Winnipeg Signal — Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 2026

Winnipeg Signal ("the app", "we") is a daily city-information app for Winnipeg residents. It is built to use the least personal data possible. This policy explains what we collect, where it goes, how long it is kept, and the choices you have. We do not sell your data, show ads, or track you across other apps or websites.

1. Information we collect

• Saved places and addresses you choose to add (e.g. Home, Work).
• Saved routes and your selected travel mode (drive, transit, walk, bike).
• Device location (precise, if you grant location permission). The app checks your location when you open it, when you return to it, and when you tap "Use my location", so nearby alerts stay current.
• Your preferences — which alerts you want, quiet hours, and muted categories.
• Reader notes and pick suggestions, only if you choose to send one. These are anonymous: there is no name, account, or contact detail attached.

2. Where your information is stored

On your device: your saved places, routes, travel mode, alert preferences and quiet hours live in your phone's own app storage. There is no Winnipeg Signal account, and no server holding a profile of you. From version 1.2.1 the app also excludes this on-device data from your phone's cloud backups (it was never backed up on Android; 1.2.1 adds the same exclusion on iPhone). The trade-off: setting up a new phone starts the app fresh. Removing the app, or using the in-app "Delete all my data" control, erases it from your device.

On servers, when a feature needs it: some things cannot be answered on the phone alone. When you save an address, look up your garbage and recycling day, ask for a neighbourhood label, plan a transit trip, or send a reader note, that one piece of information is sent to our own server layer, which runs on Cloudflare, and usually onward to the outside service that can answer it. Section 3 lists what goes where. Section 4 says how long each thing is kept. Your saved-places list itself is never uploaded; only the single address or coordinate a lookup needs is sent, at the moment you use that feature.

3. Where each piece of information goes

Requests from the app pass through our own Cloudflare service first. That is deliberate: it keeps the API keys off your phone, and it means the outside services below see Cloudflare's address rather than your device's IP address. Cloudflare acts as our infrastructure provider and processes these requests on our behalf.

• Google Geocoding — when you type an address to save a place, that address is sent to Google to return its location on the map.
• OpenStreetMap / Nominatim — turns your GPS coordinates into a neighbourhood label, and is a fallback for address lookups. Coordinates are cut down on our server before they are sent: about 110 m of precision for a neighbourhood label, and house-level precision only for the garbage and recycling lookup, which needs the street address to work.
• City of Winnipeg Open Data — road closures, parking bans, snow routes, and garbage and recycling collection days. Most of these send no personal data. The collection-day lookup is the exception: your address is sent to the City's open-data service, because that is how the City's schedule is looked up.
• Environment and Climate Change Canada — weather warnings, temperature, and air-quality (AQHI). No personal data is sent.
• Winnipeg Transit Open Data — bus arrivals, delays, service advisories, and trip planning. Stop numbers and coordinates are sent to plan trips and find nearby stops.
• Cloudflare Workers AI — if you send a reader note, the text of that note is checked by an automated moderation model before anything is shown to other readers. The note text is sent to that model. Nothing else about you is.
• Ticketmaster Discovery — public listings of major Winnipeg events. No personal data is sent.
• Map tiles (CARTO) — renders the map. Standard web requests, which reveal the part of the map you are looking at.

These providers have their own privacy practices, which govern data they receive.

4. How long things are kept

We keep the answers to lookups, not a history of who asked. Where an address or a coordinate would otherwise become the label on a stored item, we store a one-way hash of it instead of the value itself, so the stored item does not read as an address.

• Geocoded addresses: the result is cached on Cloudflare for up to 30 days, so the same lookup is not paid for twice. Street addresses do not move, which is why the window is long.
• Neighbourhood and street lookups: cached up to 7 days.
• Collection day, transit, closures, weather, events: cached from about one minute to fifteen minutes, long enough to avoid hammering the source.
• Reader notes: a private copy is held for up to 90 days so notes can be reviewed. A note that passes review also appears in the public list for up to 7 days. Using "remove my note" deletes both the public entry and the private copy.
• Reported notes: if a reader reports a note, we keep a moderation record that includes the note text for up to 90 days, so the report can be reviewed. That record is kept even if the note is deleted, because it is the evidence for the report.
• Pick suggestions: kept for up to 90 days so they can be considered for the weekly list.
• Abuse counters: to stop one device flooding a service, we count recent requests against a one-way hash of the IP address. Those counters expire within minutes and are not linked to anything else.
• Cloudflare's own logs: as our infrastructure provider, Cloudflare handles the request itself and may keep standard technical logs under its own retention practices.

5. How we use location and addresses

We use your saved addresses and, if you grant location permission, your device location to show what is near you, scan your saved areas and routes for disruptions, look up your garbage and recycling day, and plan transit trips. The app reads your location while you are using it (on open, on return, and when you tap "Use my location"). It is never shared with advertisers.

6. Data sharing

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We do not use it for advertising or cross-app tracking. Data is shared with Cloudflare and the services listed in section 3 only to the extent needed to return the information you requested.

7. Your choices and rights

• Decline location access at any time. The app still works on city-wide information.
• Turn any alert category on or off, and set quiet hours.
• Reset your saved places, or use "Delete all my data" (Profile → Privacy & data) to erase everything from your device.
• Remove a reader note you sent, from the same device that sent it, using the remove control on that note.

Winnipeg Signal is intended for a Canadian audience and aims to follow Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). You may contact us to ask about the information the app holds about you.

8. Children

Winnipeg Signal is a general-audience utility and is not directed to children under 13.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we add a feature that processes more personal data than this policy describes, such as accounts or push notifications tied to your identity, this policy will be updated before that feature goes live. Material changes will be reflected here with a new effective date.

10. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: [email protected]