tell us and we will remove it.
15. Changes to this policy
A changed policy will be posted on this page with its new date. If a change matters to how your information is used, the app will tell you before it applies.
16. Contact
[OPERATOR NAME], privacy contact: support@pricewarden.drbyte.org