Lighthouse Retail is a point-of-sale, inventory and back-office service for retail businesses. It is operated by 10145947 Canada Inc. ("Lighthouse Retail", "we", "us"), a Canadian company based in Ontario. This policy explains what personal information we handle, why, and what you can ask of us. It follows Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
Who this policy is about
- Businesses that sign up for Lighthouse Retail (our customers), and the owners and staff who use it on their behalf.
- Shoppers: the customers of those businesses. When a business records a shopper's details in Lighthouse Retail (for example a name on a layaway, an email address for a receipt, or a loyalty account), the business decides what it collects and why. The business is in control of that information and responsible for it; we hold and process it only on the business's behalf, as its service provider. If you are a shopper, please contact the business you dealt with first. We will help it answer you.
- Visitors to this website.
What we collect from businesses
- Account details: the owner's name and email address, the business's name, address, contact details and settings, and the sign-in details of the staff accounts the business creates (name, email address or user name, role, and a password or PIN, which we store only in a hashed form we cannot reverse).
- What the business enters or records: products, prices, stock, suppliers, purchase orders, sales, returns, payments, customers and the other records the service keeps for the business. This can include shoppers' personal information, as described above.
- Devices: identifiers of the registers, scanners and store servers a business enrols, so that only enrolled devices can connect, and the record of what each did.
- Server logs: when you use the service, our servers record technical details such as your IP address, the time, the address requested and your browser's description. We use them to keep the service running and secure, and to investigate problems and abuse.
- Diagnostics: the apps can report errors and timings to our own servers to help us fix problems, never to a third party.
- Messages you send us, for example to support.
We do not sell personal information. We do not use it for advertising, we show no advertising, and we use no third-party analytics or tracking.
Sign in with Google and Sign in with Apple
You can sign in with Google or Apple instead of a password, if your account already uses the same verified email address. These buttons never create an account on their own.
- From Google we ask for your basic profile and email address; from Apple, your name and email address. Google's basic profile can also carry a profile picture; we do not keep it.
- We keep only the provider's identifier for you and the email address it gave us, linked to your account, so that we can recognise you next time.
- We never post anything, read your contacts or act on your behalf with Google or Apple.
- If you use Apple's "Hide My Email", we use the relay address Apple gives us and never try to find your real address.
Payments
Card payments in a business's store or online shop are handled by the payment processor the business chooses and contracts with. Card numbers are entered on the processor's own terminal or in the processor's own payment fields; they never reach our servers, and we never store card numbers. We keep what the processor sends back to complete the sale, refund it and print the receipt, such as the card brand, the last four digits and the approval code.
If a business pays us by card, that payment is handled by [the payment processor we use for our own billing], which receives the card details directly. We do not see or store them.
Cookies and browser storage
We do not use cookies for advertising or tracking.
- Signing in keeps a session token in the app or your browser, so that you stay signed in. Signing out ends the session.
- A business's online shop uses cookies to hold the shopper's cart and checkout.
- This website remembers whether you chose the light or dark theme, in your browser's storage. It is never sent to us.
This website loads nothing from other sites: no fonts, scripts, videos or images from third parties.
Where your information is kept
Lighthouse Retail runs on servers in Toronto, Canada, rented from Akamai Technologies (Linode). Our email is handled by our own mail server there. Information travels over encrypted connections (HTTPS).
Backups are made every night. A copy is kept on the server for 14 days, and an encrypted copy is kept with the same provider in [the region of the off-site copies: Washington, DC, United States, until a Canadian region offers this service] for 30 days. The off-site copy is encrypted before it leaves the server, with a key that neither the hosting provider nor that server holds.
Akamai is a United States company. Information held by a service provider, in Canada or elsewhere, can be subject to lawful access by the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of the country where it is held.
The other companies that may receive personal information from us, and only what they need:
- Google and Apple, when you choose to sign in with them (above).
- The payment processor a business connects, under the business's own agreement with it.
- [The payment processor we use for our own billing, once chosen.]
How long we keep it
- Account information and the business's records are kept while the account exists. When a business asks us to delete its account, the account is suspended for a cooling-off period of 14 days, during which the owner can restore it. Then it is deleted.
- Backups are kept for up to 30 days, so information deleted from the service can remain in a backup until that backup expires.
- Server logs are kept for 14 days.
- Account exports a business downloads are kept on our server for 72 hours.
- Messages to support are kept as long as we need them to help you and to keep a record of what was agreed.
How we protect it
Encrypted connections, passwords and PINs stored only as hashes, optional two-factor sign-in and passkeys, each business's data in a database of its own, access to the servers limited to the people who run them, and encrypted backups. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach of our safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify the people affected, the businesses concerned and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as the law requires.
Your rights
Under PIPEDA you can:
- Ask for access to the personal information we hold about you.
- Ask us to correct it if it is wrong or incomplete.
- Withdraw your consent, subject to legal or contractual limits. For example, we cannot run an account without its owner's email address.
- Complain to us, and if you are not satisfied with our answer, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Write to privacy@lighthouseretail.ca. We will answer within 30 days. If you are a shopper, the business you dealt with is responsible for your information; we will pass your request on to it and help it answer.
Our privacy officer is [name or title of the person accountable for privacy], 10145947 Canada Inc., [mailing address], Ontario, Canada.
Children
Lighthouse Retail is a service for businesses and is not meant for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 16 for our own purposes. If you believe a child has given us personal information, write to us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We will update this page when what we do changes, and change the effective date at the top. If a change is significant, we will also tell account owners by email before it takes effect.
Contact
Privacy: privacy@lighthouseretail.ca. Anything else: support@lighthouseretail.ca.