Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, school (for students), organization name (for organizations), neighbourhood, grade level, and volunteer interests. When you use the Platform, we also collect application data, volunteer hours, messages sent through in-app chat, uploaded files and images, feedback submissions, and basic usage data such as login timestamps.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to: operate and maintain the Platform; match students with volunteer opportunities; facilitate communication between students and organizations; track and verify volunteer hours; send transactional emails (application updates, hour confirmations, security codes); generate leaderboard rankings; analyze platform usage to improve our services; and enforce our Terms of Service.

3. Data Storage and Security

Your data is stored in Google Firebase (Firestore and Firebase Authentication) and processed through our server infrastructure. File uploads (profile images, chat attachments, resumes) are stored in Firebase Storage. We implement access controls, security rules, and encryption in transit (HTTPS) to protect your data. However, no system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

4. Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services to operate the Platform: Google Firebase for authentication, database, and file storage; Resend for transactional email delivery; Google Gemini AI for automated triage of feedback and safety reports, which means the text you write in one is sent to it; OpenStreetMap to turn a typed address into map coordinates; and CARTO to serve the map tiles themselves. Opening any map sends your IP address to those last two. Each of these services has its own privacy policy governing their use of data.

5. Data Sharing

We do not sell your personal information. We share your data only as follows: your student profile information is visible to organizations you apply to; your organization profile is visible to students browsing opportunities; leaderboard rankings (name and hours) are visible to other logged-in users. We may disclose data if required by law or to protect the rights and safety of our users.

6. Cookies and Local Storage

We use browser local storage to maintain your login session and store UI preferences. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party tracking cookies, and we do not use any analytics or tracking service.

7. Your Rights

You may access, update, or delete your personal information through your profile settings at any time. You may request a copy of the data we hold about you by contacting us through the Feedback page. You may delete your account, which will remove your profile data. Note that some data (such as applications you submitted or hours logged by organizations) may be retained as part of other users' records.

8. Children's Privacy

The Platform is built for Ontario high school students, who are typically 14 to 18. Most of our users are under 18.

We do not currently ask for your age, and we do not ask for a parent or guardian's permission before you sign up. We are saying that plainly because a privacy policy that describes checks we do not perform is worse than one that admits we do not perform them.

If you are under 13, please do not create an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will delete it and its data.

If you are a parent or guardian and you want your child's account and data removed, email us and we will do it. You do not need to give a reason.

9. Data Retention

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists.

When you delete your account we delete it immediately, not within 30 days: your profile, applications, saved opportunities, logged hours, feedback, ratings, and your sign-in itself. Your name comes off the leaderboard at the same time.

Safety reports are the one thing we keep. A report is another person's account of what happened to them, so we do not let the person it is about erase it by closing their account. We remove the names and email addresses from it and keep the rest. If you filed a report and then delete your account, your name comes off it too, and what you wrote stays.

We also keep backups for a short period, so a copy of your data can persist there briefly after deletion before it ages out.

Print or save your hours record before you delete your account. We do not keep a copy for you and cannot restore one afterwards. Your school holds the record that counts toward graduation. This site is only your own tracking copy.

An organisation keeps its own record of the hours it confirmed, in its own files. That is theirs and sits outside this Platform.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify users of material changes by posting a notice on the Platform. Your continued use of the Platform after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.