Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

NearbyStore ("NearbyStore", "we", "us") runs the NearbyStore website at nearbystore.ca, the NearbyStore CA mobile app, and everything behind them. We're based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

If you have questions, requests, or complaints about your privacy, email us at support@nearbystore.ca.

2. What this policy covers

This explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how we handle it, and what rights you have over it. It covers the website and the mobile app, on both Android and iOS.

We follow Canada's main privacy law, called PIPEDA for short, and British Columbia's own version of it, called PIPA.

You must be at least 18 years old to use NearbyStore.

3. What we collect

When you create an account

What we know about you depends on how you sign up:

• Phone number and password: your phone number and a password. Your password is stored in a way that even we can't see or recover it. If you sign up this way, we won't have an email address for you unless you add one yourself later, in your profile.
• Signing in with Google or Apple: your name and email address, as shared by Google or Apple. Neither company gives us a profile photo. If you use Apple's "Hide My Email" option, we may get a private Apple relay address instead of your real one. We use it only to recognize your account when you sign in, never to send you email (we don't send email at all), and never to try to link it to any other account. If you sign up this way, you can add a phone number later in your profile.

Your receipts and purchase history

• Receipt photos you upload.
• Corrections you make when a line item was read wrong. We keep these so your totals are right and so the scanner gets better over time.
• What we pull from your receipts: the store name, the date and time, each item you bought (its description, quantity, price, and any discount or tax shown), and the receipt's subtotal, tax, and total. This is the core of what makes your spending history and price tracking work.

Community price reports ("sightings")

• If you report a price you saw at a store without buying the item, we collect the item, price, unit, store, and a photo if you add one.
• These reports are shown to other users to help everyone find better prices. We never show your name or account next to a price you report. Nobody can tell who reported it.

Your location

With your permission, we use your general area (not your exact location) to show you nearby stores. We don't save this anywhere: it's used for that one moment and then it's gone. This is entirely optional; you can say no and still use the app, including by searching manually. We don't use any outside mapping service for this; we just check it against our own list of stores. You can also manually set your preferred shopping area in settings without sharing your device location.

Device permissions

The NearbyStore app requests access to certain device features. You can always revoke these permissions in your device settings, but some app features may become unavailable:

• Camera: to scan product barcodes (Scan a Barcode feature) and optionally capture receipt photos. Permission is requested only when you first use these features.
• Photo Library: to select photos from your device when uploading receipts or price reports, and to optionally save processed images back to your library. Permission is requested only when you first use image selection features.
• Location: optional, to discover nearby stores and pricing in your area. When granted, it's "when-in-use" only — NearbyStore never accesses your location in the background. If you deny location permission, the app continues to work using your manually set preferred area.

Local device storage

In addition to uploading data to our servers, NearbyStore stores the following information securely on your device using your device's built-in encryption:

• Authentication tokens: used to keep you signed in. These are stored encrypted and never in plain text.
• App preferences: your display settings, notification preferences, and manually set preferred shopping area.
• Onboarding status: to remember you've completed the initial setup.

This locally-stored data is encrypted at rest and is never transmitted to our servers except as required for core app functionality. None of this data is shared with third parties.

Notifications

If you turn on notifications, we keep a code tied to your device (and whether it's iPhone or Android) so we can send you alerts about price drops or new community reports for items you care about. You can turn this off anytime in the app.

Basic technical information

• Standard details needed to keep the app running securely: your IP address (a number that identifies your device on the internet), device and browser type, and a log of requests with a timestamp.
• Error logs that help us fix problems: these only ever include things like a request ID or receipt ID, never the receipt photo itself, its full contents, or any payment details.

If you contact us

If you email support@nearbystore.ca, we get your email address and whatever you wrote to us.

We don't use ads, trackers, analytics, or crash-reporting tools of any kind. The website doesn't use cookies.

4. What we never keep, no matter what

Grocery receipts often print payment details at the bottom. We don't need any of it, so we don't keep it. Before a receipt is stored, we automatically find and remove things like:

• Card numbers, in full or in part
• Authorization codes
• Reference and terminal numbers
• The cardholder's name
• Any other payment-related codes or card network names

Two things make this reliable. First, there's literally nowhere in our system for this kind of information to be saved, even by mistake. Second, this check is done by a separate, simple, and consistent process, not by asking the AI reading your receipt to notice and skip it. That means a mistake by the AI can't cause payment details to slip through: if anything looks like payment information, that whole line is thrown out.

5. Why we use your information

• To run the app: read your receipts, track your spending, show your price history, show community price reports, and find stores near you.
• To keep your account safe: sign you in and watch for misuse.
• To make the scanner better: learn from corrections you make and cases where the scanner wasn't fully sure it read something correctly.
• To notify you: send the price alerts you've turned on.
• To help you: respond when you contact us.
• When the law requires it.

6. Community price information

Prices you report, and prices we pull from your receipts, are used to build a shared record of what things cost at different stores over time. This is never linked back to you by name for other users to see. Nobody can see who bought or reported a given price, including when you're looking at someone else's report.

We never publish, sell, or share your individual receipts, your personal purchase history, or your identity behind a price report.

7. Who we share information with

Only you can see your receipts. Viewing one always requires you to be signed in as the account that owns it, and we don't create shareable public links to them.

We only share information in these situations:

• Companies that help us run NearbyStore:
  • Google Cloud Vision reads the text on your receipt photos.
  • OpenAI turns that text into a clear list of items, prices, and quantities.
  • Open Food Facts looks up a product's name and photo when you scan a barcode. We only send the barcode number, nothing about you.
  • Google or Apple if you choose to sign in that way.
  • Supabase and Fly.io host our database and servers.
  These companies only use your information to do this work for us, never for their own purposes.
• If the law requires it: a court order or a legal request from an authority.
• If NearbyStore is ever sold or merged: your information could transfer as part of that, and we'd let you know. This policy would still apply until a new one replaced it.

We never sell your personal information, and we never share your receipts or price reports with retailers, advertisers, or data brokers.

8. Where your information is stored

Our database and servers (Supabase and Fly.io) are located in Canada. Some of the outside services we use, such as reading your receipts (Google Cloud Vision), understanding them (OpenAI), barcode lookups (Open Food Facts), and sign-in (Google/Apple), may process information outside Canada, including in the United States. When that happens, your information is subject to the laws of that country, which may allow courts or law enforcement there to access it.

9. How long we keep your information

• Receipts, and everything we learned from them, are permanently deleted, photo included, when you delete that receipt or close your account.
• Community price reports you made, including any photo, stay in our system even after you delete your account, so the shared price data built from everyone's voluntary reports doesn't disappear. Once your account is deleted, though, those reports are disconnected from you completely. There is no way for us, or anyone, to trace a kept report back to your account afterward.
• We may hold onto limited records where the law requires it, or if we need them to resolve a dispute.

10. Your rights

Under Canadian and BC privacy law, you can:

• See what personal information we hold about you, and how it's been used.
• Fix anything that's inaccurate, including directly in the app, for a misread receipt line.
• Delete a single receipt, or your whole account, anytime, right in the app. (See section 9 for how this works for community reports specifically.)
• Withdraw your consent to how we use your information. In practice, this means closing your account, since the app can't work without your receipt or report data.
• Complain: to us first, at support@nearbystore.ca. If you're not satisfied, you can also contact Canada's national privacy watchdog, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or British Columbia's, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia.

We'll respond to any request within 30 days, as the law requires, and tell you if we need more time and why.

11. How we keep your information safe

Only you can access your receipts, and that always requires being signed in as the right account. Information sent between your device and our servers uses industry-standard HTTPS encryption (scrambled so nobody in between can read it). We limit who can access our systems, and we never write the actual contents of your receipts, the full extracted text, or any payment details into our internal logs.

Encryption at rest: Authentication tokens and sensitive preferences stored on your device use platform-native encryption (iOS Keychain on iPhone, Android Keystore on Android), never stored in plain text or visible in app logs.

No tracking: We don't use any analytics, crash reporting, or tracking tools. Your activity and performance data is only collected as needed to run the app and help us fix problems.

No system is perfectly secure, and we won't pretend otherwise. If something ever goes wrong in a way that puts you at real risk, we'll tell you and let the appropriate government privacy office know, as the law requires.

12. Children

You must be 18 or older to use NearbyStore. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe someone under 18 has given us personal information, let us know and we'll delete it.

13. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we'll post the updated version here. If a change meaningfully affects how we handle your information, we'll let you know in the app before it takes effect.

14. Contact us

For anything about your privacy, including questions, requests, or complaints, email support@nearbystore.ca.

NearbyStore · Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.