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Privacy Policy

lotbook is operated by DG Fintech Inc. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices and rights you have. We aim to collect as little as possible.

Effective date: July 21, 2026.

This policy is written to align with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), and, for users in Québec, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (Law 25).

The short version

  • You can browse the public map and read application pages without an account.
  • If you create an account, we store your email address and a secured (hashed) password — nothing more by way of identity. We ask for no name, phone number, or mailing address.
  • We never see or store your card details — payments are handled by Stripe.
  • We use a small number of service providers (Cloudflare, Stripe, Logfire) to run the service. Some are in the United States, so some data is processed outside Canada.
  • We use no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and no analytics that profile you — only Cloudflare's cookieless, aggregate traffic measurement.
  • You can access, correct, or delete your information, and unsubscribe from any non-essential email, at any time.

Information we collect

Account information. When you register, we store your email address, a password stored only as a salted PBKDF2-SHA256 hash (never in plaintext), whether your email has been verified, your subscription tier, your account status, and the date you registered. We do not collect your name, phone number, or postal address, because the service does not need them.

Billing information. If you subscribe, payment is processed by Stripe through its hosted checkout. We never receive or store your card number, expiry, or security code. We store only Stripe's identifiers for your customer and subscription records (customer ID, subscription ID, price, status, and billing-period dates) so we can reflect your entitlement and manage renewals.

Saved searches and alert areas. If you save a search or draw a watch area, we store the geographic area (a drawn polygon or a named municipality) and your criteria (application types, minimum units) and delivery cadence, linked to your account. This information can reveal your interest in a location, so we treat it as personal information and never share it.

Communications. We send you service emails (see below) and, if you subscribe to alert digests, those digests to your account email address.

Technical and usage information. To operate the service securely and diagnose problems, we collect limited operational telemetry through Pydantic Logfire and Cloudflare Workers Logs. Our telemetry is deliberately minimized: it is configured to exclude secrets, your email address, IP addresses, request headers and cookies, and raw request content. Where a user must be referenced in a trace, we use an opaque internal identifier, not your email. We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics — a privacy-first, cookieless measurement tool — to understand aggregate traffic and page performance. It sets no cookies, stores no personal data, and does not track you across sites or build a profile of you.

Cookies

We use two cookies, both strictly necessary — there are no advertising or tracking cookies:

  • md_session keeps you signed in (HttpOnly, Secure over HTTPS, SameSite=Lax, expires after 7 days, and is revocable server-side when you sign out).
  • md_csrf protects sign-in and registration forms from cross-site request forgery (HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Strict, expires after 1 hour).

Our pages currently load fonts from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google's servers (exposing your IP address to Google) when a page loads.

How we use your information

  • To provide the service: authenticate you, remember your saved searches, and show the data you are entitled to.
  • To process payments and manage your subscription (via Stripe).
  • To send service emails — email verification, password resets, and billing notices — which are necessary to your account.
  • To send alert digests you have chosen to receive.
  • To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and fix problems.
  • To comply with legal obligations, for example tax and payment records.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for advertising or to build marketing profiles.

Consent

We rely on your consent to collect and use your personal information for the purposes above. Creating an account and saving searches are affirmative choices. You may withdraw consent at any time by deleting the relevant data or your account, subject to legal retention requirements. Withdrawing consent for essential processing may mean we can no longer provide the service.

Email and your choices

  • Service emails (verification, password reset, billing) are required to operate your account and are sent on the basis of our account relationship.
  • Alert digests are sent only because you created a saved search; you can pause or delete any saved search to stop them.
  • Marketing email, if we ever offer it, will be sent only with your express consent, collected separately, with a working unsubscribe link in every message, as CASL requires. We will never add your account email to a marketing list without that separate opt-in.

Service providers

We share personal information only with the providers that run the service, only as needed:

  • Cloudflare, Inc. — application hosting, database, storage, email delivery, and privacy-first, cookieless web analytics (global network; US company).
  • Stripe, Inc. — payment processing and subscription billing (United States).
  • Pydantic Services Inc. (Logfire) — minimized operational telemetry (United States).
  • Google LLC (Google Fonts) — web-font delivery, which exposes your IP address to Google on page load (United States).

We do not otherwise disclose your information, except where required by law or to protect our rights and users' safety.

Data location and cross-border transfer

We operate on Cloudflare's global network, and some of our providers (Stripe, Logfire, Google Fonts) are based in the United States. This means some of your personal information is stored or processed outside Canada and may be subject to the laws of those countries, including lawful access by their authorities. By using lotbook you acknowledge this transfer. For users in Québec, this constitutes a communication of personal information outside Québec under Law 25.

How long we keep it

  • Account information is kept while your account is active, and deleted or anonymized within 90 days of account closure — except records we must keep longer by law, such as payment and tax records retained per Canada Revenue Agency requirements.
  • Saved searches and alert areas are kept until you delete them or close your account.
  • Operational logs and telemetry are retained for no longer than 12 months, and subject to each provider's own retention.

How we protect it

We use industry-standard safeguards: encryption in transit (HTTPS/TLS); passwords stored only as salted PBKDF2-SHA256 hashes, never in plaintext; HttpOnly, same-site session cookies with server-side revocation; and CSRF protection on authentication forms. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we work to protect your information and will notify you and the appropriate regulator of a breach where the law requires.

Your rights

Subject to applicable law, you may:

  • access the personal information we hold about you;
  • correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete;
  • delete your account and associated personal information, subject to legal retention;
  • withdraw consent or unsubscribe from non-essential email;
  • port your information, and — for Québec users under Law 25 — request de-indexing or cease-of-dissemination in the circumstances the law allows.

To exercise any of these, contact us at privacy@lotbook.ca. We will respond within the timelines the law requires. If you are unsatisfied, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or, for Québec residents, to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

Public municipal records

lotbook displays information about development applications drawn from public municipal records. Those records, as published by the municipality, may include the names of applicants, agents, or property owners. That is public-record information published by the government, not information we collect from you. If you have a concern about such a record, it is best addressed to the source municipality; you may also contact us and we will consider requests consistent with the source's licence and applicable law.

Children

lotbook is a professional tool and is not directed to children. You must be at least 18 years old (or the age of majority where you live) to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from minors.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If we make a material change, we will update the effective date and, where appropriate, notify account holders. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions, requests, or complaints about privacy: DG Fintech Inc., privacy@lotbook.ca. The person responsible for the protection of personal information (Law 25) can be reached at the same address.