Privacy policy

WhereWise (wherewise.ca, “we”) is a website that shows Canadian neighbourhood and business-area data. WhereWise is run by an individual operator who lives in Vancouver.

This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, and how we handle it, in line with BC’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) and, where it applies, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Privacy officer: the WhereWise operator, here@wherewise.ca. We will tell you the officer’s name on request.

There are no accounts, so we do not ask for your name, email address or phone number. This is all we collect:

AI chat (beta)

• Your question and what is on screen. To write an answer, we send your question through our server to Anthropic, together with the page and area you are viewing, the point you picked on the map, the values you entered in the calculator, and up to three earlier questions and answers from the same conversation. During the beta we also store the text of questions and answers to improve the service.
• Question limits. During the beta, each person can ask 10 questions in total, and everyone together can ask 3,000. To tell people apart, we turn your IP address into a one-way hash mixed with a secret value (a salt) and store that hash with your count. The hash cannot be turned back into your IP address, and we never store the IP address itself.
• Chat records. For each question we store the question and answer text, the time, the page or area, quick or detailed, the model used, token counts, cost, whether it succeeded, the IP hash above and a random session ID used only within the tab. We use this to see which questions are common and to manage answer quality, costs and errors.

Usage records

• Page views; the parts of a page you scroll to; buttons, links, tabs and map layers you click; areas and menu values you choose; addresses you search for in "Find by address" and the calculator; places you open on the map; and how long you stay and how far you scroll.
• Stored with them: a random session ID that ends when you close the tab, the IP hash described above, screen width and device type (phone, tablet or computer), the referring page, the page language, and the country, province or state and city you connect from (a rough location estimated from the IP address, never a street address or precise location). Records that share a session ID can be read together with the chat records, so the owner can see which pages one visit looked at and what it asked. Only the owner can see these records.
• These usage records use no cookies. Apart from address searches, we do not store what you type into fields. We use this only to learn which features and areas people look at and to improve the site.

Google Analytics (only if you allow it)

• On your first visit a notice appears at the bottom of the screen. Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC, USA) loads only if you choose Allow; before that nothing is sent to Google. If you choose Decline or ignore the notice, it never loads.
• If you allow it, Google sets cookies (_ga and names starting with _ga_, up to 2 years) and collects page views, time on page, approximate location, device and browser type and the referring page on its servers. Ad personalisation and Google signals (linking to signed-in accounts) are turned off. We use it only to see visit statistics.
• You can change your mind with Change cookie settings at the bottom of this page. For how Google handles the data, see the Google Privacy Policy.

Send feedback

• When you send a note with "Send feedback", we keep the kind you chose, the text, the page you were on, the page language, the IP hash and session ID described above, and an approximate location (country and city). We keep an email address only if you write one to get a reply, and use it only to reply. Only the owner and the admins the owner names can read the notes.

Email

• If you write to here@wherewise.ca, we receive your email address and message and use them to reply.

Hosting logs

• Vercel, which hosts the site, may keep short-term access logs (IP address, time, page requested, browser details) for security and operations. On the plan in use, Vercel keeps these logs for about one hour (Vercel’s policy).

Consent. By sending a question to the AI chat, you agree to the processing described above. Everything else on the site works without the chat. [Lawyer to review: whether implied consent is enough for usage records]

• Accounts, names, home addresses, phone numbers or payment details.
• Your device’s precise location (GPS). The site never asks for location permission.
• Ads or ad tracking. We use no advertising cookies.
• We do not sell, rent or use personal information for advertising.

The site is not directed at children. [Lawyer to review: whether to state an age] Please do not put personal information such as names, contact details, or health or financial details into your chat questions.

Answers in the AI chat are written by Anthropic PBC’s Claude models (USA), based on the figures on this site. Your question and the on-screen details listed above are sent to Anthropic’s API. Anthropic processes them under its own terms and privacy policy and may keep them for a limited time. [Lawyer to review: confirm Anthropic’s current commercial terms on retention and on not training models on API data, and state them here]

During the beta we store the text of questions and answers, so please do not put personal details such as names or contact information in a question.

• Chat records, question-limit hashes and usage records: Neon Postgres (Amazon Web Services, us-east-1 region, USA)
• Website hosting and server functions: Vercel (USA)
• Writing AI answers: Anthropic (USA)

Because this information is stored and processed outside Canada, it may be accessed by courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of the United States under US law.

These values are kept on your device, and you can clear them at any time in your browser settings.

• Your language choice (localStorage, and a cookie ww-lang with the same value for 1 year, used only to send an address without a language to that language’s page)
• Whether you allowed Google Analytics (localStorage ww-consent, until you clear it)
• Only if you allowed it: Google Analytics cookies (_ga and names starting with _ga_, up to 2 years)
• The width of the AI chat panel (localStorage, until you clear it)
• Your AI chat conversation (sessionStorage, gone when you close the tab)
• The random session ID for usage records (sessionStorage, gone when you close the tab)

The language and panel width are never sent to us. From the conversation, only up to three earlier questions and answers are sent along with a new question, and the session ID is sent with usage records and chat questions.

Change cookie settings

When you open a page, your browser contacts the services below directly. Like any web request, each of them receives your IP address and browser details and handles them under its own policy.

• Find by address: the address you type is sent from your browser straight to the Province of BC’s BC Address Geocoder (DataBC) to find its location. We never receive or store it.
• Base map: OpenStreetMap Foundation (tile.openstreetmap.org)
• Fonts: Google Fonts, jsDelivr
• Map and chart libraries: unpkg (Leaflet), cdnjs (Chart.js)

[Owner to review: serving the fonts and libraries from our own host would shorten this list]

• Usage records: deleted after 13 months
• Chat records (AI questions and answers): deleted after 13 months
• Email addresses on feedback notes: removed 12 months after the note is handled. The note itself stays, without the address.
• AI question-limit hashes: deleted when the beta ends
• Emails to here@wherewise.ca: 12 months after the last contact

Records past these periods are deleted automatically once a day.

If the law requires us to keep something longer, we keep it for that period.

• Connections between your browser and our server are encrypted with HTTPS.
• IP addresses are hashed with a secret value before anything is stored. The secret is kept only in the server settings.
• Only the owner can access the database and service accounts.
• We collect only what we need.

No transmission or storage over the internet is completely secure. If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm, we will give notice as the law requires.

• Access: you can ask what personal information we hold about you and how it has been used.
• Correction: you can ask us to correct information that is wrong.
• Withdrawing consent: if you stop using the AI chat, no new information is created. You can ask us to delete records already stored.

Because we keep only a hash instead of your IP address, we may not be able to tell which records are yours. If you tell us the IP address you used, we can hash it the same way and find them.

Please send requests to here@wherewise.ca. We will reply within the time BC law allows (generally 30 business days).

Please contact us first at here@wherewise.ca. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (oipc.bc.ca). [Lawyer to review: whether to also name the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca) where PIPEDA applies]

If we change this policy, we will post the new version on this page with a new effective date. If what we collect or why we collect it changes significantly, we will also announce it on the site.