Privacy policy

Who we are

CampusMart is a student-built marketplace for Canadian universities. Buying, selling, renting, and ticket transfers happen between verified students at the same school. We are the organisation responsible for the personal information described here. Privacy questions, access requests, and complaints go to johnceqa@gmail.com and are handled by the CampusMart privacy contact.

What the app collects

What you give us

• Your name, program, and year of study. Typed when you sign up, or taken from your Apple or Google account if you sign in that way.
• Your university email address. Used to prove you are a student. Either we send a six-digit code to it, or, at Western, we read it from what Microsoft signs when you use the Western sign-in below.
• Your Western account, if you verify that way. You sign in on Microsoft's own page, never on ours. Your Western password is never sent to CampusMart and we never see it. Microsoft returns a signed statement naming the university directory your account belongs to, your Western email address, and an identifier Microsoft assigns you. Our server checks that signature, and that the directory really is Western's, before any of it counts.
• Your account email and password, if you sign up with email rather than Apple or Google. We never see or store the password. Firebase Authentication handles it.
• Your profile photo, if you add one.
• Your listings. Title, description, price, category, condition, accepted payment methods, photos, and where you will hand the item over. That is either a campus spot you pick from a list, or, if you are meeting off campus, how far from campus you are, chosen from five distances such as “Within 3 km of Western”. You cannot type an address, and we never ask for one. For tickets, the event name, date, venue, and quantity. For rentals, the rate and deposit.
• Your messages. The text you send, and any photo or video you attach. A conversation is tied to the item it is about, and when a seller marks that item sold they record which of the people they were talking to bought it. That record is visible only to the two of you, and the seller can correct or remove it.
• Reviews you write about another student: a one-to-five star rating and any words you add. A review is public inside your campus and carries your name and profile photo. You can only review someone you completed a deal with, so a review is always attached to a real sale.
• Reports you file about another student, including the reason you give.

What we create about you

• An account identifier that ties everything above together.
• Your school and email domain, worked out from the address you verified.
• A record that your university address is taken, so it cannot be used on a second account. We store a one-way hash of the address rather than the address itself. If you verified through Western sign-in, the identifier Microsoft assigns you is kept next to it.
• Your seller record: your average star rating, how many reviews it rests on, and your completed sale count. The average is computed by us from the reviews on your profile; nobody, including you, can set it directly.
• Activity timestamps and counters: when you verified, when you last changed your name, when you last posted, and how many listings you have posted today. These exist to enforce our limits, such as one name change every fourteen days.
• A notification address for your device, so we can send you push notifications. It is created by Expo's push service and is specific to your device and this app.
• A moderation record, but only if we suspend your account. It holds the reason, the date, and the listings that were taken down with it.

What stays on your phone

Your signed-in session and any half-written listing are saved on the device so the app survives a restart. A half-written listing draft is not cleared when you sign out, so the next person to sign in on the same phone can see it. If you share a device, finish or discard your draft before handing it over.

Who can see what

This is the part most people care about, so it is exact.

We also do not remove hidden information that your camera may store inside a photo or video, such as the time and place it was taken. Videos are uploaded exactly as your phone provides them.

Where your information is processed

CampusMart runs on Google Firebase. Our database is hosted in Google's United States multi-region, and all of our server code runs in Google's us-central1 region in the United States. Your personal information is stored and processed in the United States, even though CampusMart is Canadian and serves Canadian universities. While it is there, it is subject to United States law, including lawful access requests by United States authorities. By using CampusMart you agree to this transfer.

Who else handles your information

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else's advertising. We do rely on service providers to run the product. Each one only receives what it needs.

• Google Firebase stores essentially everything: accounts, profiles, listings, messages, and uploaded files, plus server logs.
• Resend sends email for us. For you, that is your verification code, and it receives your university email address and the code. It also carries our own moderation notices: when somebody reports you, Resend delivers that report to us, and the notice contains your name, your account identifier, your university email address, and the reason given.
• Expo delivers push notifications and app updates. See the next section for exactly what it receives.
• Apple and Google receive nothing from us, but if you choose to sign in with them, they tell us your name and email address so we can create your account. Apple's Hide My Email gives us a relay address instead of your real one, which is fine with us.
• Microsoft handles the Western sign-in, if you choose it over a code. You authenticate on Microsoft's systems, so Microsoft sees that sign-in and your university may too, exactly as it does when you sign in to any other Western service. What comes back to us is your Western email address, the identifier Microsoft assigns you, and confirmation that your account is in Western's directory. We send Microsoft nothing about you beyond the request to sign you in, and we ask for no access to your mailbox, files, or anything else.
• Netlify hosts this website and processes anything you submit through its forms.

Push notifications carry part of your message

When you send a message, we generate a notification for the person receiving it. To do that, our server sends your display name and roughly the first 140 characters of your message to Expo's push service, which passes it to Apple or Google to deliver to that person's phone. If you send a photo or video instead of text, only a short placeholder is sent, not the file.

This is how notifications work on every phone, but it does mean part of a private message passes through companies other than us. If you would rather that not happen, turn notifications off for CampusMart in your phone's settings. Messages still arrive in the app.

What we do not collect

• No location. The app never asks your device for your location and contains no code that could. A meetup spot is a label you pick from a list, such as “Weldon Library”, or a distance from campus such as “Within 3 km of Western”, which is a radius and not a point. It is not a position, and there is nowhere in the app to type an address.
• No analytics, advertising, or tracking. The app contains no analytics, advertising, attribution, or crash-reporting software of any kind. We do not build a profile of you, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.
• No payment information. CampusMart never handles money. You arrange payment with the other student directly, in person or however you both agree.
• No contacts, no browsing history, no health data.

Reports and suspensions

Reporting somebody sends the report to us by email straight away, carrying the reported student's name, account identifier, and university email address, along with the reason and the listing it was about. Your own address is not included, and the person you reported is never told who reported them.

If we suspend an account, four things happen: it can no longer read or write anything in CampusMart, its listings are taken off the campus feed and kept by us, its notifications stop, and its university email address is refused if somebody tries to sign up with it again. Conversations and reviews are kept exactly as they were, because they are the evidence, and because a suspension we got wrong has to be reversible.

A suspended account sees a screen saying so, with an address to write to. Every suspension is a decision made by a person, not an automatic threshold, and every one can be undone.

How long we keep it

We do not delete things on a schedule. Your profile, listings, messages, reviews, and uploaded files stay until you delete them or delete your account. A review you wrote can be edited or removed by you at any time from that person's profile. Verification codes are the exception: they expire ten minutes after we send them and are erased once used. The one-time value behind a Western sign-in works the same way, and is spent the moment it comes back.

Messages cannot be edited or deleted, by you or by the person you are talking to. A conversation is the evidence behind a report, which is what makes reporting mean anything. Messages disappear when one of the two accounts is deleted.

Deleting your account

Open the app, go to Profile, and choose Delete my account. You will be asked to type DELETE to confirm. There is no waiting period and no recovery.

Deleting removes your profile, your listings and their photos, your conversations and every message in them for both sides, reviews on your profile, reviews you wrote on other profiles, your saved items, your blocks, your notification address, and your sign-in account. Profiles you reviewed have their star average recalculated without you. Your university email address is released, so you can sign up again later with the same address, unless the account was suspended. See below.

Four things do not go away, and you should know about them before you decide:

• Reports other students filed about you stay with us, still linked to your former account identifier. Deleting your account is not a way to erase a complaint.
• A suspension, if you were suspended. Deleting the account removes everything above, but we keep a record that the address was suspended, with no account attached to it, so the same university email cannot be used to sign up again. Deleting your account is not a way to shed a suspension. Write to us if you think the suspension was wrong: lifting it also frees the address.
• Other students' records that they blocked you remain in their own accounts.
• Server logs kept by Firebase for operational purposes, which include your university email address at the moment a code was sent, age out on Google's schedule rather than ours.

Deleting uploaded files is done on a best-effort basis. If that step fails, the rest of the deletion still completes. Write to us if you want confirmation that your files are gone.

Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law you can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct anything wrong, and withdraw consent. In the app you can change your name (once every fourteen days), your program, your year, and your photo at any time, and you can delete any listing.

For anything else, email johnceqa@gmail.com and we will answer within thirty days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.

Security

Your information travels encrypted, and Google encrypts it while stored. Access is enforced on our servers rather than in the app, so the rules above hold even against someone using CampusMart in an unintended way.

To be straightforward with you: messages are not end-to-end encrypted. We can technically read them, and we may do so to investigate a report or where the law requires it. We do not read them otherwise.

Who can use CampusMart

CampusMart is for university students, and you must be at least sixteen to have an account. Buying, selling, renting, reviewing, and messaging all require a verified university email address. Anyone can create an account with an ordinary email address, and an unverified account can browse the launch campus as described above. It cannot list anything, message anyone, review anyone, or reach any other campus.

This website

• Waitlist: your email address, and your school if you give it.
• Team applications: your email address, the role you pick, your social handle and university if you apply as an ambassador, and any resume you attach.
• Both are submitted through Netlify, our hosting provider, whose servers may be outside Canada. Netlify keeps standard web server logs, which include visitor IP addresses.
• This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics or advertising scripts.
• Every page here, including this one, loads its fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address and browser details when you visit.

Waitlist emails are used to tell you when CampusMart opens at your school, and are deleted once that outreach ends. Application materials are deleted within twelve months. Ask us any time and we will remove yours sooner.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and change the effective date at the top. If a change is significant, we will tell you in the app.

Contact

johnceqa@gmail.com