Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

NearLoad Connect is an online load board operated by NearLoad Connect ("NearLoad Connect", "we", "us"). This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who sees it, where it is kept, for how long, and the choices and rights you have. It follows British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act, Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act for information collected in Alberta, and Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

NearLoad Connect is released in stages. Where this policy describes a feature your business does not have yet, we collect nothing for it until it does.

Our privacy officer is the Privacy Officer, at info@nearloadconnect.ca. Write to them with any question, request or complaint about your personal information.

2. What we collect

We collect only what NearLoad Connect needs to work. Members are businesses, but the people who sign in for them, drivers, and sole proprietors' business details are personal information, and we treat them that way.

Visitors to our public pages

Our public pages set no cookies and run no analytics or advertising trackers. Like every website, our servers record each request's network address, browser and the page asked for, which we keep for security for 30 days.

Everyone who signs in

• Your name and email address (which you confirm).
• Your preferred units, and your alert settings, with when you changed them and a record of each alert we sent you.
• Your password, stored only in a form that cannot be turned back into it; the public part of any passkey; and your second sign-in factor's secret, encrypted.
• Records of your sign-ins: when, from which network address and on which browser.
• Your role in your business, and which versions of our terms and this policy you accepted, and when. An account owner's confirmation that they are 19 or older with authority to bind the business is recorded with it.

Your business

• Its legal and operating names, business address, contact phone and email, website and email domain.
• Its registration numbers, including a carrier's National Safety Code number, and whether it is incorporated.
• The evidence for its checks, such as insurance certificates and authority documents, and the record of each check: what was checked, against what source, by whom, when, the result and any expiry.
• For a carrier with bookings, the details Canada's Income Tax Act requires for our yearly report of carriers to the Canada Revenue Agency: its business number and its legal name and registered office or, for a sole proprietor, the owner's name, home address and date of birth.
• If the person who set it up came to sign up from a link tagged with a campaign, such as one of our ads, that campaign's source, medium and name, never which pages they opened. Until the business is set up, these are kept with that person's account.

Your work on NearLoad Connect

• Loads and availability you post, and who in your business posted each one.
• Offers, counteroffers, awards, bookings and cancellations, and messages between members.
• Status updates and exceptions, with the time on the device and the time we received them, and their notes and photos.
• Bills of lading and proof of delivery photos.
• Saved searches, reports and cases, and a carrier's reports of how a shipper paid, with the shipper's reply.

Drivers

A carrier's driver has an account like any member. We record the status updates, exceptions and photos they capture on the bookings they are assigned.

We do not collect your location. The app never reads your phone's position, and we remove location and other hidden details from photos when they are uploaded.

People who receive a delivery

When a driver records proof of delivery, we keep the name the recipient gives, whether the goods were received in good order or the exceptions noted, and the time. We ask drivers to tell recipients this.

People who are invited, reported or who contact us

• When an account owner invites someone, we keep that email address for the time section 7 gives for invitations.
• Reports, cases and copyright notices may name people. We keep them with the case.
• When you email us, we keep the message to answer it.

What we never collect

Identity documents of people (such as driver's licences or passports), social insurance numbers, payment card details, your location, or biometric information.

3. Why we use it

• To run NearLoad Connect: show listings, match loads with vehicles, record what members agree and do, and send the messages and alerts members ask for.
• To show each member who it is dealing with.
• To keep, for both businesses on a booking, the carrier's report of how the shipper paid for it and the shipper's reply, and to show carriers how an incorporated shipper has paid others, with that reply.
• To check businesses' identity, authority and insurance, and show labels from those checks.
• To keep NearLoad Connect secure and prevent fraud and abuse, and to handle reports and cases.
• To answer your questions and requests.
• To meet our legal duties, such as reporting each year to the Canada Revenue Agency the carriers that completed bookings through NearLoad Connect, with the amounts agreed for their bookings in each quarter, and sending each carrier its copy, as Part XX of the Income Tax Act requires.
• To count things, such as listings by lane or vehicle type, or the businesses each of our campaigns brought, in statistics that identify no member or person.

We do not sell personal information, build advertising profiles, or put third-party analytics or advertising tools in the app.

4. Who sees what

Anyone, without signing in

The public preview shows, for open loads and availability: the lane (origin and destination city and province, never a street address or postal code), dates, vehicle type, size and weight, whether it is a partial or full load, urgency, how long ago it was posted, and the poster's current check labels. It never shows the poster's name, contact details, exact addresses, reference numbers, price, notes, documents, offers, or anything about a person.

Other members

Signed-in members see listing details and the business identity of the member who posted them: legal and operating names, business address and registration numbers, and we record which businesses were shown it. A member that could take up the listing (a carrier looking at a load, or a shipper looking at a vehicle) also sees the poster's contact phone, email and website, and the two parties to a booking see each other's. The two parties to an offer, booking or conversation see what each of them did on it, such as the terms, each step and its time, and the messages, each under the name of the business that acted. The people who act for a business, such as the driver assigned to a booking, are named only to their own business and to NearLoad Connect staff. Insurance and authority documents are seen only by the business's account owner and NearLoad Connect staff.

A carrier's report of how a shipper paid for a booking is seen by the two businesses on that booking, with the shipper's reply, but not by their drivers. Other carriers see only counts of these reports about a shipper that is incorporated, from the last 12 months and once at least 3 bookings have been reported by at least 2 carriers, with the shipper's reply. About a shipper that is not incorporated, other carriers see none of these reports, their counts or a reply. Carriers also see the number of bookings each shipper has completed.

These reports and replies, like everything members post, are the statements of the members who write them. NearLoad Connect does not check or endorse them, and the member who writes one is responsible for it (Terms of Use, section 10).

People in your business

Each person sees what their role allows: the account owner manages the business's members and documents, and is the only one in a carrier who sees its tax reporting details; a driver sees only the bookings they are assigned.

NearLoad Connect staff

Our moderators and administrators see what they need to check businesses, handle cases and run NearLoad Connect. They read messages between members only when a message is part of a case. Only our administrators see carriers' tax reporting details.

Service providers

The providers in section 5 process information for us under contract, only to provide their service, except the push service of your browser's maker, which delivers alerts to you under its own terms with you; we have no contract with it, which is why each alert is encrypted and carries only a listing's public details or who a message is from.

When the law requires it, or a sale

We disclose personal information when the law requires or allows it, such as to answer a court order, or to protect someone's safety or prevent fraud. Each year we give the Canada Revenue Agency the report of carriers the Income Tax Act requires, with each carrier's tax reporting details and the amounts agreed for its bookings, through the accountant who files it for us. Before a sale, a prospective buyer may see the information it needs to decide whether to go ahead, under an agreement that limits its use to that decision and requires it to return or destroy the information if the sale does not proceed. If NearLoad Connect is sold or transferred, the new operator receives the information it needs to keep running NearLoad Connect, under an agreement to use it only for the purposes in this policy, and we tell you.

5. Where it is kept, and who processes it

• Amazon Web Services stores and runs NearLoad Connect in its Canada (Central) region in Montreal, with backup copies in its Canada West region in Calgary. It also sends our email from Canada.
• Pages reach you through Amazon Web Services' content delivery network and firewall, which receive each request at the Amazon Web Services location nearest you, to deliver the page and turn away attacks. That location is usually in Canada or the United States. We use only its locations in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Europe, Israel and Türkiye, though Amazon Web Services may now and then answer from another of its locations, all listed by country at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features. The firewall keeps a sample of the requests it sees, with the network address each came from, for three hours, and may keep it in the United States.
• Address search and maps use Amazon Location Service. The address or place you type, and the two ends of each route drawn on a map, are sent to it, and may be passed to its map data provider for processing in the United States, Australia, Germany, Ireland, Japan or Singapore, the countries Amazon Web Services lists for its map data providers.
• If you turn on push alerts, they are delivered through the push service run by your browser's maker. Apple and Mozilla process them in the United States; Google and Microsoft in the United States and the other countries where they have data centres, listed at datacenters.google/locations and in Microsoft's privacy statement. The alert is encrypted on the way and carries only a listing's public details or who a message is from. You can turn each alert off in the app or in your browser.
• Email you send to us is kept in our business mailbox, provided by Google Workspace, which may store and process it in the United States and the other countries where Google has data centres, listed at datacenters.google/locations.
• Membership is free, so no payment processor holds any of your information.

Information processed outside Canada is subject to the laws of the country where it is, and may be accessed by its authorities. Our Privacy Officer, at info@nearloadconnect.ca, can give you this information in writing and answers any question about how these service providers outside Canada collect, use, disclose or store your information.

6. Cookies and storage on your device

The app sets the cookies it needs to sign you in and keep you signed in: a session cookie, and short-lived cookies during a second-factor or passkey sign-in. Three more remember things for you on that device: your last search, without its places, for 30 days; when you last opened each of your saved searches, so the app can count what is new since, for 90 days; and a membership notice you chose to hide, for 12 months. It sets no other cookie, and our public pages set none.

The app keeps a copy of its own screens on your device so it opens without signal, and keeps a driver's status updates and photos on the phone until they are sent.

7. How long we keep it

• Your account: while it is open, and 1 year after it closes.
• Sign-in records: until 30 days after the session ends.
• Invitations: the email address until 30 days after the invitation ends, unless it is accepted.
• Offers, bookings, messages, bills of lading, proof of delivery and carriers' reports of how a shipper paid: 3 years after the load is completed. After that the records are anonymized, so nothing in them identifies a person.
• Loads and availability you post: 3 years after the listing ends (completed, withdrawn, covered or expired; one saved but never posted, once its pickup time and its last change are 3 years past), then anonymized the same way: the addresses, notes and reference numbers are removed and the places kept only to the town.
• A shipper's reply to those reports: 3 years after it is replaced or the business's account closes, then anonymized.
• Evidence for checks: while the check is current, and 1 year after.
• Reports and cases, with the copies of any messages attached to a case: 3 years after the case closes. A decision about you, such as a suspension or a refused check, is kept at least 1 year after it is made, as the law requires.
• Billing records, if you ever pay us: as long as Canadian tax and corporate law requires (6 or 7 years).
• A carrier's tax reporting details, and each yearly report to the Canada Revenue Agency: 6 years after the end of the last year a report used them, as the Income Tax Act requires.
• Records of your alert settings and the alerts we sent you, of the businesses shown your business identity on a listing, of staff actions and of security events: 3 years.
• Server logs: 30 days. Backups: 35 days.

We keep information longer only when the law requires it or a dispute or legal claim needs it.

8. How we protect it

Information is encrypted in transit and where it is stored. Access is limited by role, both in the app and among our staff, and staff sign in with a second factor. Our logs record identifiers, never names, contact details or message contents. When you choose a password, we check it against a public list of passwords exposed in breaches by sending the first five characters of a code derived from it to Have I Been Pwned; your password itself, and anything that identifies you, never leave our servers.

9. Your choices and rights

• Access and correction: you can ask our privacy officer for the personal information we hold about you, how we have used it and who we have given it to, and ask us to correct it. Write to info@nearloadconnect.ca. We answer within 30 days, or tell you within that time if the law lets us take longer and why.
• Withdrawing consent: you can withdraw your consent at any time by telling us, with reasonable notice. We tell you what that means first: NearLoad Connect cannot work without the information in section 2, so withdrawing it usually means closing your account. We keep what the law or the retention periods in section 7 require.
• Alerts: you can turn each alert on or off, by channel, in your account settings.
• Closing your account: unless your business is suspended, the account owner can close your business's account in the app at any time, after withdrawing its open listings and finishing or cancelling the offers and bookings under way. A person who leaves a business keeps their name on the records of what they did, for the periods in section 7.

10. If there is a breach

If a breach of security puts your personal information at real risk of significant harm, we tell you, and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as soon as we can, as well as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta if the information was collected in Alberta, and we may also tell the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia. We keep a record of every breach for at least 24 months.

11. Complaints

Please write to our privacy officer first, at info@nearloadconnect.ca. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (oipc.bc.ca), the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca) or, about information collected in Alberta, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (oipc.ab.ca).

12. Changes to this policy

Each version of this policy has a date. When we change it, we tell account owners by email, and an account owner is asked to accept the new version for their business the next time they use the app.