Privacy Policy
Version 1.0. Effective . This policy applies to all use of this site, including document uploads, and is the policy in force today.
PayStub IQ Canada helps people understand Canadian pay stubs and payroll documents. Those documents contain sensitive personal information, so this page sets out exactly what happens to yours: what is collected, where it is processed, how long it is kept, and what you can ask us to do about it.
Who is accountable for your information
The person in charge of the protection of personal information for PayStub IQ Canada is Rocco Clayfield, Founder, Director and Privacy Officer. You can reach the Privacy Officer at hello@paystubiq.com. The Privacy Officer is responsible for our compliance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, for users in Quebec, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector.
Where your document is processed
Your document is processed outside Canada. When you upload a file, it is sent to our application servers, operated by Vercel Inc. in the United States (US-East region), and from there to Anthropic PBC in the United States, whose model reads the document to generate your explanation. The file is held in memory for the seconds it takes to produce your report and is then discarded.
Information processed in the United States may be accessible to United States authorities under the laws of that country. If you would rather not have a document processed outside Canada, do not upload it — every explanatory page, the payroll glossary and all seven calculators work without uploading anything, and the calculators run entirely in your own browser.
Documents you upload
You control what you send. Upload only documents you are authorised to use. Your document is used for one purpose: producing your plain-English explanation. It is not used to train any model, not shared with anyone else, not sold, and not retained once your report is returned.
Social Insurance Numbers are never extracted. The document reader is instructed never to return a Social Insurance Number, and any value matching the SIN format is stripped from the report before it reaches your screen. A SIN never appears in your report and is never stored. Your document is transmitted as an image, so the reader can still see whatever is on the page — if you would rather your SIN were never sent at all, cover it before you upload. The same applies to anything else on the page you do not want read.
This report is produced by automated processing
Your explanation is generated entirely by automated processing. No person at PayStub IQ Canada reads your document or reviews your report. The system works only from what is visible on the page you uploaded, and it can misread a figure. If you think a report got something wrong, email hello@paystubiq.com and a person will look at your question — we will ask you to describe the issue rather than to send the document again.
Information you provide directly
If you email us, we collect your email address and whatever you choose to put in the message, and we use it only to answer you. We do not sell personal information and we never pass an address to a third party for their own marketing.
We run one mailing list: the payroll rate-change list. Joining it requires an unticked express-consent checkbox with the purpose written beside it, as Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation requires. We record the address, the date and time consent was given, and the page it was given on, because CASL puts the burden of proving consent on the sender. The list is used for one thing — telling you when a Canadian payroll figure actually changes — and every message carries a working unsubscribe link. One click ends it. Your address is then kept only on a suppression list, so that we can honour the unsubscribe and for no other purpose.
We do not use the list for advertising, we do not rent or sell it, and we do not profile you against it. If the list is ever discontinued, the addresses on it are deleted rather than transferred.
How long we keep information
- Uploaded documents: not retained. The file exists in server memory only for as long as it takes to generate your report, and is discarded when the response is returned.
- Your report: not retained. It is returned to your browser and is not saved on our side. Closing the tab loses it.
- Server access logs: request metadata such as IP address, retained by our hosting provider for a short operational period for security and abuse prevention. They never contain the contents of your document.
- Email correspondence: retained for up to 24 months from the date of last contact, then deleted.
Analytics and cookies
We use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views and a small set of interaction events (which buttons are used, how far pages are read, which official sources people follow). It is configured not to use cookies, does not collect information that identifies you personally, and does not follow you across other websites. We set no advertising or profiling cookies, and we run no third-party ad or social tracking scripts. If that ever changes, this page will say so and a consent control will be in place before the script loads.
Security and breach response
The site is served over HTTPS with HSTS, a restrictive Content-Security-Policy and standard hardening headers. Uploads are size-limited and format-limited, and are never written to disk. We do not claim long-term encrypted storage, because we do not store your documents at all.
If a breach of security safeguards involving personal information creates a real risk of significant harm, we will report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, notify affected individuals as soon as feasible, and keep a record of the breach as required by law. Quebec users will be notified in accordance with the Quebec private-sector privacy legislation.
Your rights
You can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or withdraw consent to any processing. Because uploaded documents are never stored, in practice there is usually nothing held about you beyond any email you have sent us. Write to the Privacy Officer at hello@paystubiq.com and we will respond within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Quebec residents may instead complain to the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec.
Children
This site is intended for people who receive a pay stub. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 14.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the version number and effective date at the top of this page change with it. Material changes to how uploaded documents are handled will be announced on the upload page before they take effect.