This policy explains how Other U Inc. ("OtherU", "we") collects, uses and protects personal information. OtherU is a federal corporation (Canada Business Corporations Act) with its registered office at 003-6 Hamilton Ave N, Ottawa, Ontario K1Y 4R1, Canada. We follow the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
Contact
Our privacy officer is Lawrence Beckwith, Co-founder. Send privacy questions and requests to [email protected], or by mail to the address above.
What we collect
- Customers and suppliers: business contact details (names, work email addresses, phone numbers, addresses) and the records of our dealings with you: quotations, orders, invoices, payments and correspondence.
- Customer portal accounts: your name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash) and sign-in activity, when you have an account at billing.otheru.ai.
- Payments: when you pay by card, the payment is handled by Stripe. We receive confirmation of the payment, not your full card number.
- Email: messages you send us and their contents.
- Website visits: our web servers keep standard access logs (IP address, browser, pages requested) for security and troubleshooting. We do not use advertising or analytics trackers or cookies on otheru.ai. Pages load fonts from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address when it serves them.
- Our own bank accounts: we use Plaid to import transactions from OtherU's own corporate bank accounts into our accounting system. We do not use Plaid to access anyone else's bank accounts.
How we use it
We use personal information to provide our products and services, issue quotations and invoices, receive and record payments, keep our accounting and tax records, provide the customer portal, answer messages, and protect our systems. We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.
Plaid
OtherU uses Plaid Inc. to connect to OtherU's own bank accounts and retrieve their transaction history for bookkeeping and bank reconciliation. Data received through Plaid is used only for that purpose, stored on our own encrypted systems, and kept as part of our financial records. Plaid's handling of data is described in the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.
Sharing and service providers
We share personal information only with service providers that help us run the business, and only as needed:
- Hetzner Online (hosting for our website, email and network services)
- Stripe (card payments)
- Plaid (bank transaction data for our own accounts)
- Our banks, including Venn and Wealthsimple (payments and banking)
- Professional advisors such as accountants, and government authorities where the law requires it
Where your information is stored
Our business systems, including our accounting system and customer portal, run on servers we operate in Canada. Traffic to our websites and email passes through servers we operate in Finland (Hetzner). Some service providers, such as Stripe and Plaid, may process information in the United States or other countries, where it may be accessible to authorities under local law.
Security
We protect personal information with access limited to authorized staff through single sign-on with multi-factor authentication, administrative systems reachable only over our private network, encryption in transit (TLS 1.2 or better) and at rest for systems holding financial data, encrypted backups, and continuous security monitoring and vulnerability scanning.
Retention
We keep financial and accounting records, including invoices, payments and bank transactions, for 7 years, as Canadian tax law requires. Other personal information is kept only as long as needed for the purpose it was collected for, then deleted. Portal accounts are removed on request or when the business relationship ends.
Your rights
You may ask to access the personal information we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted, and you may withdraw consent to uses that are not required to provide our services or meet legal obligations. Email [email protected]. We respond within 30 days. Where the law requires us to keep a record (for example, an invoice), we keep it for the required period and tell you why.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Changes
We may update this policy. The effective date at the top shows when it last changed. Material changes will be noted on this page.