Privacy

The short version

HFX Traffic has no accounts, no sign-in and nothing to sell. Reading the app sends us nothing you typed. Everything we do keep is described below, and none of it is shared or sold.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which screens people use, so we know what to fix first. It sets cookies and reports your rough location and device type to Google. Your IP address is anonymised by Google before it is stored. Google's own privacy policy applies to that data: policies.google.com/privacy.

Because most of this app changes what is on screen without changing the web address, we also tell Google Analytics when you open a screen inside a page: a bus route, a camera, an alert. This is recorded the same way a page is, as the name of the screen and nothing more. It adds no new information about you, and there is no identifier in it.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal or you block third-party scripts, analytics simply does not load and the app works the same.

Analytics only runs if you accepted it when you first arrived. You can change that here, at any time, and we will ask again next time you open the site.

Feedback and "notify me"

When you send a bug report, a comment, or ask to be told when the app is back up, we store what you typed, the email address if you gave one, which screen you were on, your browser's user agent string, and a salted hash of your IP address. The hash exists only to stop one person flooding the form; it cannot be turned back into your address.

Feedback is read by the people who run the app and by nobody else. It is never shown to other visitors. The hashed IP and user agent are deleted after 30 days. Bug reports and comments are deleted 12 months after they were sent. "Notify me" addresses are deleted 30 days after the launch notice goes out, or on request at any time.

Public notices we republish

Some of what the app shows arrives as email: road closure notices, water outages, transit advisories and the like, sent to us by the organisations that issue them. We republish the notice, not the sender. Phone numbers, email addresses and the contact lines that carry them are removed from a notice before it is published.

We use a language model (Anthropic's API) to tidy the wording of some notices. The text sent to it has those contact details removed first, and nothing from the feedback form is sent to it.

Server logs and backups

Like every web server, ours writes a log line for each request, and that line includes your IP address. The logs are kept for about two weeks and then deleted.

We keep backups of the site's data, including the feedback table, for a limited number of deploys, so something you asked us to delete can persist in a backup for a short while afterwards.

Location

The "find me" button on the bus map asks your browser for your location. That happens on your device and is used only to centre the map. It is not sent to us.

Maps and data sources

Map tiles are loaded from Stadia Maps, and traffic camera images from the Province of Nova Scotia and the Halifax Harbour Bridges. Loading those images tells those services your IP address, as loading any image from any server does. Bus, ferry, flight, closure and alert data is fetched by our own server and republished, so reading it sends nothing to the original sources.

Local storage

The app remembers a few things on your own device, such as whether you have seen the beta notice, your last map position and your chosen units. This stays in your browser and is never sent to us. Clearing your browser's site data removes it.

Contact

Questions, or want something you sent us deleted? Email hfxtraffic@haligonia.ca and we will sort it out.