Privacy policy

Your submission is used in a neighbourhood-level rent estimate only when there are at least 5 recent, comparable submissions for the same area and type of home, and they are not too alike. It is then combined with them, with public market data from CMHC and Statistics Canada, and with FairRent's neighbourhood adjustment where one is set. Individual submissions are never displayed publicly and never sold. A rent well outside the range we can compare directly is held for review rather than added straight away. That is a data quality step, not a judgement that the submission is false. You are told when it happens.

Our hosting and analytics providers process technical information when you visit, including your IP address and browser details. We do not attach that information to rent submissions.

Google Analytics measures visits and steps in the rent check. Our analytics events do not include the rent amount or answers submitted through the form. They carry the city, the language and where on the page a link was used. If a link from one of our flyers or posts brought you here, they carry a short name for that campaign. When you share the page, they carry which way you shared it. When a submission is not stored, they carry a short code for why. When a form is returned with errors, they also carry which fields were incomplete.

In our analytics tag, advertising features, ad personalization and Google Signals are turned off. Google processes technical data, including IP addresses, on our behalf. We see grouped figures, not individuals.

If you arrive from one of our own Google ads, the link carries a click identifier. We pass that identifier to Google Analytics, and it is shared with Google Ads only so that a submission can be counted as coming from that ad. It says which ad was clicked, not who clicked it. It never travels with the submission itself, and it is not used to personalize advertising.

To limit automated flooding, we keep a short-lived count of how many submissions have arrived from one network address in the last ten minutes. The count is held in memory only. The address is scrambled with a key that exists only while the server is running. The count is never written to disk and never attached to a submission. The limit is deliberately loose. The people in one household, one apartment building or one university residence can share one network address, and we would rather accept their submissions than block them.

Your answers do not travel in the page address. They are held in a short-lived, encrypted cookie that only our server can read. The address carries nothing but a random id. So a link you copy from the result page contains no rent, no move-in year and no size. The same is true of our hosting log and of the web address your browser passes on to any site you click through to. That cookie is cleared after 30 minutes, and you can clear it yourself with the control on the result.

A second cookie holds one word, your language choice, so that the site stays in French or English as you move between pages. It is set when you switch language, it holds nothing else, and it is not used to identify or track you. It lasts one year and you can remove it in your browser at any time.

If you log an N12 or N13 notice, a cookie of the same encrypted kind holds your answers or your result for 15 minutes. You can clear it with the control on the result.

Google Analytics sets its own cookies in your browser to count a visit as one visit. They are first-party cookies and are not used for ad personalization or cross-site tracking. When you arrive from one of our Google ads, one of them keeps the ad click identifier for up to 90 days, Google's documented default, which we have not yet confirmed. That lets a later submission be counted for that ad.

The result page stores a short marker in your browser's session storage so that reloading the page does not count the same submission twice in our analytics. It holds no rent and no answer, and your browser discards it when you close the tab.

To keep the data clean, the form includes a hidden field that automated bots tend to fill in. Submissions that fill it are dropped. This check runs on our server and does not require any tracking on your device.

We use Supabase to store rent submissions. Data is stored on Supabase servers in accordance with their privacy policy. We do not share data with advertisers, data brokers, or any third party for marketing.

We do not use Google Fonts or any third-party font service. Fonts are loaded from your operating system.

The table below lists everything we hold, what it is for, and how long it lasts. Where a duration is set by our code, the table reads it from that code.

11 of the rows above say that a decision has not been taken. We would rather publish that than publish a number nobody is applying.

Every submission records the version of this policy and of the notice above the submit button that you were shown when you sent it. The current version is October 2026.

What changed in this version: A submission now also holds the kind of home, the rent month, the move-in month, the recent-lease answer, the exact amount in cents, the home size, the special-terms answer and whether you said you had reported this home before. Room reports became a separate dataset. The purposes did not change.

Submissions sent before our notice named paid reports are not used in paid reports. Our code enforces this rule. An export is refused when a submission does not record which notice it was made under. It is also refused when the recorded notice did not mention paid reports.

Submissions sent before we started recording this carry the notice that was in force when they were sent. Where even that cannot be established, they carry no version at all, and they cannot be used in a paid report. The rule above decides for the others: only a submission made under a notice that named paid reports can be used in one.

The N12 and N13 page for Ottawa and Toronto lets you log a notice from your landlord and see whether other renters logged one at the same address, or from the same landlord at another address. It is separate from the rent submission form, and logs are never used in any rent figure.

A log stores the city, the type of notice, the month it was given, when you logged it, which version of the notice above the button you were shown, and up to five codes. Three of the codes are made with a secret key from the street address, the unit, and the landlord's name when you give it, so that two logs at the same address, or under the same landlord name, can be matched. One is made from those and the type and month, so that the same notice logged twice is counted once. One is a scrambled version of your private code, if one was issued. We do not store the address, the unit or the landlord's name as you typed them, and the form does not ask for your name or email.

Anyone who later logs a notice at the same address sees the type of yours, the three-month period it was given in, and whether it was for the same unit and under the same landlord name. Anyone who gives the same landlord name sees how many notices are logged under it in each city, of which type, and the earliest and latest three-month periods, never the address or the exact month. That includes your landlord, if they log a notice at your address or under their own name. The same notice logged again, with or without a landlord name, stays one log and is not changed. No visitor to the site can list logs, or look up an address or a landlord, without logging a notice of their own, and a connection, an address or a landlord name that is used too many times in a short period is refused for a while.

Logs are shown for three years from the month on the notice and are deleted after that by a daily job. A log holds nothing that says who made it, apart from the scrambled private code. We can find logs from their details, such as an address or a landlord's name, but we cannot tell who made one. With your private code you can remove your own log from the N12 and N13 page before it expires; without it, we cannot remove a single log on request. When no code could be issued, the result says so.

Institutions can ask for the paid Ottawa rent report through a request form. It is separate from the rent submission form, and it is not meant for renters.

A request stores what the form asks for: the name of the institution, its type, one contact name and work email, what the report is for, the two statements the form asks for, the language of the form and the date it was sent, and later FairRent's decision, its date and its notes. FairRent reads it to decide whether the institution and its purpose are eligible and to answer. How long it is kept: Kept with FairRent's decision and notes. Nothing deletes it yet, and no retention period has been set.

A request also keeps, for 1 day, a key scrambled from the network address it came from with a secret, so the form can refuse a flood: 3 requests a day from one address, and 50 from all addresses together. The key is emptied from the request at the first request sent after that, or when the report console is next opened if that comes first. The address itself is not stored.

If an access code is issued, we store only a scrambled version of the code, never the code itself, with its last four characters, the institution, its type, the edition it opens, the payment reference, the request it answers, its status, its dates and FairRent's notes. How long it is kept: Kept after it expires or is revoked, as a record of what was delivered. No retention period has been set.

Each build of a report is recorded: when it started, its steps, whether it was forced, the version it made and who started it. A build an institution starts is recorded with the number of its access code, so the record shows when each code was used to build. How long it is kept: Kept with the edition. No retention period has been set.

When a sign-in to the report console or an access code is refused, we keep a record for 1 day: the time, which of the two it was, and a key scrambled from the network address with a secret. Once an address has reached the limit, its further refusals add no record. The address itself is not stored, and nothing that was typed is kept. The record is used only to limit guesses. A record is deleted at the first sign-in attempt after a day, or when the report console is next opened if that comes first.

A signed-in institution's browser keeps an encrypted cookie for up to 7 days, never past the code's expiry, and the console's sign-in lasts 12 hours. A request sent back with a mistake keeps its answers in an encrypted cookie for 15 minutes. In the console, a new access code travels to the next page in an encrypted cookie that lasts 5 minutes at most and is deleted once the code is shown, and the answers of a refused code form are kept in another for 10 minutes at most.

The in-memory count that slows a flood of rent submissions also slows the request form, the access code page and the console's sign-in, each counted on its own.

None of this is ever joined with rent submissions. The report and its free sample hold grouped figures only. The checks behind each version of the report, which are never shown to a buyer or a visitor, also list which rent submissions each published group used, so that a later version cannot be compared with an earlier one to reveal one renter's rent. That list is never sold.

FairRent Canada is a small independent project. We have not yet published the name of the legal operator. When we do, it will appear here.

We have not yet published the name of the person accountable for personal information. When we do, it will appear here.

As of October 2026, no paid report has been sold, no customer or project is listed on our transparency page, and no organisation is named as a partner. We update this line when it changes.

This version dates from October 2026. It adds to what a submission stores: the kind of home, the month the rent is for, the move-in month, the recent-lease answer, the exact amount in cents, the size of the home when you give one, with its unit and whether it was measured, estimated or not sure, whether you said the rent has special terms, and whether you said you had reported this home before. Room reports are now stored separately. The September 2026 version added a new purpose, paid reports and research for eligible institutions, described above. Each of those is a change, not a clarification of the previous policy, and neither applies by itself to submissions made before it. This version also says when a submission is used in an estimate and names the public data it is combined with, from CMHC and Statistics Canada. Those are clarifications: they do not change what submissions may be used for. On 15 October 2026 we added the N12 and N13 notice log, described above, which is separate from the rent submission form. On 16 October 2026 it began to match notices by the landlord's name as well. On 18 October 2026 it began to show the three-month period of a notice rather than its month, to group matches by name per city, to say that anyone who logs at the address or under the name sees the matches, to leave an earlier log unchanged when the same notice is logged again, and to issue a private code with which a renter can remove their own log. On 20 October 2026 we added the request form for the paid Ottawa rent report and its access codes, described above, which are kept apart from rent submissions.