Privacy policy

01Two groups of people, and two different roles

Poudra handles information about two groups, and that distinction drives everything else. First group: the people who USE Poudra — the contractor, their dispatchers, their operators. For them, we are responsible for the information. Second group: the contractor’s CUSTOMERS and the occupants of their buildings. For those, it is the contractor who decides what is collected and what is done with it; we act on their behalf. In practice: if you are the customer of a snow removal contractor who uses Poudra and you want your information corrected or deleted, contact THAT contractor, not us — only they can decide, and we cannot do it in their place.

02What we collect

Accounts: name, email address, phone number, language, password (never in clear text — we keep only an irreversible fingerprint of it) and, if two-factor authentication is on, its secret in encrypted form. Work activity: visits with arrival and departure times, de-icer applied, site findings, proof photos and a fingerprint of each photo. Documents: quotes, contracts, invoices, payments, and for a contract signed online the name typed by the signer, the date, the internet address they signed from and a fingerprint of the terms they had on screen. The sending log: who a message went to, through which channel, and whether it got through. Your customers’ information, which you enter: contact details, addresses, property outlines, consents with their date, and the occupants of a building if you record any.

03Location: during the shift, and not before

The phone app records an operator’s location ONLY between the moment they start their shift and the moment they end it. Outside a shift it records nothing, and the app asks for nothing in the background. During a shift, three things are recorded: the route travelled, the location at the moment the operator checks in at a stop (stating where it came from — the phone’s GPS, or the property’s file if GPS returned nothing, never passing one off as the other), and a periodic sign of life carrying the battery level and permission state, so the office can tell whether a truck has gone quiet because it stopped or because the phone is off. Before their first route, the operator reads what the app records and answers: they may REFUSE location tracking, their refusal is visible to their employer, and they go on checking in at their stops as usual.

04Who it is shared with

We sell nothing and rent nothing to anyone. We entrust certain tasks to suppliers, each for one precise reason and nothing else: collecting subscriptions and your customers’ payments, sending text messages, sending notifications to phones, sending emails, storing photos and attachments, turning an address into coordinates and drawing maps, hosting the two websites, hosting the server, and receiving technical error reports. Error reports contain no personal information and no recording of what you do on screen. Weather forecasts and warnings go the other way: we RECEIVE them from a public service, nothing leaves us. The named list of our suppliers, with the country where each one processes, is provided on written request to support@poudra.ca: we answer, we do not publish it.

05Where the information is processed

Our suppliers are based both here and abroad, notably in the United States and in Europe — payment collection, text messages, phone notifications, emails, mapping, hosting of the two websites and error reports are processed outside the country. We make location neither a promise nor a selling point: we will not tell you that everything stays in the country, and we will not pretend our suppliers are beyond the reach of any foreign jurisdiction either — no software publisher of this size can honestly claim that. A transfer outside Quebec or outside the country is not forbidden: it must be governed, and that is what our contracts with those suppliers are for. If the location of one specific processing matters to you — because one of your own customers asks, for instance — write to us and we will answer for that one.

06How long it is kept

As long as your account is active, everything is kept: that is what a history is for. On termination, each category follows its own period, and each one has its reason — a session token and an invoice have nothing in common, and a single deadline for both would be justifiable neither way. You get a notice 30 days before the main deadline, and another 7 days before. Here is the whole schedule.

Open sessions and registered phones

30 days after termination

A dormant token serves nobody and stays a risk. Your credentials do remain: signing in is how you come back to pay or to export.

Credentials: email, password, two-factor authentication

12 months

Long enough to come back next season without starting over.

Phone numbers and emails of your contacts and occupants

12 months

The trade is seasonal: someone who cancels in April calls back in October. No law sets a figure; it is that reason which justifies this one.

Proof of a consent: the date and the channel, without the contact detail

3 years after the last message

The anti-spam law has a three-year limitation period. Without that date you would have nothing left to show you had the right to write. Without a contact detail, it authorizes no sending: it only bears witness.

Sending log, without the recipient

3 years

The other half of the same defence: what went out, when, and with what outcome.

Invoices, credit notes, payments

6 years

The Income Tax Act and the Excise Tax Act require it. Neither you nor we can depart from that.

Visits, proof photos, proof files, and the names on them

7 years

This is the proof that a property was cleared, and it protects you first. Limitation periods run from two to fifteen years depending on the province.

Sign of life from a phone on shift

one row only, replaced

Nothing accumulates: the current row overwrites the previous one.

GPS track of a shift

no automatic deadline today

It stays as long as the visit it documents stays, so seven years. We say so rather than let you believe otherwise: it is the line of this table we must tighten, and we are working on it.

07Your rights, and how to exercise them

If you use Poudra: you can view and correct your information from your profile, withdraw your consent, and TAKE your company’s data with you in a single step — the export button produces an archive of files any spreadsheet can read, and it works even if your access is closed for non-payment. For an access, correction or deletion request, write to support@poudra.ca. If you are a contractor’s CUSTOMER: contact them, as explained above; to stop receiving visit notices, every email carries an unsubscribe link and every text stops if you reply STOP — both take effect immediately. If you are an EMPLOYEE: you can re-read, at any time from the app, the tracking policy you were shown, and the date of your answer.

08What we do to protect it, in verifiable terms

Exchanges between your browser, your phone and our servers are encrypted. The token that keeps you signed in to the office lives in a cookie that a page’s code cannot read. Two-factor authentication is offered to every role, not just the owner. Photos and attachments are in private storage: none is reachable through a public address, every display goes through a short-lived link. One company’s data is walled off from every other company’s, and that wall is checked on every release by a test that walks all of the interface’s routes. We will claim nothing more: no organization has audited us, and we will not pretend otherwise.

09Cookies

This public site carries NO audience measurement tool and no advertising cookie: there is nothing to accept or refuse. The office does set the cookie that keeps you signed in — without it you could not work — and keeps two display preferences in your browser: the light or dark theme, and the menu collapsed or expanded. Those two preferences never leave your device.

10Minors

Poudra is a work tool meant for businesses. We do not offer it to minors and we do not knowingly collect information about them.

11Contacting us, and changes

Write to support@poudra.ca. We answer privacy requests within 30 days. If this policy changes in a significant way, the date at the top of the page changes and account owners are told by email; earlier versions are kept and can be requested at the same address.