1. Who we are
PawMaple (“PawMaple”, “we”, “us”) is a mobile application published by ZeasDesign, a sole proprietorship registered in Ontario, Canada (Business Identification Number 1001474674), owned and operated by Henry Zeas.
For the purposes of Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and equivalent provincial legislation, ZeasDesign is the organization accountable for the personal information described in this policy. Our privacy contact is listed in section 16.
2. What we collect
2.1 Information you give us
| Category | Examples | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Account | Email address; a password you choose, or an Apple ID token if you use Sign in with Apple. Optionally your name, phone number, street address, postal code, province or state, and country. | Only if you create an account |
| Pet profile | Pet name, species (dog or cat), breed, sex, birthday, photos. | Yes — this is the product |
| Health records | Vaccines and dates, medications and dosages, parasite treatments, weight logs, medical conditions, allergies, free-form notes, appointments. | Optional, entered by you |
| Veterinary contacts | Clinic name, phone number, address, notes about your primary vet. | Optional |
| Expenses | Amounts, dates, merchants, categories, currency, budget goals, and receipt photographs you choose to scan. | Optional |
| AI conversations | The questions you type into the vet assistant, and its answers. | Optional |
| Support | Anything you write to us by email, plus a diagnostics block (app version, build number, device model, iOS version, whether you are signed in) that the app appends when you use the in-app support link. | Only if you contact us |
2.2 Information collected automatically
- Crash and diagnostic data. If a crash occurs, we may receive an anonymised crash report (stack trace, device model, OS version) to fix the fault. It contains no pet records.
- Basic technical data on the website. Your IP address and browser user-agent reach our web server as part of any HTTP request. Where we store them with a form submission, the IP is stored only as an irreversible hash used for abuse prevention.
- Subscription status. Apple tells the app whether your subscription is active. Apple does not give us your payment details.
3. Why we collect it — and our lawful basis
| Purpose | Basis |
|---|---|
| Provide the app | Performance of our agreement with you (the Terms of Use). Without your pet's data there is no record to show you. |
| Reminders | Your consent, given when you allow notifications and set a reminder. |
| AI features | Your consent, given each time you choose to scan a photo, scan a receipt, or ask the vet assistant. |
| Cloud backup and sync | Performance of our agreement with you. PawMaple requires an account, and your records are backed up to it automatically so that a lost phone is not a lost history. Deleting your account (Settings → Delete Account) removes them. |
| Support and safety | Our legitimate interest in answering you and in keeping the service free of abuse. |
| Marketing email | Your express opt-in consent, withdrawable at any time (Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, CASL). |
| Legal compliance | Where a law requires it. |
We never use your pet's health or spending records for advertising, profiling, or resale. We do not sell personal information to anyone, for any price.
4. AI features — what leaves your device
PawMaple has three AI features. All three are opt-in, one action at a time.
- AI breed scan. When you take or choose a photo and tap scan, that image is sent for analysis and a breed, care guide and healthy weight range are returned.
- Receipt scanning. When you photograph a receipt, that image is sent for analysis and the merchant, date, total and a suggested category are returned.
- Vet assistant (PawMaple AI). When you send a message, your question is transmitted together with relevant context from the selected pet's record — species, breed, age, sex, weight, and current vaccines, medications and conditions — so the answer fits your animal rather than a generic one.
This processing runs on our own backend hosted in Google Cloud's northamerica-northeast1 region (Montréal, Canada), which calls a third-party large-language-model provider under a commercial agreement. Under that agreement, your content is not used to train the provider's models.
Images and prompts are processed to produce your answer and are not retained by us as a separate archive. The result you save — the identified breed, the created expense, the conversation in your chat history — is stored with your pet's record like anything else you enter, and you can delete it the same way.
5. Device permissions
iOS asks before granting each of these. You can change your mind at any time in Settings → PawMaple. The app degrades gracefully if you say no.
| Permission | Used for | If you decline |
|---|---|---|
| Camera | Scanning your pet's breed and photographing receipts. | Choose images from your library instead, or enter data by hand. |
| Photo library | Adding pet pictures and selecting receipt images. | Use the camera instead, or enter data by hand. |
| Location (when in use) | Finding veterinary clinics and 24/7 emergency care near you. | Search by city or postal code instead. Your location is used to run the search and is not stored as a history. |
| Notifications | Reminders for vaccines, appointments and antiparasitic treatments. | Reminders still appear inside the app; they just will not alert you. |
| Face ID / Touch ID | Locking the app so your pets' health and spending records stay private. | The lock is simply off. Face ID data never leaves your device and is never seen by us — iOS only tells the app "yes" or "no". |
6. Where your data is stored
6.1 On your device
Your pet records live on your iPhone, and the app reads them from there — it works with no network at all. They are protected by iOS file-level encryption and, if you enable it, by the app's Face ID lock.
6.2 In the cloud
PawMaple requires an account, and your records — including your pets' photos — are backed up to a private area of our Google Firebase project, keyed to that account, automatically and from the moment you sign in. There is no separate switch to turn this on or off: it is how you restore your history on a new phone, and it is why losing your phone does not lose your pet's record. Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest.
If you would rather we held nothing, delete your account in Settings → Delete Account. That erases the cloud copy and the account itself. See section 10.
6.3 Website form data
Waitlist signups and contact messages submitted on pawmaple.ca are stored on our web hosting, in files that are not reachable from the public internet.
7. Who we share information with
We share the minimum necessary, with a short and stable list of service providers:
| Provider | What it handles | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | App distribution, Sign in with Apple, all subscription payments and renewals, crash reports. | Global / Apple regions |
| Google Firebase | Account authentication, cloud backup of your records, file storage for your pets' photos, backend functions. | Canada (Montréal region) and Google's global infrastructure |
| AI model provider | Processes breed scans, receipt scans and vet-assistant questions on our behalf, under contract, with no training on your content. | North America |
| IONOS | Website hosting and the email that carries form submissions to us. | Canada / EU |
Apple handles payment entirely. When you subscribe, your card details go to Apple, never to us. We only learn whether a subscription is active.
We may also disclose information where legally compelled — a valid court order, subpoena or equivalent legal process — or where necessary to protect the rights, safety or property of a person. If PawMaple is ever sold or merged, your information may transfer to the acquirer, who would remain bound by this policy or give you notice before changing it.
8. Tracking and advertising
PawMaple contains no advertising SDKs and no third-party analytics trackers. We do not:
- show ads, or sell ad space;
- track you across other companies' apps or websites;
- use the iOS Advertising Identifier (IDFA), or ask for App Tracking Transparency permission;
- build advertising profiles or sell your data to data brokers.
The website uses no cookies for tracking. It loads one third-party resource — the Inter typeface from Google Fonts — which means Google receives the request that fetches the font file.
9. How long we keep it
- Pet records: for as long as you keep them. Delete one and it is gone from the device immediately, and from cloud backup within 30 days.
- Account: until you delete it. In-app account deletion removes your records from our cloud; residual copies in encrypted backups are purged within 90 days.
- Waitlist subscribers: until you unsubscribe, or after 24 months of no engagement, whichever comes first.
- Contact messages: up to 24 months after the matter is resolved.
- Abuse-prevention hashes and logs: up to 12 months.
10. Your rights
Under PIPEDA — and, where they apply to you, under Québec's Law 25, the GDPR, or state privacy laws in the U.S. — you have the right to:
- Access the personal information we hold about you;
- Correct anything inaccurate;
- Delete your account and your records;
- Port your data — receive it in a portable format;
- Withdraw consent at any time — for marketing email, for notifications, and for each of the camera, photo-library and location permissions. Cloud backup is not consent-based and has no switch: it is part of providing the app, so the way to withdraw from it is to delete your account, which erases the cloud copy;
- Complain to a regulator, and to be told the outcome of a complaint to us.
Export: Settings → Export Data gives you your full record, plus the
medical-history PDF and expense reports.
Delete: Settings → Delete Account removes your account and cloud data.
Unsubscribe: the link at the bottom of every email we send.
Reading, correcting, deleting and exporting your data are never behind the paywall. They keep working whether or not you have an active subscription.
For anything you cannot do in the app, write to support@pawmaple.ca. We respond within 30 days. We may ask you to verify your identity before acting on a request, to be sure we are not handing your record to someone else.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca), or the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec if you are a Québec resident.
11. Security
- All network traffic uses TLS 1.2 or higher.
- Cloud data is encrypted at rest by our infrastructure provider.
- Device data is protected by iOS data protection, plus optional Face ID / Touch ID app lock.
- Backend access rules scope every record to its owning account, enforced on the server rather than in the app.
- Passwords are handled by Firebase Authentication and are never stored by us in readable form.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify affected users and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as required by PIPEDA's breach-reporting rules.
12. Children
PawMaple is not directed at children and is rated 4+ only because it contains nothing objectionable, not because it is designed for children. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account, and if you are under the age of majority where you live, you need a parent or guardian's permission. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.
13. The website and its forms
pawmaple.ca has two forms. Here is exactly what each does:
- Waitlist / subscribe. Stores your first name, email, optionally your pet type and city, your consent flag, a timestamp, a hashed IP address and your browser user-agent. Used to email you at launch and, if you agreed, occasional product news. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.
- Contact. Stores your name, email, optional phone number, topic and message, plus the same technical fields. Used only to answer you.
Both are protected by a hidden anti-spam field and per-address rate limiting. Submissions are stored in files that are blocked from public access and are also emailed to us. We do not add anyone to a mailing list who did not tick the consent box.
14. International users
PawMaple is operated from Canada. If you use it from outside Canada, your information is transferred to and processed in Canada and the United States, where privacy laws may differ from your own. Canadian law also permits courts and government agencies in the jurisdictions where our providers operate to obtain access to information under their applicable laws. By using PawMaple you consent to this transfer.
15. Changes to this policy
We will update this page when our practices change, and revise the “Last updated” date at the top. If a change is material — a new purpose, a new category of recipient, a new type of data — we will notify you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and where the law requires it, ask for your consent again. Continuing to use PawMaple after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.
16. Contact us
Questions, requests or complaints about privacy:
- Email: support@pawmaple.ca — privacy requests, app support and general questions all reach us here.
- Web: the contact form on pawmaple.ca
- Postal: ZeasDesign, Ontario, Canada
Our accountable privacy officer is Henry Zeas, owner of ZeasDesign.
This policy is published in English and in French. If the two versions conflict, the English version governs, except where applicable law provides otherwise. See also our Terms of Use and the version française of this page.