Privacy Policy
Effective October 14, 2026
This policy explains what personal information GTASearch collects, why, and what control you have over it. We follow Canada’s federal privacy law (PIPEDA) and collect only what the service needs to work.
What we collect
- Account information: your name, email address, a hashed version of your password (we never store the password itself), and an optional phone number if you add one.
- Sign in with Google: if you use it, Google shares your name and email with us. We never see your Google password.
- Listings: the titles, descriptions, prices, photos, city, and neighbourhood you post — all of which are public by design. An optional postal code, if you provide one, is never shown publicly; it exists only to support distance-based sorting.
- Technical basics: session cookies to keep you signed in, a short-lived cookie that stops repeated page refreshes from inflating view counts, and standard server logs (IP address, browser type) used for security and abuse prevention, including rate limiting.
We do not sell personal information to anyone.
Advertising
GTASearch shows ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. You can opt out of personalized advertising in Google’s Ads Settings, or opt out of many third-party vendors’ cookies at aboutads.info. See how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
How we use it
- To operate your account and display your listings.
- To let buyers and sellers communicate about listings.
- To send transactional email only — password resets and, in future, listing-expiry reminders. No marketing email without separate, explicit consent.
- To prevent fraud, spam, and abuse, and to moderate content.
Who processes it for us
Like nearly every website, we rely on a small set of service providers that process data on our behalf, under their own security programs: Vercel (hosting), Supabase (database), Cloudinary (photo storage), Google (optional sign-in and advertising), and Resend (transactional email). Payment card details for boost purchases, when offered, are handled entirely by Stripe — card numbers never touch our servers. Some providers store data outside Canada (typically in the United States).
How long we keep it
- Listings expire after 90 days and stop being publicly visible.
- Deleted listings are hidden immediately and purged from our systems on a periodic schedule.
- Account information is kept while your account exists. To close your account, contact us (below) and we will remove your personal information within 30 days, except records we must keep for legal, security, or fraud-prevention reasons.
Your choices and rights
- You can edit your name and phone number in your dashboard.
- You can delete any of your listings at any time.
- You can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it.
- If you believe we have mishandled your information, you may also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Security
Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes; password-reset links are single-use, expire within an hour, and are stored hashed; all traffic is encrypted with HTTPS; and every change to a listing is checked server-side against the account that owns it. No system is perfectly secure, but we build with that assumption rather than against it.
Children
GTASearch is not directed to children and may not be used by anyone under the age of majority in their province.
Changes and contact
Material changes to this policy will be posted here with a new effective date. Questions or requests: support@gtasearch.com. See also our Terms of Service.