Privacy

A forum is a public place. Almost everything you write here is visible to anyone, without an account, and findable by search engines.

• •Your first name, last name and profile photo appear beside everything you post.
• •The text of your reports and replies is public.
• •A photo attached to a report is public. Look at it before sending: a licence plate, a face or a door number sometimes ends up in frame.
• •The topics you back are public: your face appears among the people supporting them.
• •Poll results are public, but your individual choice is not: it is never displayed publicly.
• •Points added to map polls are public, including their location, description and photo when provided. Your name is not displayed with the point.

Your email address is never displayed. It signs you in, and nothing else.

We ask for no phone number, no mailing address, no date of birth. There is no password to remember: you sign in with a code sent by email, and no password is stored.

The site uses no advertising cookies. A random cookie, carrying neither your name nor your IP address, prevents the same event or project from being counted more than once in a day. It is used only to build the Trending section.

• •To publish your reports and replies under your name, because a forum nobody signs is not a neighbourhood conversation.
• •To place reports on a map, so the borough knows where to act.
• •To count backing, because the most-supported topics are handled first.
• •To count poll answers and let you change your choice without voting twice.
• •To show on a map the places members propose in a map poll.
• •To rank the events and projects most often opened during the last seven days.
• •To sign you in and recognise you from one visit to the next.
• •To catch abusive or threatening language before it is published.

Your information is used for nothing else. It is not sold, not traded, and not used to solicit you.

The database, the photos and the site's pages are hosted in Montréal. Processing happens in Québec.

Four outside services are involved, and they are worth naming:

• •Supabase hosts the database and the photos, in a data centre in Montréal.
• •Vercel hosts the site and runs its code, in its Montréal region.
• •Base map tiles come from CARTO. Your IP address and the map area you are looking at are sent to them whenever a map is shown.
• •The “Translate” button, if you use it, sends that message's text to a Google translation service in the United States. Nothing is sent until you press it. This transfer is under review and may be removed.

Every message is read by a program before it is published. It compares the words used against a list of abusive, hateful or threatening terms and works out a score.

• •Above a certain score the message is not published and you are told why immediately.
• •Between the two thresholds the message is published normally, but an elected official is asked to read it.
• •Below that, nothing happens and nobody is notified.

The program reads only the text of the message. It takes no account of who you are, what you have written before, or what you have backed. The only factor in a refusal is the presence of those words in that message.

If your message is refused and you believe that is a mistake, you can ask for a person to read it and publish it. You can also ask which words were matched and make your case. Write to the responsible person, whose contact details are below.

Your reports and replies stay online until you withdraw them, because together they are the record of what the borough and its residents said to each other. A report settled in 2024 still explains why a street was rebuilt.

What has no such reason to be kept is not kept: anonymised openings used for Trending are erased after thirty days, messages held by the filter and then cleared by an elected official after twelve months, and sign-in codes expire in minutes.

Because the borough is a public body, destroying its records also follows its retention schedule. A deletion request is handled within that framework.

• •To know what we hold about you and get a copy. The “Download my data” button on your profile gives you a file straight away.
• •To have inaccurate information corrected, including an error in the transcript of a council meeting, which is produced by machine and can get what you said wrong.
• •To withdraw a report or a reply, at any time, yourself.
• •To close your account. Your email, name and photo are deleted; your messages stay online, detached from your identity, so as not to tear holes in conversations other people took part in. Withdraw the ones you do not want to leave behind first.
• •To complain to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec if our answer does not satisfy you.