Privacy, neutrality and security
A municipality is a public institution. These commitments are built into the product, not added afterwards.
Privacy
Public sources only
We collect only what anyone can see without signing in. We never join private or closed groups, and Settings refuses a private group if one is added.
Topics, not people
Community Watch shows topics, volumes and trends with representative public excerpts. Private individuals' names and handles are hidden by default. There are no per-resident histories and no "most active residents".
Limited retention
Raw community and social posts are deleted after your retention period: 90 days by default, set by you. Summaries, official records and news are kept as public record.
Supporting your MFIPPA obligations
Each client completes a Privacy Impact Assessment with us before go-live, and its privacy officer or clerk signs off. We act on your instructions under a data-processing agreement.
Where your data is kept
Each municipality has its own separate database and file storage, hosted in Canada (Montréal region). No other client can reach it.
Some processing uses service providers outside Canada: AI analysis of collected public content and of documents your staff upload, email delivery of the daily brief, and the network that delivers this website. Each provider, what it handles and where, is listed in our Privacy Policy and in your data-processing agreement.
Neutrality
- Councillors and staff are described by role and public record only. Nobody is scored, ranked or profiled.
- The Risks module is about the municipality's exposures, never a person's.
- Elections history shows official results only, for every candidate, with no forecasts and no individual voter data.
- The municipal service never shares a database, login or data with any other client.
Security
- Accounts are issued by us after a contract or payment; there is no public sign-up. Your administrator controls staff access and roles (administrator, editor, viewer).
- Access to every table is enforced in the database itself (row-level security) and tested as an outsider and as a signed-in user from another organisation before release.
- All traffic is encrypted. Every change to your configuration is recorded with who made it and when.
- We are putting in place a written control set modelled on SOC 2, covering backups, secret rotation and change control. We do not hold a SOC 2 report today.
Accessibility
This website and the client portal are built to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, as required by the AODA: keyboard access throughout, sufficient colour contrast, text alternatives, and a table view for every map layer. Accessibility statement.