Privacy Policy

Introduction

HouseUp™ is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how House Up Inc. (HouseUp™, "we", "us") collects, uses, retains and discloses personal information in connection with the HouseUp™ website at www.houseup.ca, our mobile device applications and all HouseUp™ content, products and services (together, the "Website"). It replaces the version dated May 1, 2023. Please read it together with the HouseUp™ Website and Mobile Device Applications Use Terms and Conditions, which can be found at HouseUp Terms and Conditions.

HouseUp™ is based in Ontario, Canada. We follow the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), the privacy laws of the provinces in which we operate, including the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (Quebec), and Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). We have appointed a Privacy Officer, whose contact details are at the end of this Policy.

What is personal information?

Personal information is any information about an identifiable individual. On HouseUp it includes your name, email address, telephone number, the address of a property you list, photographs and videos you upload, the messages you send through the Website, your payment history, your approximate location and information about the device and browser you use. It does not include information that has been aggregated or de-identified so that it can no longer reasonably be linked to you.

What we collect and where it comes from

• Account information you give us: name, email address, password (stored only as a one-way hash), optional profile photo and bio, and whether your email address has been confirmed. If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address and profile picture from Google.
• Listing information you give us as a seller or landlord: the property address, price, description, features, photographs, videos, open house dates, price history and sale outcome. Your street address is used to place the listing on the map at an approximate location and is never shown publicly; only the city, neighbourhood and an approximate map pin appear.
• Professional profile information you give us: business name, contact person, business phone and address, service area, services, description, licence or certification titles and numbers, work photographs, videos, links to your website and social media, and updates you post. Your business phone and address are not shown publicly unless you choose a plan that displays them.
• Communications: messages, showing requests, offers, questions and quote requests you exchange with other users through the Website; emails you send us; and reviews you write.
• Purchases: what you bought (for example a listing fee, signage package, promotion or plan), the amount, date, currency and the status of the payment. Card details are collected directly by our payment processor; we receive and keep only a payment reference, the card brand and the last four digits, and the billing name and postal code where the processor provides them.
• Signage orders: the delivery name, address and phone number you give us so that signs can be shipped, and counts of scans of the QR code on your signs (we record that a scan happened and when, not who scanned).
• Technical information collected automatically: IP address, browser and device type, operating system, language, pages visited, referring page, and times of access, kept in server logs and used for security and troubleshooting. Listing page views are counted per day; for that count we store a hash of the visitor's IP address and browser, salted with a value that changes daily, so that it cannot be reversed and does not identify a visitor across days.
• Approximate location: with your browser's permission or from your IP address, a city-level location used to show homes near you. It is kept in a cookie on your device, not in our database.
• Cookies and similar technologies, described in the Cookies section below.

How we use personal information

We use personal information for the following purposes:

• to create and administer your account, authenticate you and keep your account secure;
• to publish your listing or professional profile, show it in search results and on maps, and send it to people who have saved a matching search;
• to deliver messages, showing requests, offers, questions and quote requests between users, and to notify you by email and in the Website when you receive one;
• to process payments, deliver what you bought, send receipts, prevent fraud and handle disputes and chargebacks;
• to print and ship signage packages and to show you how often your signs are scanned;
• to review listings, profiles and reviews before publication, to investigate reports, and to enforce our Terms and Conditions and the law;
• to provide optional features you choose to use, such as address suggestions, the map, and the listing-writing assistant described below;
• to understand how the Website is used and to improve it, using aggregated statistics and, with your consent, privacy-focused analytics;
• to send you marketing about HouseUp, only with your consent;
• to comply with legal obligations, including tax and accounting record-keeping, and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

We do not sell personal information, we do not use it for advertising on other websites, and we do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on you.

Consent

We collect, use and disclose personal information with your consent, except where the law allows or requires otherwise. Your consent may be express, for example when you tick a box to receive marketing email or turn analytics on, or implied, for example when you give us the information needed to publish the listing you asked us to publish. We ask for express consent before any use that goes beyond the purposes set out in this Policy.

You may withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual restrictions and reasonable notice, by changing your settings, by unsubscribing, or by contacting the Privacy Officer. Withdrawing consent may mean that we can no longer provide some or all of the Website to you; we will explain the consequences when you ask.

Who we share personal information with

• Other users. Your public listing (without the street address), your public professional profile, your first name or business name, your reviews and the updates you post are visible to everyone who visits the Website and may be shared by them through the Website's features and on social media. When you message a seller or request a quote, the recipient sees your name and the contact details you include so that they can reply. When you order a sign, the installer or printer sees only what is needed to deliver it.
• Service providers that process information on our behalf and only on our instructions: cloud hosting and database providers, file storage for photographs and videos, an email delivery service for notifications and receipts, a payment processor (Stripe) for purchases, mapping and address-lookup services (Google Maps Platform) for the map and address suggestions, and, with your consent, a privacy-focused analytics service (Plausible) that sets no cookies and collects no personal identifiers. Some of these providers are located in the United States, and personal information held by them may be subject to the laws of that country, including access by its authorities under lawful process. A current list of our service providers is available from the Privacy Officer.
• The listing-writing assistant. If you choose to use it when creating a listing, the facts you entered about the property and your notes are sent to an artificial-intelligence provider (Anthropic) to produce a draft that you then edit and approve. Nothing is sent unless you press the button, the provider does not use the information to train its models under our agreement with it, and you remain responsible for what you publish.
• Professionals you contact. When you request a quote, your name, email address, telephone number if you give one, and your message are sent to the professional you chose so that they can respond directly. Their use of that information is governed by their own privacy practices.
• Business transfers. If HouseUp is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy or sale of some or all of its assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this Policy and to notice where the law requires it.
• Legal requirements and protection. We may disclose personal information where permitted or required by law, for example to respond to a court order, subpoena, warrant or lawful request from a government or regulatory authority, to comply with tax and anti-money-laundering obligations, to detect or prevent fraud or security incidents, or to protect the rights, property or safety of HouseUp, our users or others.

Cookies and similar technologies

We use a small number of cookies and browser storage entries that are necessary for the Website to work: to keep you signed in, to protect forms against misuse, to remember your consent choice, to remember your approximate location for "homes near you", and to remember homes you recently viewed on your own device. These cannot be turned off without breaking the Website.

Analytics is off unless you turn it on. If you consent, we use Plausible, a privacy-focused service that counts page views and product events such as "search started" without cookies and without collecting personal identifiers. You choose when you first visit, and you can change your choice here at any time:

We do not use advertising cookies or cross-site tracking. Embedded videos on professional profiles load from YouTube or Vimeo only when you press play, and the embedding provider's own privacy policy applies from that moment.

Most browsers let you refuse or delete cookies. If you refuse the necessary cookies, you will not be able to sign in.

How long we keep personal information

We keep personal information only as long as necessary for the purposes described in this Policy and to meet legal requirements, then delete or de-identify it. In particular:

• Account information is kept while your account exists. When you delete your account, your profile, listings, professional profile, saved homes and searches are deleted within thirty (30) days, subject to the exceptions below.
• Listings are public while live and are then archived so that price history and sale records remain available in aggregate form; the street address is retained privately for the seller's own records and for fraud prevention.
• Messages between users are kept while either party's account exists, so that both sides keep a record of what was agreed, and are deleted when both accounts are gone.
• Purchase and payment records are kept for seven (7) years after the transaction, as Canadian tax law requires.
• Server logs are kept for ninety (90) days, and the salted visitor hashes used to count unique listing views are deleted after three (3) days. Encrypted backups are kept for thirty (30) days.
• Records of consent, of reports and moderation decisions, and information needed to establish, exercise or defend legal claims are kept as long as the applicable limitation period requires.

How we protect personal information

We protect personal information with safeguards appropriate to its sensitivity: encryption in transit and at rest, password hashing, access limited to the people who need it for their work and bound by confidentiality obligations, logging of administrative actions, and regular review of our providers. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure. If a confidentiality incident involving your personal information creates a risk of serious injury, we will notify you and the relevant privacy regulators as the law requires, and we keep a register of such incidents.

Your rights

Subject to the exceptions set out in applicable law, you have the right to:

• access the personal information we hold about you and learn how it has been used and to whom it has been disclosed;
• ask us to correct personal information that is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date;
• withdraw your consent, as described above;
• delete your account yourself from your account settings, which triggers the deletion described in the retention section;
• if you reside in Quebec, receive the computerized personal information you gave us in a structured, commonly used technological format, or have it sent to another organization, and ask that a hyperlink to your personal information be de-indexed where the law provides for it;
• complain to the Privacy Officer, and, if you are not satisfied with our response, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or to the privacy regulator of your province, including the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

We respond to requests within thirty (30) days. There is no charge for reasonable requests; if a request requires copies of records, we will tell you the cost before proceeding. We may ask you to verify your identity before acting on a request, and we may not be able to provide access to information that cannot be separated from information about others, that is protected by legal privilege, or that must be withheld for security or commercial confidentiality reasons; in that case we will tell you why.

Children

The Website is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under eighteen (18). If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact the Privacy Officer and we will delete it.

Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it last changed. If a change materially affects how we use personal information already collected, we will notify account holders by email or by a notice on the Website before the change takes effect.

How to contact the HouseUp™ Privacy Officer

Email: info@houseup.ca (Attention: HouseUp™ Privacy Officer). You may also write to us at the postal address shown on the Contact page of the Website.