Privacy policy

Ottawa Property Guide ("we") runs this website as an independent information publication based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, and the choices you have. We aim to collect as little as possible.

What we collect

• Newsletter signups: your email address, the date and page ("source") of your consent, and your subscription status. We record consent details because Canada's anti-spam legislation (CASL) requires us to be able to demonstrate them.
• Contact form messages: the name, email address, subject and message you send. We also store a scrambled one-way code made from your IP address — never the address itself. It lets us spot a burst of automated submissions from one source; it cannot be turned back into an IP address and we cannot use it to identify you.
• Search terms: the words typed into our search box, kept as anonymous daily totals — the term, how many times it was searched that day, and how many results it returned. We use this to find out what readers look for and what the site is missing. It is not linked to you: no IP address, no cookie, no account, and no way to connect one search to another or to a person.
• Server logs: like nearly all websites, our hosting provider keeps standard technical logs (IP address, pages requested, timestamps) for security and operations.

What we don't do

• We don't sell, rent, or share your personal information with third parties for their marketing.
• We don't run third-party advertising or tracking scripts on this site.
• We don't ask for financial or identity information — we never need it, so never provide it through this site.

Cookies and browser storage

There is no cookie banner on this site because there is nothing to ask you about. We run no advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies of any kind, and no third-party scripts that could set them.

• One session cookie, set only when you use the contact or newsletter form. Its only job is to carry the confirmation or error message back to you after you submit. It contains no personal information and disappears when you close your browser.
• Your own browser's storage. Checklists remember which boxes you have ticked, and the first-time-buyer page remembers which path you chose, so your progress survives a refresh. All of it is written to your device and stays there — it is never sent to us and we cannot read it. Clearing your browsing data erases it.

How we use your information

• To send the newsletter you asked for, and to stop sending it the moment you unsubscribe.
• To answer messages you send us.
• To keep the website secure and working.

Your choices and rights

• Every newsletter email contains a one-click unsubscribe link, honoured immediately.
• You can ask us to show you, correct, or permanently delete the personal information we hold about you — use the contact page. Deletion requests are honoured in line with PIPEDA (Canada's federal privacy law).

Storage and retention

Subscriber and contact information is stored on our website server, in Canada, with access limited to the site administrator. We keep it only as long as it is useful for the purpose it was given for:

• Contact form messages are deleted automatically 24 months after they are sent.
• Newsletter details are kept while you are subscribed. If you unsubscribe we keep the minimal record — your address, the date you consented and the date you opted out — as proof that we had your consent and honoured its withdrawal, which is what CASL contemplates. You can ask us to delete that too.
• Search terms are daily totals with nothing personal in them, so they are kept as ordinary site statistics.

You do not have to wait for any of these periods: ask us and we will delete your information sooner.

Our use of YouTube API Services

We publish our own short videos to our own YouTube channel, and we use a tool we built ourselves to upload them on a schedule. That tool is an API Client that uses YouTube API Services. It lives inside our password-protected admin area and is used only by us — there is nothing here for readers to sign in to, and no part of it is available to anyone else.

It collects nothing about you. Visiting this site does not involve YouTube, and reading it gives us no YouTube information about you whatsoever. The only Google Account involved is our own, the one that owns our channel.

What that account's authorisation lets the tool do, and nothing more:

• What it can access: permission to upload videos to our own channel. We deliberately request only that single permission, which grants no ability to read our channel, its videos, its statistics, its comments, or anything about the people who watch.
• What we store: the authorisation token for our own account, held on our own server; the email address of that account; and, for each upload, the video's identifier and the channel it went to. We store no YouTube user data — the permission we hold makes it impossible to obtain any.
• What we share: nothing. This information is not sold, shared, transferred to anyone, used for advertising, or used to train any AI or machine-learning system.
• How long we keep it: the token for as long as the tool is connected; it is deleted the moment we disconnect it. Upload records are deleted automatically 30 days after the upload.

By using this tool we are bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's handling of information is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

Revoking access. The Google Account whose authorisation the tool holds — ours — can withdraw it at any time from Google's security settings page, which ends the tool's access immediately. Anyone whose Google Account has ever authorised an application can revoke it in the same place.

Questions

Privacy questions or requests: use the contact page or email info@ottawapropertyguide.ca.