Privacy

1. The short version

albertacurrent.ca is a free events board. You can read all of it without giving us anything, without an account, and without being tracked. There are no cookies on this site at all. We ask for an email address in one place — the digest signup — and we use it to send you the digest.

We have never sold, rented or traded anyone's information, and we do not run advertising networks, tracking pixels or cross-site profiling. If that ever changes it will be written here first, with a new effective date, and it will not be applied to information collected before the change.

2. What we collect, exactly

The digest. When you sign up we store your email address, which board or market you signed up for, whether you told us you are a resident or a visitor, which categories you chose, whether you asked for free events only, the page the signup came from, and the dates you signed up, confirmed and unsubscribed. If you pause the digest we store the month you paused it until.

A phone number, only if you ask for texts. The signup has an optional SMS box. If you leave it unticked the number is discarded and never reaches the database. If you tick it we store the number, the date, and the exact sentence you agreed to, word for word — that record exists so we can show what you consented to, which is what Canada's anti-spam law requires of us.

Events you submit. The submission form asks for your name and email so we can come back to you about the listing. The event details — title, date, venue, city, price, link and description — are published. Your email address is not published.

"Near me". If you use it, your browser asks your permission and sends the coordinates to our server to run the distance search. The coordinates are used for that query and are not written to the database, not logged against you, and not kept.

Which links get pressed. When you follow a ticket or organizer link we record that the link was followed: which event, which board, what kind of link, the page you came from, the domain of the site that sent you, and whether the device is a phone or a desktop. No IP address, no cookie and no identifier of any kind is stored with it, so these rows count presses and cannot be traced to a person.

What we do not collect. No account, no password, no payment card, no address, no date of birth, no advertising identifier, and no browsing history from anywhere but this site.

3. Cookies, and the one thing stored in your browser

This site sets no cookies. Not for sessions, not for analytics, not for advertising. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

One value is stored in your own browser: a note that you have already joined the digest or closed the signup bar, so the bar stops appearing. It stays on your device, is never sent to us, and clearing your browser data removes it.

Page views are counted with Vercel Web Analytics, which is the reason we can say the rest of this paragraph: it is cookie-free by design, it does not build a profile of you, and it does not follow you to other sites. It does process technical request data including your IP address to work out roughly where a visit came from, and Vercel discards the address rather than storing it against you.

4. What we use it for

Your email address is used to send the digest you asked for, to confirm that the address is really yours before anything is sent, and to answer you if you write to us. Your market, audience and category choices are used to decide which events go in your copy of it. A phone number, if you gave one, is used to text you the same thing.

A submitter's name and email are used to check and publish the listing and to come back with a question about it.

Aggregate counts — how many people opened a digest, how many presses a link got — are used to decide what the board covers and to show organizers and sponsors that it works. Those are counts, not lists.

We do not use any of it to build a profile, to score you, or to make an automated decision about you.

5. Consent, and taking it back

Nothing is sent to you until you confirm the address. The signup emails you a link and the subscription does not start until you follow it.

Every digest carries an unsubscribe link and a preferences link. Unsubscribing is immediate and needs no reason and no reply from us. Preferences let you change markets and categories, or pause for a while without leaving. Texts stop when you reply STOP, which is handled automatically.

If you buy something — a sponsorship, a promotion, a supporter contribution — your name and email are added to our mailing list on the strength of that purchase. Canadian anti-spam law allows this as implied consent from an existing business relationship, and it runs out after two years. We would rather you knew about it than discovered it, so: it happens, and the unsubscribe link in the first message ends it.

Withdrawing consent does not undo what was already sent, and we keep a record that you unsubscribed so that we do not add you again by mistake.

6. Who else sees it

We use four service providers, and no others touch your information. They process it on our instructions and are not allowed to use it for their own purposes.

Supabase hosts the database that holds subscribers and submissions. Vercel hosts the site itself, handles every request to it, and provides the page-view analytics described above. Resend delivers the email and holds the list it is sent to. Twilio carries the text messages, and only for people who asked for them.

Stripe handles payments, and your card details never reach us — you go to Stripe's own page, Stripe takes the payment, and what comes back to us is that a payment was made and the address it was made from. We have never held a card number and the site has no code that could.

We do not give your information to anyone else. The exception every policy has to state is the honest one: if a court order or a law required it, we would have to comply, and we would tell you unless we were forbidden to.

7. Where it is kept, and the border it crosses

The database is hosted in the United States (Supabase, us-east-1). Vercel, Resend, Stripe and Twilio are also United States companies. So your information is stored and processed outside Canada.

That matters and is not boilerplate: while it is there it is subject to United States law, and a US court or government agency can compel access to it under that law without your knowledge and without ours. Canadian privacy law does not stop that; it requires that we tell you plainly, which is what this paragraph is for.

Alberta Current remains responsible for your information the whole time it is with a provider, and remains the place to complain to.

8. How long we keep it

A subscription is kept until you end it. When you unsubscribe we keep the address and the date, and nothing else, so that a later import cannot put you back on the list — tell us to erase it entirely and we will, accepting that risk.

A submission is kept while the event is upcoming and afterwards as archive, because a board that forgets what happened is not much of a record. The submitter's email is not part of what is published.

Link-press rows have nobody attached to them, so there is nothing in them to expire.

9. Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and withdraw your consent at any time. Write to partners@albertacurrent.ca. There is no charge, and we answer within 30 days, which is the deadline Canadian law sets.

We will ask you to confirm you are the person whose address it is — usually by replying from that address — because handing someone's information to whoever asks for it is itself a privacy breach.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle it, you can complain to a regulator, and you do not need our permission. In Alberta that is the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (oipc.ab.ca). Federally it is the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca).

10. Children

Alberta Current publishes events for all ages, and children are welcome to read it — reading requires nothing from anyone. But the digest is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly sign one up. If you are a parent and believe your child subscribed, write to partners@albertacurrent.ca and it will be deleted.

11. Security, and what we would do if it failed

Everything travels over HTTPS. The database enforces row-level security, so the site's public key cannot read the subscriber list; only the send path can, and that runs on a server you cannot reach from a browser. Preference and unsubscribe links are unguessable single-purpose tokens rather than your email address in the URL.

No system is perfectly secure and it would be dishonest to say otherwise. If information were exposed in a way that created a real risk of significant harm to you, we would tell you and report it to the Privacy Commissioner, which Canadian law requires and which we would do regardless.

12. Changes, and who to write to

This policy may change. The effective date above says when the wording last moved, and a change that materially affects what we do with information already collected will be asked about rather than assumed.

Alberta Current is responsible for the personal information in its custody, and questions, requests and complaints go to partners@albertacurrent.ca — a person reads that address.

This policy is governed by the laws of Alberta and the laws of Canada that apply in it. It sits alongside the terms of use, which cover money and liability; this page covers information.