Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

Citizen Stance is a Canadian non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote democracy by collecting and sharing citizens' opinions on public services and public servants. Our platform is available at citizenstance.ca.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following types of information:

• Account information: When you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture from Google.
• Reviews and ratings: The content you submit when reviewing public servants or organizations, including your ratings and written comments.
• Usage data: Pages visited, search queries, and interaction data collected through Google Analytics (GA4).
• Donation information: If you make a donation, Stripe processes your payment. We receive a confirmation and your email address but do not store your payment card details.

3. How We Use Your Information

• To provide and operate the Citizen Stance platform.
• To display your reviews (unless you choose anonymous posting).
• To prevent abuse, spam, and duplicate reviews.
• To understand how the platform is used and improve it.
• To send transactional emails (e.g., donation receipts) via Resend.

4. Anonymous Reviews

By default, reviews are posted anonymously — only "Verified Citizen" is shown publicly. If you choose to display your name, your Google display name will appear on your review. You can change this setting when submitting each review.

5. Sharing of Information

We do not sell your personal information. We share data only with:

• Google: For authentication (Google Sign-In).
• Stripe: For payment processing.
• Railway: Our hosting provider, which runs our servers and database.
• Resend: For transactional email delivery.
• Google Analytics: For anonymized usage analytics.

6. Data Retention

We retain your account information and reviews for as long as your account is active. Users may request deletion of their account and the personal data they submitted to the platform by contacting us at info@citizenstance.ca. Note that this right applies to data you have provided as a platform user (your account, your reviews). It does not apply to public servant profile listings, which are addressed separately in Section 8 below.

7. Your Rights as a Platform User

If you have created an account on Citizen Stance, you have the following rights under Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial legislation with respect to the data you have submitted to us:

• Access the personal information you have provided to us.
• Request correction of inaccurate information in your account or reviews.
• Request deletion of your account and the data you have submitted.
• Withdraw consent for non-essential data uses.

To exercise these rights, contact us at info@citizenstance.ca.

8. Public Servant Profiles

Citizen Stance maintains profiles of public servants — including elected officials, government employees, and individuals in publicly funded roles — based solely on information that is already in the public domain. This includes names, job titles, departments, and organizational affiliations as published by government bodies, official directories, and other public sources.

This information relates to individuals' professional public roles, not their private lives. Under PIPEDA, an organization may collect, use, and disclose publicly available information for purposes consistent with why it was made public. The professional identity of a person employed or elected to serve the public — and the public's right to evaluate that service — is precisely such a purpose.

Accordingly, profile listings of public servants cannot be removed upon individual request. Removing profiles on demand would undermine the platform's core democratic purpose: giving every Canadian the ability to find, evaluate, and hold accountable the public servants who work on their behalf.

If a profile contains factually inaccurate information (e.g., a wrong title, a role you no longer hold), please contact us at info@citizenstance.ca and we will investigate and correct it promptly. Similarly, if a review posted about you contains false statements, personal information unrelated to your public role, or content that violates our Community Guidelines, you may flag it for review.

9. Cookies and Tracking

We use cookies for authentication (to keep you signed in) and Google Analytics for anonymous usage tracking. We do not use advertising cookies or sell data to advertisers.

10. Contact

Questions about this Privacy Policy? Contact us at info@citizenstance.ca or through our Contact page.