Privacy policy

Through the application form:

• Your name, email address, and phone number.
• Your current and previous addresses, how long you have lived there, what rent you pay, and your landlords' contact details.
• Your employment status, employer, job title, start date, and employer contact. We do not ask for your income.
• If someone is guaranteeing your rent: their name, email, phone, home address, employer, and gross monthly income.
• The names of everyone who will live in the unit, and how many people that is in total.
• The names and contact details of the references you give us.
• Whether you have pets, need parking, or smoke indoors.
• Any documents you upload, such as photo ID or proof of income. A photo ID you upload is kept with your application and reproduced in the PDF the landlord reviews.
• A confirmation that each adult applicant is 18 or older, and your typed signature and the time you gave it.

If we ask you to verify your identity, our verification provider collects a photograph of a government-issued document and a selfie. See Identity verification below.

Guarantor and reference details are somebody else’s personal information. Only give them to us if you have that person’s permission, which the form asks you to confirm. We contact guarantors directly for their own consent before running any check on them — you cannot give that consent on their behalf, and we will not treat your tick box as if you had.

We deliberately do not ask for your date of birth, your Social Insurance Number, your marital or family status, your citizenship or immigration status, or whether you receive public assistance. Most of these are protected grounds under the Ontario Human Rights Code and none of them are needed to assess an application.

Only to decide who to rent the unit to, and to contact you about your application. Specifically: to confirm you are who you say you are, to check your rental history with your current and previous landlords, to confirm your employment, to speak to your references, to contact anyone guaranteeing your rent, and to run a credit check if you consented to one.

Where there is a guarantor, we assess their income together with your rental history, your references, and credit, never on its own. We do not use your information for marketing, we do not sell it, and we do not share it with anyone outside the list below.

You give consent by submitting the form, and the form records it explicitly: one checkbox for a credit and reference check, one confirming your information is accurate, and your typed signature. We do not run a credit check on anyone who did not tick that box.

You can withdraw consent at any time by emailing john@cravecoffeehouse.ca. Withdrawing consent means we can no longer assess your application, so we will withdraw it and delete your information.

• The landlords, employers, and references you listed. We contact them to confirm what you told us. We tell them only that you have applied and what we need to confirm.
• Anyone guaranteeing your rent. We contact them to confirm they agreed to guarantee, and to ask for their own consent to any check.
• A credit bureau, if you consented to a credit check.
• Our identity verification provider, if we ask you to verify your identity.
• Our email provider, which carries your application to us.

We do not share your information with other landlords, tenant screening databases, or anyone else, and we never sell it.

Confirming your identity is part of the application itself: you complete it before you can submit, using Stripe Identity, a service operated by Stripe, Inc. You photograph a government-issued document and take a selfie, which Stripe compares against the document photo, without leaving the application page.

Your document and selfie are uploaded to Stripe, not to us. Stripe returns to us only whether the document was genuine and the name printed on it. We do not receive, and do not store, your date of birth, your address as printed on the document, or the document number.

This check is required to submit an application. If you cannot complete it — because you do not hold a government photo ID, or because the capture will not work on your device — email us and we will arrange another way. We will not turn an application away for that reason alone.

Stripe’s handling of your document is governed by its own privacy policy, at stripe.com/privacy.

Some of the services we use — including our identity verification provider and our email provider — store and process information on servers outside Canada, including in the United States. While it is there, it is subject to the laws of that country, and may be accessible to foreign courts and law enforcement under those laws. We tell you this because PIPEDA requires it.

If your application is not successful, we delete it until the unit is rented, and no more than 60 days after that. That includes any documents you uploaded and the email copy of your application.

If your application is successful, we keep it for the duration of your tenancy and for as long afterwards as we are required to, since it forms part of the tenancy record.

Applications are stored in a private database that is not publicly accessible. Documents you upload are never placed in a public folder and can only be opened by a signed-in reviewer. Access is limited to the person assessing applications.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever created a real risk of significant harm to you, we would notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as PIPEDA requires.

You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct anything inaccurate, or ask us to delete it. Write to the contact below. We will respond within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with how we handled your request, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca or 1-800-282-1376.

John Stathopoulos is accountable for the personal information described in this policy.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. Changes do not apply retroactively to information already collected without your consent.