What we collect, why, and what you can do about it — in plain language.
This policy applies to anyone who creates an account or submits information on Prodistrict, regardless of province. We handle personal information in accordance with Canada's federal privacy law (PIPEDA) and the applicable provincial equivalent, including Quebec's Law 25 for Quebec residents, which gives you rights beyond what's described here — see section 7.
Account information, from everyone: name, email, phone, password (stored as a salted hash, never in plain text — see section 8), province, and city.
From professionals specifically: firm name, licence/registration number, discipline, project categories, bio, and an optional insurance note — all self-declared except the licence number, which we check against your provincial regulator's public directory (see the Terms of Use, section 2).
Payment information: handled directly by Stripe when a professional pays the platform fee. We never see or store your full card number — Stripe passes us only a confirmation that payment succeeded.
Standard technical data: IP address, browser type, and similar information our servers log automatically when you visit, the same as almost any website.
To create and operate your account; to verify a professional's licence against their regulator's public directory; to process the platform fee through Stripe; to send transactional emails (account confirmation, deal updates, refund decisions) through Resend; to compute reputation signals shown to the other side (ratings, jobs completed, strikes); and to detect and act on abuse of the platform (the strike and flagging system described in the Terms of Use). We do not use your information for anything beyond operating the platform — no advertising profiles, no sale of data.
Two processors handle data on our behalf, strictly to provide the platform: Stripe (payment processing) and Resend (sending transactional email). Neither uses your information for their own purposes.
We check a professional's licence number against their provincial regulator's public directory — we send them a name or licence number to look up, we do not send them your account information, and nothing is shared back to them.
We do not sell personal information to anyone. We disclose it beyond the above only if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Prodistrict, our users, or the public.
We keep account information for as long as your account is active, and for a reasonable period afterward in case it's needed to resolve a dispute, honour the engagement-refund guarantee, or meet a legal obligation. If you'd like your account deleted sooner, contact us — see section 9.
We use one cookie: a session cookie that keeps you logged in. It's strictly functional — the platform doesn't work without it — and we don't use advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies of any kind. Because we don't deploy non-essential cookies, there's nothing to opt into.
You can view and update most of your own information any time from your profile. For anything you can't change yourself — including requesting a copy of your data, a correction, or deletion of your account — contact us at the address in section 9.
If you're a Quebec resident, Law 25 gives you additional rights, including the right to be informed of and object to certain automated decisions, the right to data portability, and the right to bring a complaint to Quebec's data protection authority (the CAI) or, in some circumstances, a private right of action before the courts.
Passwords are hashed with a salted scrypt function — we cannot see or recover your actual password, only verify it. Payment details are handled entirely by Stripe and never pass through our own servers. No system is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee against every possible breach, but we don't store anything we don't need to operate the platform.
Questions about this policy, or a request to access, correct, or delete your information, can be sent to our Privacy Officer at support@prodistrict.ca — the same contact point referenced in the Terms of Use.
We may update this policy as the platform evolves; continued use after a change constitutes acceptance of the update. Material changes to how we use your information will be flagged on this page.