What we collect, and what we don’t.

01The short version

This policy covers clearlybuilt.caonly. Websites we build for clients are the client’s own properties with their own privacy policies, and this page doesn’t govern them — see websites we build for clients.

02Who we are

Clearly Built is a small web design studio working with small businesses in Ontario and Nova Scotia. For the purposes of Canadian privacy law, we are the organisation responsible for the personal information described on this page.

Privacy questions, access requests and deletion requests all go to the same place: contact@clearlybuilt.ca, or (289) 512-9296. A real person reads it — there are three of us.

03What we collect

What you type into the contact form. It asks for five things, and only three of them are required:

• Your name— required, so we know who we’re replying to.
• Your email address— required, because it’s how we reply.
• Your message— required. What goes in it is up to you; please don’t send anything sensitive through a web form.
• Your business name— optional.
• A budget range— optional.

The form also contains a hidden field that real visitors never see or fill in. Automated spam tools fill it, which is how we recognise them. When it’s filled in, the submission is discarded and never reaches us or anyone else.

Ordinary server logs.Our host records what every web server records — IP address, browser and device type, the page requested, and a timestamp. We don’t combine those logs with form submissions to build a profile of you, and we don’t look at them except when something is broken or being abused.

04What we don't collect

This section is deliberately specific, because “we value your privacy” is worth nothing without it.

• No cookies are set by this website. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
• No analytics. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no advertising or conversion tracking of any kind. We genuinely do not know how many people visit this site beyond raw server logs.
• No accounts, no profiles, no visitor database. There is nowhere on this site to sign up, and form submissions aren’t written to any database we run.
• No third-party fonts fetched by your browser. Our typefaces are downloaded once when the site is built and served from our own domain, so your browser never makes a request to Google to render this page.
• We have never sold or rented personal information to anyone, and we don’t intend to start.

05Why we use it, and on what basis

We use what you send us to reply to you, to prepare a proposal if you ask for one, and to carry out the work if you become a client. That’s the whole list.

Under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), we rely on your consent, which you give by choosing to send us the form. Consent only means something if it’s easy to withdraw, so it is — see your rights.

We don’t add you to a mailing list. If we ever send commercial email, it will be with express consent and a working unsubscribe link in every message, as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) requires.

06Who else sees it

Three companies necessarily touch your message on its way to us. We name them, because a policy that says “trusted partners” without naming anyone is telling you nothing.

• Vercel— hosts this website and runs the code that receives the form. Based in the United States.
• Resend— delivers your submission to our inbox as an email. Based in the United States.
• Our email provider— stores that message in our mailbox, the way any business email is stored.

Beyond those, we share personal information only where the law requires it — a court order, or a legal obligation we can’t refuse.

Where your information goes.Because those providers operate in the United States, your message is processed and stored outside Canada and is subject to the laws of the country it’s held in, including lawful access by foreign courts and government authorities. PIPEDA requires that we tell you this plainly, so we have.

07How long we keep it

If you contact us and we don’t end up working together, we keep the correspondence for up to two years in case you come back, and then it goes.

If you become a client, we keep project correspondence and records for the length of the working relationship and for seven years after it ends — the period Canadian tax and business-record rules expect us to be able to produce them for.

You can ask us to delete your information sooner, and unless we genuinely have to keep it, we will.

08Your rights, and how to actually use them

Under PIPEDA you can ask us to:

• Tell you what we hold about you, and who we gave it to.
• Correct itif it’s wrong.
• Delete it, where we’re not required to keep it.
• Withdraw your consentat any time, subject to legal or contractual limits we’ll explain if any apply.

Email contact@clearlybuilt.caand say what you want. We’ll confirm we’ve received it within one business day and complete it within 30 days, which is the limit PIPEDA sets. There is no charge and no form to fill in.

If we get it wrong, you’re entitled to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. We’d much rather you told us first and gave us the chance to fix it.

If you’re in the UK or the European Economic Area and the GDPR applies to you, the same requests work, and you additionally have the right to data portability and to complain to your local supervisory authority.

09How it's protected

The site is served over HTTPS, so what you type into the form is encrypted in transit. Access to our inbox is limited to the three of us and protected by two-factor authentication. Our hosting and email providers encrypt data at rest.

We won’t claim a web form is unbreakable, because no honest business can. If a breach ever created a real risk of significant harm to you, PIPEDA requires us to report it to the Privacy Commissioner and to notify you — and we would.

10Websites we build for clients

When we build or host a website for a client, that site belongs to the client. They decide what it collects, and they are responsible for its privacy policy. We act as their service provider, and we handle information from their site only to do the work they’ve asked us to do.

If you submitted something to a website we built for someone else, your request should go to that business. Send it to us anyway if you can’t reach them, and we’ll point you in the right direction.

11Children

This site is aimed at business owners and isn’t directed at children. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we’ll delete it.

12Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or who we share it with, we’ll update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes get flagged here rather than slipped in quietly, and that date is the honest one — it moves when the policy changes, not on a schedule.