Privacy

What we collect

Only what the service needs:

• Account details: name, email, password (stored hashed, never readable), and a phone number if you verify one. If you turn on two-step sign-in, an encrypted key for your authenticator app.
• Seller profiles and listings you publish, including your city and region. Your postal code is used for distance search and isn't shown publicly.
• Applications, inquiries, messages, orders and reviews.
• Saved listings, saved searches, saved events, back-in-stock alerts, what is in your basket, and your alert settings.
• Go-home plans: how and when an animal on a request goes to its new home, the meeting place, the cost, and the name and phone number of any transporter hired. Only the buyer, the seller and PerfectPal staff see a plan.
• Verification documents you upload for badges or an ID check.
• Payment records: amounts, status and references. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach PerfectPal.
• Bookings: visits, pickups and video calls you book or take, and your answer if you're asked whether you saw the animal live on a video call. Video calls happen in the seller's own video app; PerfectPal doesn't host, record or store them.
• Your buyer profile, if you make one: reusable answers to sellers' usual questions.
• Your animals' profiles (My animals): animals you add yourself and, for animals from a PerfectPal seller, what the seller handed over when the animal went home; plus the records, notes, photos and documents you add.
• Updates sellers post for the buyers who reserved from them: text, photos and an animal's records.
• Contracts you send or sign: the text, the name you typed to sign, when you signed, and the IP address and browser you signed from.
• Security records: the devices and IP addresses of your sign-ins (you can see them under Sign-in and security). On requests to sellers, IP addresses are stored only as a one-way hash.
• Fraud checks: to help stop scams we automatically compare listing photos between sellers, look for common scam wording in messages (which shows a warning to the person who received the message), and note unusual account activity such as many accounts on one network. A match only asks PerfectPal staff to take a look. A person decides what, if anything, to do; nothing is limited automatically.
• How often each listing is viewed, as a daily count. Views aren't linked to you or your device.
• How often each species is searched for, as a daily count per province or state (taken from the location you chose for searching, if you chose one). Searches aren't linked to you or your device. Sellers see these totals only when they're 5 or more.

Who can see what

• Your public seller page, listings, trust level, badges and reviews from buyers are public. On the map, a seller's pin shows only the area they're in (about 2 km), never their address.
• Application answers, messages and order details are visible only to the buyer, the seller involved, and PerfectPal staff when needed. A seller can add team members to help run their account; team members see requests, messages or orders only if the seller gave them that part of the account, and what they do is recorded under their own name.
• If you're on a seller's team, the seller can see your name, email address and what you did for their account. You can leave a team at any time from your account page.
• If you follow a seller, we email you at most once a day when they add something new. Sellers see how many people follow them, not who. You can unfollow at any time.
• A seller you bought from may ask to show a photo of your animal on their page. Nothing is shown unless you agree, your name is never shown, and you can change your answer at any time.
• A seller's meeting link for a video call is shown only to the buyer who booked it, from 15 minutes before the call until it ends. The video app the seller uses has its own privacy policy. A buyer's answer about seeing the animal live is visible to that seller and can be used as a record of the sale.
• Your buyer profile is private. Sellers see only the answers in a request you send them. If you choose to tell a seller about the animals you have, that request shows them the species and since when, never names, records, notes or documents.
• Your animals' profiles are private: only you, and PerfectPal staff when needed to help you, can see them. The seller doesn't see what you add. If you make a share link for a vet, anyone with that link can read that animal's records, notes and documents (not your name or contact details) until it expires after 30 days or you turn it off.
• A seller's updates for buyers who reserved are visible only to those buyers, the seller's team members who handle requests, and PerfectPal staff when needed. Their photos are private. A seller can also share one animal's records (values and dates, never their notes) with the buyer it's matched to.
• A contract is visible only to the buyer and seller who signed it, the seller's team members who handle requests, and PerfectPal staff when needed. Anyone holding a copy can check it on the Check a contract page, which shows only whether and when it was signed.
• Ratings sellers give buyers are shown only to sellers that buyer contacts, never publicly.
• Verification documents are private: only you and PerfectPal staff can open them.
• We don't sell your information or show you advertising.

Cookies and storage on your device

PerfectPal only uses what the site needs to work, so there's no cookie banner:

• Sign-in cookies keep you signed in, and hold the short-lived step between your password and your two-step code.
• A location cookie remembers the postal code or place you search near, so distances work without an account.
• A language cookie remembers whether you chose English or French.
• Your browser stores your light or dark theme choice, unsent form answers while you fill them in, and whether a listing view or a species search was already counted in this visit. These stay on your device.
• No advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and no third-party analytics.

How long we keep it

We keep information while it's needed, then remove it:

• ID documents: deleted 30 days after staff review them; only the outcome is kept.
• Read notifications: 180 days. Expired sign-in sessions and links: removed once they expire.
• Raw payment event messages from Stripe: 90 days after they're processed.
• Photos and documents you delete: erased 30 days later.
• Orders and payment records: 7 years, for tax and dispute purposes. If you delete your account they're kept without your name or contact details.
• Your animals' profiles, records and documents: while your account is open. Deleting your account deletes them.
• Updates for buyers who reserved: while a buyer who reserved can still read them, then 1 year after the last request on that listing closes.
• Signed contracts: 7 years, like orders. A contract stays as it was signed, including the names typed to sign it, even if an account is deleted, because it's the record of the agreement.
• Backups of the database are kept for 14 days.
• Everything else: while your account is open.

Service providers

We use a small number of providers, each only for its purpose:

• Stripe processes card payments and seller onboarding, under its own privacy policy.
• OpenFreeMap supplies map images when you open a map. Your browser asks OpenFreeMap for them directly, so they see your IP address, as any website you load images from does. No account or tracking is involved.
• Email (and, when phone verification launches, text messages) is sent through providers we choose for that purpose only.
• Our hosting provider stores the site and its database.
• Postal code locations come from the GeoNames dataset, which is stored on our own servers; nothing about you is sent to GeoNames.

Your choices

You can see and correct your information in your account at any time. Under Your account › Your data you can:

• Download your data: one file with your profile, requests, orders, messages, reviews, saved items and uploads.
• Delete your account. Deletion happens 14 days after you ask, and you can cancel until then. It can't happen while an order, payment or dispute is still open. Your name, email, phone, messages, request answers and uploads are removed; a seller page and its listings come down. Reviews you wrote stay, shown as from a “Former buyer”.

Questions and complaints

Contact PerfectPal support about anything in this policy. You can also contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or the privacy regulator where you live (in Quebec, the Commission d’accès à l’information).