Privacy Policy

What we collect, why, and what we cannot delete. · Beta. Operated by pending registration.

This is a calculator, not an adviser. Read the full disclaimer.

1. Scope and Who Is Responsible

This Privacy Policy explains how personal information is collected, used, stored, and protected by Resonate Invoicing (referred to in this document as "Resonate," "we," "us," or "our").

Resonate is currently operated by <span class="pending-operator" title="Legal entity registration is pending">pending registration</span>, which is pending registration. Resonate is a pre-launch, beta-stage software service managed by a single-person operator based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

To understand your privacy rights, it is important to understand our two distinct roles under Canadian data protection law:

• For your account and business profile data: When you register for Resonate as an independent film or audiovisual technician, we collect your personal contact, profile, and billing information. In this context, we act as the organization responsible for your personal information (often called a data controller).
• For your clients' data: When you input information into Resonate about the productions, producers, venues, and clients you bill—such as their names, addresses, and rates—you remain the organization in control of that information. Resonate acts strictly as a service provider (data processor), storing and organizing that data entirely on your instructions so you can create and manage your invoices.

2. What We Collect

We collect only the information necessary to provide you with an invoicing tool tailored to film and audiovisual crew work. This includes:

• Account Data: Your name, email address, and authentication credentials. Account authentication is handled through an instance of Authentik, an open-source identity provider hosted on our own server; your plaintext password is never visible to us or stored anywhere on our systems.
• Business Profile Data: Information you choose to display on your invoices, such as your union or guild affiliation, your standard day and hourly rates, your business name, and your Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) registration number.
• Records You Enter: The project records you create, including call sheets or shift dates, regular hours, overtime (OT) tiers, kit and gear rental line items, completed invoice documents, and the names, billing addresses, and contact details of your production clients.
• Payment Status Metadata: Information transmitted to us by our payment partner, Helcim, confirming the status of your subscription payments. This includes transaction amounts, dates, subscription renewal dates, and invoice reference numbers. We never see, process, or store full credit or debit card numbers.
• Support Communications: Records of messages, bug reports, and correspondence you send to our contact addresses ([email protected] and [email protected]).
• Minimal Technical Logs: Routine operational logs required to keep the server functional, debug errors, and prevent malicious attacks. Resonate does not log your clients' IP addresses or track your end clients when they view an invoice.

3. What We Do NOT Collect

We believe that data you do not collect cannot be compromised. Resonate explicitly avoids collecting:

• Payment Card Information: We do not collect, view, transmit, or store credit card numbers, debit card numbers, expiration dates, or Card Verification Value (CVV) security codes.
• Government Identification: We never ask for or collect your Social Insurance Number (SIN), driver's license, or passport information.
• Banking Credentials: We do not collect online banking usernames, passwords, or direct financial account login tokens.
• Unsolicited Client Data: We do not scrape, purchase, or cross-reference data regarding the clients you bill beyond the specific fields you type into your invoices.
• Advertising and Behavioural Tracking Data: We do not collect behavioural advertising profiles. We do not use third-party marketing pixels, advertising networks, or third-party web trackers.

4. Why We Process Information and Legal Bases Under PIPEDA

Under the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), organizations may only collect, use, or disclose personal information for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances. We process your data under the following legal bases:

• Knowledge and Consent: When you sign up for Resonate, create an account, or subscribe to updates, you provide express consent for us to handle your personal information for those specific purposes. You may withdraw this consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual restrictions.
• Contractual Necessity: We process your account data, project shifts, gear lines, and billing records because doing so is strictly necessary to deliver the service you signed up for—namely, producing accurate invoices and keeping track of your business income.
• Legitimate Business Operations: We process minimal technical logs and communication records to maintain server stability, monitor system performance, fix software defects, and secure your account against unauthorized access.
• Legal and Regulatory Obligations: We retain transaction records, invoice copies, and tax-relevant documentation to comply with mandatory Canadian tax laws and federal reporting requirements.

5. Governing Privacy Law (PIPEDA)

Resonate operates in Ontario, Canada. Because we are a private-sector organization collecting, using, and disclosing personal information in the course of commercial activity, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) governs our handling of personal information.

PIPEDA applies directly to our operations because the Province of Ontario does not have its own general, private-sector privacy legislation. Unlike British Columbia, Alberta, or Quebec, Ontario has not enacted private-sector privacy legislation declared substantially similar to the federal statute. As a result, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) oversees our privacy practices.

6. Ontario Health-Sector Law (PHIPA) Note

Ontario has a sector-specific health privacy statute called the Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004 (PHIPA). Resonate is an invoicing tool for film and television crew members, not a medical clinic, digital health application, or health information custodian. PHIPA is not our governing privacy statute.

However, film and AV work involves physical labour, turnaround rules, and occasional injury or medical leave. We ask you not to enter personal health information—such as medical diagnoses, doctor's notes, or detailed injury descriptions—into shift memos, invoice line items, or client notes. If you inadvertently include sensitive personal notes in your records, they are protected by our baseline database access controls and treated as confidential business information, but Resonate is not intended or configured for medical record storage.

7. Data Residency and Cross-Border Transfers

We keep your core operational data inside Canadian borders:

• Primary Hosting: Resonate runs on a self-hosted Proxmox virtualized server physically located in Ontario, Canada. We do not use offshore public cloud compute regions for our core application or database.
• Backups: Encrypted offsite backups are stored on infrastructure physically located within Canada.
• Direct Transfers: We do not directly sell, rent, or transfer your personal information outside of Canada.

Sub-Processor Cross-Border Disclosure

While our application, database, and primary file storage (powered by self-hosted MinIO object storage) remain in Ontario, certain specialized third-party services may involve international processing:

• Helcim: Our payment processor is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and processes payments within Canadian financial channels.
• Resend: We use Resend to deliver transactional emails (such as password resets and account confirmations). Resend's delivery infrastructure may route, process, or temporarily store email messages on servers located in the United States.

When data passes through United States infrastructure, it becomes subject to foreign legal jurisdictions, including lawful access requests by foreign law enforcement agencies under applicable foreign laws. We maintain an up-to-date registry of all third-party service providers on our sub-processors page at /legal/subprocessors.

8. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)

We comply strictly with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). We do not send unsolicited Commercial Electronic Messages (CEMs):

• Express Consent Required: We only send commercial or promotional emails if you have affirmatively opted in. Our signup and contact forms never use pre-checked boxes; consent requires an explicit, intentional action on your part.
• Consent Auditing: When you give consent, our system captures and stores the exact text you agreed to, alongside an automated, verifiable timestamp.
• Identification and Unsubscribe: Every commercial message we send clearly identifies Resonate, displays our contact email ([email protected]), and includes a working, single-click unsubscribe link.
• 10-Day Rule: We honour all unsubscribe requests immediately through automated systems, and in all cases within the ten (10) business days required by CASL.
• No List Buying or Scraping: We never purchase, rent, trade, or scrape email lists, and our systems do not allow bulk imports of purchased contact databases.

9. Financial Data Handling

Subscription payments for Resonate and future invoice payment features are processed through Helcim, an independent Canadian payment processor based in Calgary, Alberta.

• Helcim Hosted Checkout: When you enter payment details, you do so directly inside a secure interface hosted by Helcim. Card data is sent straight from your web browser to Helcim's PCI-compliant vault.
• Zero Cardholder Data on Our Servers: Your credit card number, expiration date, and CVV code never enter, cross, or reside on Resonate servers.
• What We Store: Our database receives and retains only the operational transaction metadata needed to confirm your account status: the transaction date, the amount billed, the subscription plan interval, the Helcim transaction ID, and the card's last four digits (used solely to help you identify which card you used on your receipts).
• Independent Merchant Settlement: When client invoice take-payment functionality becomes available in a future phase, payments made by your production clients will settle directly into your own Helcim merchant account. Resonate does not hold, pool, escrow, or transmit your clients' money.

10. Your Right to Your Data

You retain full ownership of the data you input into Resonate. Under Canadian privacy legislation, you have the following rights:

• Right of Access: You can review all personal information we hold about you. You do not need to file a formal legal request to get your work records: Resonate provides on-demand self-service exports directly within the application, allowing you to download your entire database history at any time in standard formats (CSV spreadsheets, PDF invoice files, expense receipts, and structured, machine-readable JSON files).
• Right to Correction: You may update, correct, or amend your profile details, business numbers, rates, and past invoices at any time directly through the user interface, or by emailing us if you require manual corrections.
• Right to Withdraw Consent: You may withdraw your consent for discretionary data processing at any time by updating your account settings or contacting [email protected].
• Right to Complain: If you feel we have not handled your personal information in accordance with Canadian law, you have the right to file an inquiry or complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC).

11. Deletion and the Honest Carve-Out

We cannot fully delete everything, and here is exactly why.

When you choose to delete your Resonate account, we purge your active profile, login credentials, and working database records within thirty (30) days. However, we cannot and will not promise that every single trace of transactional history disappears instantly, because doing so would violate Canadian tax law.

Under Section 230 of the federal Income Tax Act (Canada), any person or business carrying on commercial activity in Canada must keep records and books of account—including invoices, receipts, and supporting transaction documents—for six (6) years from the end of the last taxation year to which the records relate. Furthermore, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has statutory authority to require businesses to keep transactional records for up to seven (7) years in certain assessment situations.

Because Resonate generates legal invoices, records HST line items, and maintains receipts for business subscriptions, we are legally required to maintain supporting audit trails for our own corporate taxation and revenue reporting.

Here is how we handle deletion requests transparently:

1. Immediate Operational Purge: Within thirty (30) days of your deletion request, your Authentik login identity is destroyed, your active workspace is permanently removed, and you will receive no further communications from us.
2. Tax-Record Segregation: Invoices, payment confirmations, and transaction logs that form part of required tax books are extracted from active operations and placed into a locked, access-controlled archive.
3. Strict Isolation: This archived tax subset is completely isolated. It is never used for product development, marketing, or business analysis. It is held solely for presentation to the Canada Revenue Agency in the event of an official tax audit or statutory demand.
4. Final Destruction: As soon as the statutory six-to-seven-year tax retention window closes for a given taxation year, those archived records are permanently, securely deleted.

We believe in stating this requirement clearly rather than hiding permanent tax obligations behind misleading "delete everything instantly" marketing claims.

12. Breach Notification

Under the Breach of Security Safeguards Regulations (SOR/2018-64) under PIPEDA, Canadian organizations are legally required to notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and affected individuals "as soon as feasible" whenever a security incident presents a "real risk of significant harm" (RROSH). Significant harm includes bodily harm, humiliation, damage to reputation or relationships, loss of employment, financial loss, identity theft, or negative effects on credit records.

Our internal commitment is stricter than the baseline statutory standard:

• Our 72-Hour Target: Resonate operates under an internal policy target to notify the Privacy Commissioner and affected account holders within 72 hours of confirming any security incident that involves a real risk of significant harm.
• Direct Notification: If your personal information is compromised in a breach posing a real risk of harm, we will notify you directly by email. The notification will describe the nature of the breach, the specific data elements involved, the measures we have taken to contain the incident, and concrete steps you can take to mitigate potential harm.
• Mandatory Breach Register: In accordance with federal law, we record and maintain a secure register of every security safeguard incident—regardless of whether it meets the RROSH threshold—for a minimum of twenty-four (24) months.

13. Retention Schedule

We retain records only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which they were collected or to satisfy statutory obligations.

Data Category	Retention Period	Disposition Method / Notes
Account & Profile Data	Active life of account + 30 days	Purged permanently from active systems upon account closure or deletion request.
Invoices & Financial Records	6 years from the end of the applicable tax year (up to 7 years if requested by the CRA)	Segregated to a locked, access-controlled archive to satisfy s. 230 of the Income Tax Act; destroyed once the window expires.
Application & Server Logs	Short rolling window (typically 14 to 30 days)	Automatically overwritten on a continuous schedule; logs contain no end-client IP addresses.
Encrypted System Backups	Rolling cycle (up to 90 days)	Encrypted server snapshots overwritten systematically as backup cycles rotate.
Consent & Unsubscribe Records	Duration of processing + limitation period following withdrawal	Retained verbatim with timestamps as legal proof of CASL compliance.

14. Sub-Processors

We rely on a limited number of specialized service providers to help run Resonate. A complete, up-to-date directory of our sub-processors, their roles, and their data locations is maintained at /legal/subprocessors.

• Notice of Changes: If we intend to add or replace a sub-processor that handles personal information, we will post notice on our website and update the sub-processor directory at least thirty (30) days before the change takes effect.
• Your Right to Object: If you object to the appointment of a new sub-processor, you have the right to export your complete data archive (in CSV, PDF, and JSON formats) and close your account without penalty before the change takes effect.

15. Security Safeguards

We implement technical and organizational security measures designed to protect your personal information against accidental loss, unauthorized access, destruction, use, or disclosure:

• Encryption in Transit: All traffic between your web browser, our web servers, and third-party APIs is encrypted using current Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols.
• Encryption at Rest: All operational databases, self-hosted MinIO object storage volumes, and offsite system backups are stored on encrypted disks.
• Database-Level Tenant Isolation: We enforce tenant separation at the database level. Queries are strictly scoped to the authenticated user's organization identifier, preventing records from bleeding between different crew members' accounts.
• Principle of Least Privilege: Server administration access is limited strictly to the operator and guarded by multi-factor authentication.
• Payment Isolation: We keep our systems isolated from payment card data by delegating all cardholder data collection to Helcim's hosted payment screens.
• No False Certifications: We do not claim SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other enterprise third-party compliance certifications that a pre-launch, single-person beta product does not hold. We rely on sound, peer-reviewed open-source components (such as Proxmox, Authentik, and MinIO), careful configuration, and documented incident processes.

16. Children's Privacy

Resonate Invoicing is a business software tool built exclusively for adult audiovisual technicians, camera crew, lighting specialists, and creative contractors. It is not intended for, marketed to, or designed for minors. We do not knowingly collect, request, or maintain personal information from individuals under eighteen (18) years of age. If we learn that an individual under 18 has submitted personal information to our platform, we will delete that information immediately.

17. Contact and Complaints

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, wish to access or correct your personal data, or want to raise a concern about how your information is handled, please contact our privacy operator directly:

• Privacy Inquiries: [email protected]
• General Support: [email protected]
• Website: resonatedemo.ca

If you are not satisfied with our response to a privacy concern, you have the right to contact the federal supervisory authority responsible for enforcing PIPEDA:

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) Website: priv.gc.ca