Privacy Policy

2. How We Use Your Information

We use personal information to:

• Provide the Service: create and manage your account, match Pet Parents and Pet Care Providers, and enable bookings.

• Process payments and payouts: charge for services, process tips, issue refunds, and pay Pet Care Providers through Stripe.

• Verify visits and prevent fraud: confirm that visits take place (for example, through the visit-start PIN), detect and investigate suspicious activity, and maintain our security audit trail.

• Communicate with you: send booking confirmations, reminders, receipts, security notices, and support responses, and — where you have not opted out — occasional service updates.

• Provide support and resolve disputes: investigate issues, apply our refund and cancellation policy, and support both sides of a booking fairly.

• Improve the Service: understand how features are used and improve reliability, design, and safety.

• Meet legal, tax, and regulatory obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

We rely on your consent, on the necessity of processing to provide a service you've requested, and on our legitimate interests in operating a safe marketplace, as permitted under PIPEDA.

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3. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We share it only in the situations below.

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a. Between Pet Parents and Pet Care Providers (this is core to how the Service works)

Because Pawborough is a marketplace, some information must be shared with the other party to a booking so that a visit can happen. When a booking is made:

• A Pet Care Provider is shown the information needed to complete the visit, which may include your name, the service address and access instructions, and relevant pet details you have provided.

• A Pet Parent is shown the Pet Care Provider's profile information.

• Both parties can exchange in-app messages related to the booking.

Please share only what is necessary in messages and access instructions, and treat the other party's information with the same care you'd expect for your own.

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b. Service providers who work on our behalf

We share information with trusted providers who perform functions for us, only as needed to do so:

• Stripe — payment processing, provider payouts, and identity verification.

• Supabase — application hosting, database, file storage, and authentication.

• Expo — delivery of push notifications.

• Apple / Google — sign-in and authentication, where you choose those methods.

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These providers are permitted to use your information only to provide their service to us, and are expected to protect it.

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c. Legal and safety reasons

We may disclose information if required by law, subpoena, or valid legal process, or where we reasonably believe it's necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Pawborough, our users, pets, or the public, or to prevent fraud.

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d. Business transfers

If Pawborough is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this Policy and applicable law.

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4. Where Your Information Is Stored (Cross-Border Transfers)

Some of our service providers store or process information outside of Canada. In particular, Stripe processes payment information in the United States, and Supabase-our database is hosted in the United States. When information is stored or processed in another country, it may be accessible to the courts, law enforcement, and authorities of that country under its laws. We take steps to ensure any provider we use offers a comparable level of protection to that required under PIPEDA.

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5. How We Protect Your Information

We use technical and organizational measures appropriate to the sensitivity of the information, including encryption of data in transit and at rest, row-level access controls that limit each user to their own data, restricted internal access, and security audit logging designed to detect and investigate misuse.

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No method of transmission or storage is ever completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach that poses a real risk of significant harm, we will notify affected users and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as required by law.

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6. How Long We Keep Your Information

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes described in this Policy, or as required by law.

• Account and profile information: while your account is active, and for a reasonable period afterward.

• Booking, payment, and tax records: retained as needed to meet financial, tax, and legal obligations 

• Security and audit-log information: retained for a limited period to support fraud prevention and dispute resolution.

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When information is no longer needed, we delete it or anonymize it.

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7. Your Rights and Choices

Under PIPEDA, and depending on where you live, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.

• Correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete.

• Withdraw consent to certain uses (note that some features may no longer work).

• Request deletion of your personal information, subject to legal and record-keeping requirements.

• Opt out of marketing messages at any time (through the unsubscribe link or by contacting us). We will still send you essential service and transaction messages, such as booking confirmations and security notices.

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To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hello@pawborough.com. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request.

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Residents of certain provinces (for example, Quebec under Law 25) may have additional rights, such as data portability and the ability to challenge automated decisions. We will honour applicable provincial rights where they apply to you.

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8. Children's Privacy

The Service is intended for users 18 or older, the age of majority in Ontario, since the Service involves payments and binding bookings]. Pawborough is not directed to, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from, anyone under that age. If we learn that we have collected information from someone under the applicable age, we will delete it.

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9. Third-Party Links and Services

The Service may link to or rely on third-party websites and services (such as Stripe, Apple, and Google). We are not responsible for their privacy practices, and we encourage you to review their privacy policies. This Policy applies only to Pawborough.
 

10. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will post the updated version with a new Effective Date and, where appropriate, notify you in-app before the change takes effect. We encourage you to review this Policy periodically.

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11. Account Deletion and Data Retention

You can permanently delete your Pawborough account at any time from within the app, under Profile → Delete account. You do not need to contact us to do so.

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What deleting your account does

When you delete your account, your personal information is removed or anonymized. Your name, contact details, profile photo, biography, home and emergency addresses, pet information (including any health and veterinary details), saved preferences, device identifiers, and any images you uploaded that are associated only with you are deleted or permanently anonymized. Your login credentials are disabled and your account cannot be signed into again.

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Account deletion is permanent. A deleted account cannot be recovered or reopened.

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What we retain, and why

Pawborough is a marketplace that facilitates real payments between pet parents and pet care providers. Under Canadian law, including the retention requirements that apply to financial and transaction records, we are required to keep certain records for a defined period even after an account is deleted. Where we retain information, we retain the minimum necessary and, wherever possible, in a form that is no longer linked to your name or contact details.

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Specifically, after you delete your account we retain:

• Booking and payment records — records of visits that were booked and paid for, including amounts and dates, are retained to meet financial, tax, and accounting obligations. [LAWYER: confirm the retention period — commonly six (6) years for Canadian financial records — and the governing basis.]

• Reviews you wrote about other members — a review you left about another person is part of their record on the platform and the honest history other members rely on. It is retained, but it is no longer displayed with your name.

• Messages and shared visit photos in conversations with other members — where you exchanged messages or where photos were taken during a visit, the other person retains their copy of that shared conversation and those records of the care they gave or received. Your side of the conversation is removed from your view and your identity is no longer shown.

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We do not retain your profile details, your pets' information, your standalone activity, or images that belonged only to you.

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How retained records are handled

Retained records are anonymized: they are no longer associated with your name, email address, phone number, or other identifying details. For records we are legally required to keep together (for example, a booking and its corresponding payment), those records remain connected to one another through an internal reference so that the required financial history stays complete and accurate. This internal reference is not your name or contact information and is not used to identify you.

Retained records are held only for as long as the applicable legal or accounting obligation requires, and are then deleted or further anonymized.

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Third-party services

• Payment processing (Stripe): Payments on Pawborough are processed by Stripe. Stripe retains transaction and payout records under its own retention obligations and privacy policy, independent of Pawborough. Deleting your Pawborough account does not delete records held by Stripe. 

• Sign-in providers (Apple, Google): If you signed in using Apple or Google, deleting your account severs the connection between that sign-in and Pawborough on our side.

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12. Contact Us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests about this Policy or your personal information, contact us at: Pawborough, Inc. Email: hello@pawborough.com Phone: 647.354.1729 

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If you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at www.priv.gc.ca.

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If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please contact us at hello@pawborough.com

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