Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Aavanu is shift scheduling software for Canadian small businesses, operated from Canada. In this policy “we” is Aavanu, “the app” is the Aavanu mobile app and this website, and “your employer” is the business that added you to a store.

This policy is written to meet the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and the substantially similar provincial laws in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec.

2. Your employer's data, and ours

This is the distinction that decides everything else, so it comes first.

When a business signs up for Aavanu, the schedules, timesheets, wages and messages inside their store are their records. They decide who is on the roster, what each person is paid, and what the schedule says. We hold and process that information on their instructions — we are the service, not the employer.

What that means in practice: if you want your rate changed, your hours corrected, or to be taken off a roster, that is a conversation with your employer, and we cannot make those decisions for them. What we can always do is show you everything we hold about you and delete your account.

3. What we collect

Only what the product needs to work. There is no analytics SDK, no advertising identifier, and no third-party tracker in the app or on this site.

What we do not collect

• Location. Clock in and out record a time, not a place. The app does not ask for location permission and there is no geofence.
• Payment details. Aavanu does not process wages. The hours and dollar figures in the app are an estimate for planning, and payroll runs wherever it ran before.
• Contacts, photos, calendar or microphone. The app does not request access to any of them.
• Behavioural analytics. No session recording, no heatmaps, no advertising profile.

4. Why we collect it

Under PIPEDA we have to name a purpose for each thing and stick to it. Ours are:

• To run the schedule — showing you your shifts, telling you when they change, letting you request time off or hand a shift over.
• To work out hours and cost — wage and clock times produce the hours, overtime and labour-cost figures your employer sees. Overtime rules are applied per province.
• To let a team talk to each other — messages, announcements and notifications.
• To keep the account secure — sign-in, password reset, and detecting abuse.
• To support you — if you email us about a problem, we use what you tell us to answer.

We do not use any of it for advertising, we do not sell or rent it, and we do not use your data or your messages to train machine-learning models.

5. Who can see what

The app enforces this at the database, not in the interface, so a screen cannot leak something by forgetting a filter.

6. Where it is stored, and who else touches it

We use a small number of service providers, each for one job:

• Supabase — the database, authentication and file storage. Data is held in a Canadian region.
• Resend — sending the email the app itself sends: invitations, password resets, and notifications you have asked for.
• Cloudflare — serving this website and storing uploaded files.
• Apple and Google — delivering push notifications to your device, and distributing the app.

Each of them is bound by contract to use the data only to provide that service. Some of them operate infrastructure outside Canada, which means information may be stored or processed in another country — including the United States — and may be accessible to the courts and law enforcement of that country. We choose Canadian regions where the provider offers them.

We will disclose personal information without your consent only where the law requires it, and we will tell you unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.

7. How long we keep it

• Your account — until you delete it, or after 24 months of the account never being signed in to, whichever comes first.
• Schedules, timesheets and pay records — kept while your employer's store exists, because employment-standards legislation requires an employer to keep hours-of-work and wage records (generally 36 months, varying by province). Leaving a job does not delete the record of hours you worked and may not have been paid for yet — that record is what proves you are owed them.
• Messages — until the conversation or the store is deleted. Your own messages are removed when your account is deleted.
• Backups — deleted data can persist in encrypted backups for up to 30 days before those expire.

8. Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law you can:

• See what we hold. Most of it is already on screen in the app. For a full export, email us and we will send it within 30 days.
• Correct it. Your profile is editable in the app. Anything your employer entered — your wage, your position, your shifts — is corrected by them, and we will help if they need us to.
• Withdraw consent. You can turn off notifications, unsubscribe from non-essential email, or delete your account. Some withdrawals mean the app can no longer do its job, and we will say so plainly rather than quietly degrading.
• Complain. To us first — see below — and to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or your provincial commissioner, whether or not you have come to us.

9. Deleting your account

Profile → Delete account, inside the app. It deletes on our servers, not only on your phone, and it cannot be undone.

What goes: your profile, your login, your phone number and birthdate, your availability, your time-off history, your notifications and your messages.

What stays: the shifts you were rostered on and the hours you clocked, as a record belonging to your employer, with your name removed from the attribution. Your employer keeps those for the same reason a payroll file is kept — they are the evidence of what you worked.

If you are a business owner, deleting your account also deletes your stores and everything in them, including your team's rosters and timesheets. The app names the stores and says so before you confirm.

Prefer not to use the app? Email [email protected] from the address on the account and we will do it within 30 days.

10. Email, and CASL

Two different kinds of email, treated differently, as Canada's anti-spam legislation requires.

Transactional email — an invitation to join a store, a password reset, a notification you asked for. These are part of the service and are sent because you or your employer used it.

Marketing email — product news, launch announcements. We send these only to people who have asked for them by ticking the box on this site, and every one carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click. Adding an employee to a store does not sign them up for anything.

11. Security

• Everything is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest.
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt; they are never stored or transmitted in a form we can read.
• Access to each row of data is enforced in the database by row-level security, so it is not possible for a bug in a screen to show one store another store's information.
• Pay rates are not merely hidden in the interface — the database refuses to return them to anyone but you and your store owner.
• Access by our own staff is limited to the people who operate the service.

No system is perfect. If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm we will notify affected people and the Privacy Commissioner as PIPEDA requires, and we will say what happened rather than what is comfortable.

12. Young workers

Aavanu is for people at work, and is not directed at children. Where provincial law permits someone under 16 to be employed, their account is created by their employer in the ordinary way and this policy applies to it unchanged. If you believe a child who is not employed has an account, email us and we will remove it.

13. Changes to this policy

If we change something that matters, we will change the date at the top and tell you in the app before it takes effect. We will not quietly widen what the data is used for.

14. Contact and complaints