Your information, plainly explained.

Who this applies to

This policy covers anyone who uses northlease.ca: a renter browsing listings, a landlord posting one, or a visitor reporting a listing. Norlease is operated in Ontario, Canada, and aims to follow the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).

What we collect, and why

• Your email address and name — collected when you create an account, handled by Clerk, our authentication provider. You can sign up with an email and password, or with a Google or Microsoft account. If you use Google or Microsoft, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture from them through Clerk. We never receive your password, and we never get access to your Google or Microsoft account itself.
• Your phone number — collected and verified through a one-time code (a 6-digit code sent by text). A landlord verifies theirs before publishing a listing; a renter verifies theirs once, the first time they message a landlord. This proves the number is real and reachable. It is not shown publicly, and it is not shown to the other party in a conversation.
• A landlord's name — a first, optional middle, and last name, given when someone becomes a landlord. The resulting display name appears on their listings and in conversations.
• Renter profile information — collected once, the first time you message a landlord: your real name, which of a few fixed categories best describes you (student or working student, with a Nipissing or Canadore choice; part-time worker; full-time worker; or “other” with a short line describing what you do), who's moving in (just you, or you and a partner), and your living situation (whether you already live in North Bay and roughly how long, or that you're planning to move and roughly when). You can also add an optional profile photo, which is never required. This is shown to a landlord when you contact them about a listing — see “What a landlord sees about you” below. It is not used for anything else, and Norlease does not build any landlord-facing search, filter, sort, or ranking on it, by permanent policy.
• A photo ID and a selfie — optional for both landlords and renters, reviewed manually by a real person on our team to earn a verified badge. Accepted documents are a driver's licence, a passport, or a provincial photo ID card. These images are never stored after review. Once a reviewer records the outcome (approved or not), the photo and the selfie are deleted immediately, and the deletion is confirmed rather than assumed. We keep only the decision, not the documents.
• Listing details and photos — the rent, bedrooms, amenities, availability, description, photos, and street-level location a landlord provides when creating a listing, used to display that listing to renters. We deliberately never collect an exact civic address, see below.
• Messages and chat photos — the content of conversations between renters and landlords sent through Norlease's own messaging feature, including any photos shared in a conversation, used to deliver those messages and keep the conversation history available to both people. For the first message in a new conversation only, phone numbers and email addresses are automatically removed before the message is stored, as a light anti-fraud measure.
• Saved listings and saved searches — if you save a listing, or save a set of search filters with a name, we store that against your account so you can come back to it.
• Reports — if you report a listing, we collect the reason you select, any details you add, and, if you're not signed in, an optional contact method you choose to leave.
• Basic technical information — your IP address is used for security purposes (rate-limiting abuse of forms like reporting a listing, sending a verification code, or signing up) and for the bot check on those forms. It is not sold and not used for advertising. Norlease runs no advertising or analytics trackers and sets no advertising cookies.

Norlease does not collect income information, credit scores, or any minimum-income requirement from renters, and never will — this is a deliberate product decision, not just a policy line.

Listing addresses, and why they're deliberately imprecise

Norlease never asks for, and never stores, an exact civic address for a listing. The address field only accepts a street name, with no house number and no unit number, and the map point we store is simply the centre of that street. On the map, a listing is drawn as a translucent circle covering roughly a 200 metre area, never a precise pin, because that circle is an honest representation of how much we actually know. This protects the privacy of whoever currently lives there, and it means an exact address can't leak from our database, because it was never in it.

How verification actually works

Landlords. One check is required before a listing can go live: an automated phone verification (a 6-digit code sent by text, built and operated by Norlease directly, not a third-party identity-verification service). The photo ID and selfie review is currently optional, and adds a verified badge rather than unlocking anything. It is reviewed by an actual person on our team, not an automated face-matching or third-party KYC service. No proof of property ownership is required to publish a listing.

Renters. The same phone verification, once, the first time you try to message a landlord, together with the short profile described above. A photo ID and selfie check is available and entirely optional, reviewed the same way by the same real person, and upgrades your badge from “phone-verified” to “verified renter.” It is never a requirement for messaging. Browsing, searching, and saving listings never require any of this.

In both cases, the ID photo and the selfie are deleted immediately after review, and only the outcome is kept. Landlord and renter ID records are stored separately from one another.

What a landlord sees about you

When a renter messages a landlord about a listing, that landlord is shown the renter's profile: real name, profile photo if one was added, what they do (including which school, for a student), who's moving in, the living-situation and timeline answer, a badge showing whether they are phone-verified or ID-verified, and the message itself. It appears in the conversation itself and on a fuller profile page the landlord can open from inside that same conversation. If a renter later completes the optional ID check, the badge updates in conversations they're already in.

This is a deliberate design choice, made with its trade-offs considered: it helps a landlord decide whether to reply, and it holds inquiries to real, identifiable people. The same profile is reused for every later conversation without being collected again, and it is only ever visible inside a conversation the renter themselves started. It never appears in any browse, search, or directory.

There is no way for a landlord to search, filter, sort, shortlist, or rank renters on Norlease, and there never will be. That is a permanent product decision, not a feature we haven't built yet: letting a landlord pre-screen renters by category or timeline is exactly the kind of indirect discrimination Ontario's Human Rights Code exists to prevent. The database itself is deliberately built without the indexes such a feature would need.

A renter's phone number is never shown to a landlord, and a landlord's phone number is never shown to a renter. The first message in a new conversation also has phone numbers and email addresses automatically removed, which does not apply to later messages.

Who your information is shared with

We use a small number of real, named service providers to run Norlease. None of them are permitted to use your information for their own purposes beyond providing their service to us.

• Clerk — handles account sign-up, sign-in, and authentication, including Google and Microsoft sign-in.
• Telnyx — delivers the SMS text message containing your phone verification code.
• Resend — delivers transactional emails, such as a verification approval or a notice that a listing was removed. No marketing email is sent through it.
• Cloudflare — stores and delivers listing photos, chat photos, and profile photos (via R2 storage and its CDN), sits in front of the site as its network edge, and provides Turnstile, a bot-detection check used on a small number of public forms to prevent automated abuse.
• Neon — hosts the Postgres database that stores this information.
• Mapbox — converts a street name a landlord types into map coordinates when they create a listing.
• ntfy — delivers short internal push notifications to the site administrator's own phone when something needs attention, such as a new listing, a verification submission, or a new inquiry. These can include a name and a short excerpt.
• Hetzner — hosts the server Norlease runs on, physically located in Germany. This means some information may be processed outside Canada, subject to that country's own laws.

Two things that would normally mean another company seeing your data deliberately don't here, because we run them ourselves on our own server. Real-time message delivery runs on our own self-hosted server (Soketi), so your messages are not routed through a third-party chat provider. French translation runs on our own self-hosted translation software (LibreTranslate), used ahead of time on the site's own interface text only, never on a listing, a message, or anything you write. Nothing you type is ever sent to an outside translation service.

We do not sell your information to anyone, for any reason. We may disclose information if we are legally required to, or where it's genuinely necessary to investigate fraud or protect someone's safety.

How we protect it

The whole site is served over an encrypted connection, and browsers are told to insist on one. We also send a set of standard browser security headers that limit where the page can load code from and stop the site being embedded inside another site, which reduces the room a common class of attack has to work in. Verification codes are stored hashed, expire quickly, and are rate-limited. Photo ID and selfie images are deleted right after review rather than retained. Access to the admin side of the site, where reviews happen, is restricted to the site administrator. No system is perfect, and we'd rather say that plainly than claim otherwise.

Email and texts we send

Right now Norlease only sends messages that are directly about something you did: a phone verification code, a verification result, a notice that your listing was removed and why, or an occasional check-in asking whether your listing is still available. Norlease does not send newsletters, promotions, or marketing email, and saved searches do not currently send alert emails. If we ever start sending anything promotional, it will be something you opt into, with a working unsubscribe link and our mailing address in every message, as Canada's anti-spam legislation requires.

How long we keep it

A photo ID and selfie are deleted immediately after manual review, for both landlords and renters. This is enforced directly in how the review process works, and the deletion is verified afterward, not a policy we simply intend to follow. Listing details and photos are kept for as long as the listing exists, plus a record of why it was removed if it is. Messages and any photos shared in them are kept for as long as your account exists, since a conversation history is part of what the messaging feature provides. Renter profile information is collected once and kept for as long as your account exists, since it is reused across every conversation you start rather than re-asked each time. Reports are kept so that a pattern of reports against the same listing is visible. Rate-limiting records of an IP address are short-lived by design. If you delete your account, we remove the personal information tied to it that we're not otherwise required to keep.

Your choices

You can browse and search every listing on Norlease without creating an account. A renter can edit their profile at any time, add or remove their profile photo, or clear it entirely: one option clears just the profile answers and keeps your phone verification, and a second clears your phone and ID verification too, starting over from scratch. You can request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask why we hold it, or ask us to delete your account, by emailing us directly (see below). We'll respond as soon as we reasonably can. If you're not satisfied with how we handled a privacy request, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your own information, can be sent to [email protected].