WellAtlas Canada — Privacy Policy

This policy explains what the WellAtlas Canada apps for iOS and Android (the "App") and the website wellatlas.ca do with information about you. It is written to be read, not skimmed: the short version is that the App has no accounts, no advertising, no tracking and no analytics software of any kind; the only personal information it handles is the location you choose to share, for as long as it takes to answer your search; and when you buy something, the store takes the payment and never tells us who you are.

The App is operated by 10591203 CANADA CORP. (the "Operator", "we"). WellAtlas Canada is an independent application and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Government of Canada or any provincial or territorial government.

1. What we do not collect

• No account. The App never asks you to sign up or sign in.
• No advertising and no advertising identifiers.
• No analytics or tracking. The App contains no analytics, crash-reporting or tracking software, and does not fingerprint your device. No third-party analytics service is used anywhere — not in the App, not on our servers, not on the website. Our servers keep daily totals of how often each kind of request is made; section 3 says exactly what those are and why they identify nobody.
• No contacts, photos, calendar, microphone or camera — the App does not request them.
• No background location. The App only reads your location while it is open and only when you ask it to.

2. Your location

Your device location is read only when you tap "Use my location". It is used once, to centre the map or to run a nearby search, and is then discarded. The App does not store it, does not write it to its logs, and never reads it in the background. Every part of the App works without location access: you can search by address, well identifier, municipality or coordinates, or simply move the map.

3. What our servers receive

When you search or move the map, the App asks our servers for the well records in that area. That request necessarily contains the coordinates or map area you are looking at and the filters you chose — that is the question the server answers. It also carries the technical details any web request carries: your device's IP address, the App version and the language you use.

Our servers use this information only to answer the request and to protect the service:

• the coordinates and search terms are not written to logs (our software is tested to enforce this) and are not linked to you — there is no account to link them to;
• your IP address is held in memory for a few minutes to apply rate limits that keep the service available to everyone, and may appear in short-lived infrastructure logs kept by our hosting provider for security purposes;
• we keep aggregate counts (how many requests, how fast, how many errors) that contain no personal information.

We do not build profiles, and we do not sell or share request data with anyone.

Daily totals. So that we can tell whether the App is useful and whether anyone wants what we sell, our servers add one to a daily counter for each kind of request: searches, well-detail views, nearby analyses, report previews, and report purchases by store and outcome. A counter is a date, a name and a number. It holds no identifier, no IP address, no coordinates, no search term and nothing about your device, and it cannot be traced back to a request or to a person. Download and revenue figures come from Apple's and Google's own reports, which are aggregate too.

If you buy a report. When you buy a Property Report, your device sends our server the store's proof of purchase, the location the report covers and the optional label you typed. The server produces the report, sends it to your device, and then forgets the location, the label and the report: none of the three is stored. What it keeps is only what lets it recognize the same purchase again if a download is interrupted or you ask for the report a second time — the store, a one-way hash of the transaction identifier, the product identifier, the store environment, a one-way fingerprint of the location that cannot be turned back into coordinates, and counts and dates. None of that identifies you. Apple and Google take the payment and do not tell us who you are.

4. Information stored on your device

Saved wells, the notes you attach to them, your recent searches, your filter settings and any Property Report you buy are stored only on your device. They are not sent to us. The reports in particular are yours alone: we keep no copy of a report we have generated, and cannot produce one. Deleting the App deletes all of it. If your device backs up app data to iCloud or Google, that backup is governed by Apple's or Google's terms, not by us.

5. Third parties

• Base maps. The map background is served by us, from our own host (tiles.wellatlas.ca), built from OpenStreetMap data. When the App draws the map, your device requests map tiles for the area you are viewing from that host, so our hosting provider sees your IP address and the tile coordinates in the same way as for any other request to our servers (section 3). No third-party map company receives them.
• Hosting. Our servers and content-delivery network are run by hosting providers who process requests on our behalf under contracts that restrict their use of the data to providing the service.
• App stores. If you buy anything — a one-time purchase such as a Property Report, or a subscription if we ever offer one — the purchase is handled entirely by Apple or Google under their own privacy policies and terms. They take the payment, hold your payment details, and issue any refund. We receive the store's proof that a purchase was made, and nothing about your payment details, your store account or your name.
• Government data. The well records themselves come from public government datasets. They describe wells, not people; the personal information those datasets may contain (such as owner names and street addresses) is removed before the records reach our servers and is never shown in the App.

6. The website

wellatlas.ca is a static website. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no third-party scripts. Our hosting provider keeps standard, short-lived access logs (IP address, page requested, browser type) for security and capacity purposes.

7. Children

The App is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since the App collects nothing that identifies a user, there is nothing to delete; if you believe a child has shared information with us by another route, contact us and we will remove it.

8. Your rights

Because we hold no personal information about you — the purchase records described in section 3 identify a purchase, not a person — there is normally nothing for us to access, correct or delete. You can nevertheless ask us at any time what we hold, and we will answer. Under Canada's federal privacy law (PIPEDA) you may also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada; residents of Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta have equivalent provincial bodies.

9. Changes

We will update this policy if what the App does changes. The version date at the top tells you when it last changed, and the App and website always show the current text.

10. Contact

Privacy questions: support@wellatlas.ca.