Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and how to reach us

Treader is a collaborative, AI-assisted travel-planning service available at treader.ca (“Treader,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). Treader is an independent service operated as a sole proprietorship under the business name “Treader,” based in the Province of Alberta, Canada.

For the purposes of Canadian privacy law, the individual who operates Treader is the “organization” accountable for the personal information described in this policy. We operate publicly under the Treader business name; the operator’s legal identity is available on request to you or to a privacy regulator. We have designated a privacy contact who is accountable for our compliance and who will respond to questions, access requests, and complaints. You can reach our privacy contact at support@treader.ca.

This Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, how we use and share it, how long we keep it, how we protect it, and the rights and choices available to you. It forms part of, and should be read together with, our Terms of Service.

2. Scope and the law that applies

This policy applies to personal information we collect through the Treader website and application, our application-programming interfaces, and related communications (together, the “Service”). It applies to visitors, registered users, and people who appear in content that our users create (for example, someone you name in a shared trip note).

Because we operate from Alberta and serve users in Canada and abroad, the following laws are most relevant:

• Alberta PIPA — Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act, our primary provincial private-sector statute.
• PIPEDA — Canada’s federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which governs personal information that flows across provincial or national borders in the course of commercial activity. Because our service providers are outside Alberta and Canada, PIPEDA applies to those transfers.

We build to the ten fair-information principles common to these laws — accountability, identifying purposes, consent, limiting collection, limiting use and disclosure, limiting retention, accuracy, safeguards, openness, and individual access. Where you are located in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Quebec, California, or another U.S. state with its own privacy law, additional rights may apply to you; see §§10 and 12.

A note on Canadian reform. As of the effective date, PIPEDA remains in force; the proposed federal Consumer Privacy Protection Act (Bill C-27) did not become law. We will update this policy if and when a successor statute takes effect.

3. Personal information we collect

We collect only what we need to provide the Service. Depending on how you use Treader, this includes the following specific categories.

3.1 Information you provide

Account and identity.

• Your email address and a password (your password is stored only in salted, hashed form by our authentication provider — we never see or store it in plain text).
• Your name, username, and display name.
• Optional profile details: avatar and banner images, a public bio, a home base location (free text, e.g. “Calgary, AB”), external links, a chosen accent colour, and your account/social preferences (such as whether your profile is private and who may send you trip invites).

Travel preferences.

• Your stated travel style, pace, budget, companions, interests, and preferred transport, and a free-text “about you” description. You provide these during onboarding and in your profile, and they are used to personalise suggestions (including by Scout — see §6).
• Scout preferences (Settings › Scout & AI). Every field is optional, and you can change or clear any of them at any time: dietary requirements (such as vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, halal, kosher, or gluten-free), free-text allergies you want avoided, accessibility needs (step-free access, less walking), free-text must-avoids, whether you are travelling with children or with a pet, and how you want Scout to write and to treat the weather. Some of these can reveal sensitive information about you — see §4. They are used only to personalise suggestions, they are sent to our AI provider with your Scout requests (see §6), and they are never shown on your public profile.

Content you create.

• Trips and itineraries — trip names, destinations, dates, map centres, and the full itinerary, including each stop’s title, location and coordinates, address, website, description, your free-text notes, rich-text note documents, and checklists.
• Saved spots — custom map locations you save, including name, category, coordinates, address, your notes, ratings, price, amenities, opening times, and photos.
• Moments — social posts with a photo, caption, place, coordinates, and time window.
• Interactions — comments, likes, saves/bookmarks, and reactions on content.
• Messages — direct messages, trip-group chat, and shared locations you send within Treader. Message content is visible to the participants of that conversation or trip.
• Trip collaboration — who you invite to a trip and their role (owner, editor, viewer).

Travel Data Suite (Discovery plan).

• Travel documents you upload to your private vault — for example flight and stay confirmations, insurance, receipts, and identity documents — together with their file metadata and any structured details you or the app records from them.
• Travel records (structured booking details) and passenger-rights claims (airline, flight number and date, the disruption, delay length, and a generated claim draft).

Your uploaded travel documents are stored privately and are accessible only through time-limited, signed links. We do not send your uploaded documents to our AI provider. If we introduce optional AI-assisted document reading in future, we will update this policy first.

Billing information.

• If you buy a paid plan (Pro or Discovery), our payment processor, Stripe, collects your billing name, billing email, and billing address, and your payment-card details. Card details are entered directly into Stripe’s secure fields and never reach Treader’s servers.
• We store, in our own database, only your plan, subscription status, renewal date, and the Stripe customer and subscription identifiers needed to manage your subscription. We can display your card brand and last four digits and your invoices, but we retrieve those from Stripe on demand — we do not store them.

Referrals.

• Your referral code, a count of your successful referrals, and a record linking a referred account to the referring account so we can apply the referral reward.

3.2 Information we collect automatically

• IP address. When your browser makes requests to our servers, we process your IP address to enforce rate limits and prevent abuse of our paid data services. For signed-in requests we key these controls to your account rather than your IP. For requests from visitors who are not signed in, we record the IP address as part of short, per-minute and per-day counters (see §11).
• Request and device metadata. Our hosting provider (Vercel) processes standard technical information — such as IP address, approximate location, browser type, and the pages or endpoints requested — in server logs for reliability and security.
• Cookies and local storage. We use a small number of strictly functional cookies and browser-storage items to keep you signed in and remember your preferences, plus first-party analytics storage set by our analytics provider. See §7 for the full list. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
• Usage counters. We keep an aggregate count of your monthly AI (Scout) usage to enforce plan limits, and aggregate, non-identifying service metrics (for example, how often our map data cache is hit). These metrics are not tied to your identity or IP address.
• Map tiles. Our map is drawn using background tiles served directly to your browser by a third-party tile host (OpenFreeMap). As with loading any web resource, that host receives your IP address and the map area you are viewing. This request is not linked to your Treader account.

3.3 Information we receive from third parties

• Stripe tells us the status of your subscription and payments (for example, active, past due, or cancelled) so we can grant the right plan features.
• If you follow a booking link on Treader and complete a purchase, our affiliate partners may send us a confirmation that a referred transaction occurred and its commission amount, so we can credit any promotional reward. They do not send us your name, email, or booking details. See §8.

4. Sensitive information

Some information can be more sensitive, and we handle it with particular care:

• Identity and travel documents in your Travel Data Suite vault (which may include passports or other identity documents you choose to upload). These are stored privately, are accessible only to you through signed, time-limited links, and are not shared with other users or sent to our AI provider.
• Precise location. Trip and stop coordinates, saved-spot locations, a moment’s location, locations you share in chat, and your home base are all location data. Much of this is data you deliberately enter about places, not continuous tracking of your device. Treader does not collect your device’s background or real-time GPS location; a map may use your device location only if you actively ask it to (for example, to centre the map on you), and that is handled by your browser.
• Payment-card information, handled entirely by Stripe (see §3.1).
• Health and belief-related preferences. The Scout preferences in §3.1 can reveal sensitive information: an allergy or an accessibility need is health information, and a dietary choice such as halal or kosher can reveal a religious belief. We treat them accordingly: every one of these fields is optional and you choose whether to provide it; they are used only to personalise the suggestions you ask for; they are never shown on your public profile and are never shared with other users; and the only third party they reach is our AI provider, as part of the Scout request you make (see §6). You can change or clear them at any time in Settings, and deleting your account deletes them.

Where the law requires your express consent to collect, use, or disclose sensitive information, we will obtain it. You should avoid placing sensitive information you do not want stored into free-text fields (such as notes or messages), and enter into the allergy and must-avoid fields only what you want Scout to act on.

5. How and why we use your information

We identify our purposes for using personal information at or before the time we collect it. We use it to:

• Provide the Service — create and secure your account, and store and synchronise your trips, notes, spots, moments, messages, and documents across your devices and collaborators.
• Power planning features — return places, photos, and routes for the areas and searches you request, and generate AI planning assistance through Scout (see §6).
• Personalise suggestions using your stated travel preferences.
• Enable social features — profiles, follows, direct messages, trip collaboration and invitations, and public trips, spots, and moments you choose to publish.
• Process payments and manage subscriptions, including referrals and any promotional credits.
• Keep Treader safe and available — authenticate requests, enforce rate limits, prevent abuse and fraud, moderate reported content, and protect our paid data services from being drained.
• Communicate with you — send account and transactional messages such as your email-verification code and, through Stripe, billing receipts. We do not send marketing email through the Service.
• Understand and improve the product — measure which features are used and where people get stuck, using our analytics provider (PostHog) tied to your account identifier, and diagnose errors and crashes using our error-reporting provider (Sentry). Analytics may include replaying anonymised sessions of how the interface was used; what you type is masked, and your trip notes and Scout conversations are never captured.
• Comply with law — meet legal, tax, and accounting obligations and respond to lawful requests.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for third-party advertising. The web application contains no advertising network and no cross-site tracking pixels; analytics and error reporting run solely for our own product and reliability purposes.

Legal bases (EU/UK users). Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, we rely on: performance of our contract with you (to provide the Service you request); our legitimate interests (to secure the Service, prevent abuse, and operate our business), balanced against your rights; your consent (for any optional processing that requires it, which you may withdraw); and compliance with legal obligations (such as tax records held by Stripe).

6. Artificial intelligence (Scout)

Scout is our optional AI planning assistant. It is powered by Google’s Vertex AI service using Google’s Gemini models. We want to be precise about what this involves.

What we send to the AI

When you use Scout, our servers send the following to Google Vertex AI:

• The messages you type to Scout, and recent turns of that conversation.
• A summary of the trip you are planning — its name and destination, the stops on your itinerary (times, titles, and types), and, if you have set one, the trip’s budget total and roughly how much of it is planned.
• The travel preferences you have set, so the suggestions fit you: your style, pace, budget, companions, and interests; your “about you” description; and the Scout preferences from §3.1 — your dietary requirements, the allergies you asked us to avoid, your accessibility needs, your must-avoids, whether you are travelling with children or a pet, and your tone and weather choices. Every one of these is optional; if you leave a field empty, nothing about it is sent. See §4 for how we treat the sensitive ones.
• A short list of candidate places (names, categories, and ratings) so Scout can make relevant suggestions.
• When you use Scout inside the Notes tool, the text of the notes you are working on.

What we do not send to the AI

• Your email address, password, or account identifier.
• Your precise coordinates or map location.
• Your uploaded travel or identity documents.
• Other users’ private messages or content you do not have access to.

Processing, retention, and training

• Scout requests are processed by Google Vertex AI in the United States.
• We do not keep logs of your Scout prompts or the AI’s responses. The only thing we retain about AI use is an aggregate monthly count, which we use to enforce plan limits.
• We use Vertex AI’s enterprise service. Under Google’s Vertex AI terms, prompts and responses are not used to train Google’s foundation models. Google may process this data to provide the service and for limited abuse-monitoring as described in its terms.

No automated decisions about you

Scout produces travel suggestions. It does not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you (such as eligibility, pricing, or access decisions). AI output can be inaccurate or incomplete — always verify hours, availability, bookings, and travel details before relying on them.

7. Cookies and local storage

We use strictly functional cookies and browser-storage items, plus first-party analytics storage. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

• Authentication session. When you sign in, our authentication provider stores your session token in your browser (as a first-party cookie and/or local storage) so you stay signed in. It is cleared when you sign out.
• Preview password cookie (treader_gate). While Treader is in private preview, entering the site password sets a functional cookie that lasts about 30 days so you are not prompted every visit. Its value is a one-way hash of the password, never the password itself or any personal data. It exists only while the preview gate is enabled.
• Analytics (PostHog, first-party). Stores a random identifier in your browser (cookie and/or local storage) so we can count visits and understand feature usage. Requests go to our own domain and are relayed to PostHog acting as our service provider; no advertising network ever sees them.
• Preferences and app state (stored in your browser’s local storage). These remember things like your theme and layout choices, a lightweight snapshot of your profile for faster page loads, panel sizes, unread-message markers, onboarding completion, a captured referral code, and client-side counters that throttle repeated sign-in attempts.

Please note: the standalone Notes workspace saves its content only in your browser’s local storage, not on our servers. That means it is not backed up, is not synced across devices, and is not removed by deleting your account — clear your browser storage to remove it. (Notes you attach to a trip are stored on our servers and are covered by account deletion.)

8. How we share information (service providers)

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only as described here. Our providers act as our processors / service providers and are permitted to use the information only to provide their service to us.

About booking links. Booking links are optional. If you follow one while signed in, we include your Treader account identifier so that, if you complete a purchase, our reward system can credit your account. The partner’s own privacy policy governs what it does with your visit and purchase. You can choose not to use these links; an operator can also disable the entire booking-link surface.

Other disclosures.

• Content you publish is shared as you direct — see §9.
• Legal and safety. We may disclose information where required by law, to respond to lawful requests, to enforce our Terms, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Treader, our users, or the public.
• Business transfers. If Treader is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction; we will require the recipient to honour this policy or notify you of any material change.

9. Public and social features

Treader includes features that let you share content publicly. When you choose to make something public, it can be viewed by anyone — including people without a Treader account and search engines — until you unpublish or delete it. Specifically:

• Public profile (at treader.ca/u/your-username): your username, display name, and avatar are visible; and, unless your profile is private, your bio, home base, banner, links, accent, and follower/following counts. Your email is never shown publicly, and neither are your travel or Scout preferences (including your dietary, allergy, and accessibility fields).
• Public trips (at treader.ca/t/its-link): when you publish a trip, its name, destination, dates, and entire itinerary — including your free-text notes and checklists — become publicly readable. Do not publish a trip that contains information you want to keep private.
• Community spots and public moments: spots and moments you mark as public (name, category, location, notes, photos, ratings) are visible to other users and, for public items, to anyone.

Content shared with a limited audience — direct messages, trip-group chat, friends-only or private spots and moments, and private trips — is visible only to the people you share it with. Remember that anyone who can see your content can copy or re-share it outside Treader.

10. International data transfers

Treader is operated from Alberta, Canada, but our infrastructure and service providers — Supabase, Google, Stripe, and Vercel — store and process personal information in the United States. This means your personal information is transferred outside your province and, if you are outside Canada, outside your country. As a result, it may be accessible to those providers and, in limited circumstances, to foreign courts, law enforcement, or regulatory authorities under the laws of the jurisdictions where it is processed.

We use contractual and technical measures to require our providers to protect your information to a comparable standard and to use it only to provide services to us. By using Treader, you acknowledge this cross-border processing.

EU/UK users: where we transfer personal data out of the EEA or UK, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK Addendum) implemented by our providers. You may request more information about these safeguards using the contact details in §16.

11. How long we keep your information

We keep personal information only as long as needed for the purposes described in this policy, to provide the Service, and to meet legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. In practice:

• Account, profile, content, messages, and uploads — kept while your account is active, and deleted when you delete your account (see §12). Deleting your account is immediate and permanent.
• Trips you delete — moved to a recoverable state for 30 days so you can restore them, then permanently purged.
• Billing records — subscription status and identifiers are kept while you have or had a paid plan. Stripe retains payment and invoice records under its own policies and applicable tax law.
• Security and rate-limit records (including the IP addresses of visitors who are not signed in) — kept only for a short period for abuse-prevention and security, then discarded.
• Cached map/place data — held very briefly to avoid repeat lookups; it contains no account identifiers.
• Aggregate usage counts — retained to enforce plan limits and understand overall usage; they are not tied to identifiable content.

Content stored only in your browser (such as the standalone Notes workspace and cached preferences) stays on your device until you clear it and is not affected by server-side deletion.

12. Your rights and choices

Everyone.

• Access and edit most of your information directly in the app — your profile, preferences, trips, spots, moments, messages, and documents.
• Delete your account at any time from Settings. This permanently and irreversibly deletes your account and the data linked to it.
• Withdraw consent to optional processing, and contact us with any privacy request at support@treader.ca.

Canada (PIPEDA and Alberta PIPA).

You have the right to access the personal information we hold about you, to ask that we correct inaccuracies, and to ask how it has been used and to whom it has been disclosed. You may withdraw consent, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. We will respond to a verified request within the timeframe required by law (generally 30 days). If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to:

• the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta; and/or
• the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Quebec (Law 25).

If you are in Quebec, you additionally have the right to data portability (to receive certain computerized personal information in a structured, commonly used technological format) and to be informed about, and to request review of, decisions based exclusively on automated processing. You may complain to the Commission d’accès à l’information.

European Union / United Kingdom (GDPR).

If the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and objection (including to processing based on legitimate interests), the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects, and the right to withdraw consent at any time. We will respond within one month. You may lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

United States, including California (CCPA/CPRA).

If you are a California resident, you have the rights to know/access, delete, and correct your personal information, to opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information and to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising your rights. We do not sell or share your personal information as those terms are defined under California law, and we do not use sensitive personal information for purposes that would trigger the right to limit. We honour opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control. Residents of other U.S. states with comprehensive privacy laws have comparable rights, which we extend to them. We will respond within 45 days (extendable as the law permits).

To protect your account, we will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before acting on a request — typically by confirming control of your account or account email. You may use an authorised agent where the law allows.

13. Children and minors

Treader is intended for a general audience and is not directed to children. You must be at least 16 years old (or the minimum age of digital consent in your jurisdiction, if higher) to create an account, and you must be the age of majority in your province, state, or country to purchase a paid plan. In Quebec, personal information of a minor under 14 will not be collected without parental consent.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below the applicable minimum age. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us at support@treader.ca and we will delete it.

14. How we protect your information

We use technical and organizational safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information, including:

• Encryption in transit — the Service is served over HTTPS.
• Database-level access controls — row-level security rules ensure each account can access only its own data (and content explicitly shared with it); these rules, not the browser, are the enforcement boundary.
• Authenticated access — every request to our data endpoints is verified against a signed session token.
• Secret isolation — provider keys are held only on our servers and are never exposed to the browser; the browser communicates only with Treader’s own endpoints.
• Payment security — card data is handled entirely by Stripe (a PCI-DSS Level 1 provider) and never reaches our servers.
• Password protection — passwords are stored only as salted hashes by our authentication provider.
• Abuse controls — server-side rate limiting and spend caps protect the Service and your data.
• Private storage — sensitive uploads (such as travel documents and private spot photos) are kept in non-public storage reached only through signed, expiring links.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach of security that creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the relevant authorities — including, as applicable, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and (for EU/UK users) the relevant supervisory authority — without undue delay and as required by law.

15. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, technology, or the law. When we make material changes, we will update the “Last updated” date above and, where appropriate, provide a more prominent notice within the Service. Your continued use of Treader after an update means you accept the revised policy.

16. Contact us and complaints

For any privacy question, to exercise a right, or to make a complaint, contact our privacy contact at support@treader.ca. We take privacy complaints seriously and will investigate and respond.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may also contact the applicable regulator listed in §12 — for Alberta residents, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, and for other Canadians, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.