Privacy Policy

Version: 2026-10-16

1. Who we are and who is accountable

You Shouldn’t Have is operated by AI Eh By Solutions, a Canadian company (“we”, “us”). This policy covers the web app at app.youshouldnthave.ca, the website youshouldnthave.ca, and the emails and notifications we send. We are responsible for the personal information we hold and follow the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, for people in Quebec, the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector. Our Privacy Officer is the person in charge of the protection of personal information and handles questions, requests and complaints: contact@youshouldnthave.ca.

2. What we collect and why

Account: your name, email address, the ID your sign-in provider gives us (Google, or Apple where offered), your language, time zone and display theme. If you sign in with an email address and password, the password is handled by Google Identity Platform; we never see it or store it in readable form. We use this to sign you in and to write to you in your language at sensible local times.
Location for delivery estimates: your country and, if you give it, your postal code. Nothing else. We use them only to estimate delivery times and to show stores that ship to you. We never ask for your street address and never use your device’s location.
Events: what organizers enter: title, description, date, time, time zone, location, budget, draw rules (households and pairs who should not draw each other), a shipping address for a registry if the organizer adds one, and the names, email addresses and (optionally) phone numbers and households of the people they invite. If someone invited you, we received your name and email address from them. We do not send text messages or make calls today.
Gift ideas and registries: your interests, notes (for example sizes) and the gift links you add; registry items, who claimed or bought them, and gift status.
Messages: anonymous questions and answers in Secret Santa threads.
Secret Santa pairings: who gives to whom, stored encrypted (section 4).
Notifications: if you turn on push notifications, your browser’s push address and keys; your notification choices and quiet hours; and a record of your push opt-in (the wording you saw, date and time, IP address and browser).
Calendar: if you create a calendar feed, a secret link token stored only as a hash; if you connect Google Calendar, an encrypted Google refresh token and, for each event we add to your Google Calendar, the ID Google gives that event (section 8).
Delivery records: for each email and push notification, the address or account it went to, the type of message, the language, the time and whether it was delivered. Never the content of an email; for push, only the title.
Website forms: what you send through the contact, support or account deletion forms (name, email address, message). It is delivered to us by email and is not stored in the app.
Technical: our hosting keeps request logs (IP address, browser, time, page and errors) for security and troubleshooting. The app uses one cookie to keep you signed in, and your browser stores settings such as language and theme. We use no advertising or analytics cookies and no third-party trackers.

We use this information only to run the app and your events: send invitations, make the draw, deliver anonymous messages, show wishlists and registries, look up gift links, estimate delivery, send the reminders described in the app, keep the service secure and comply with the law. We do not sell personal information, use it for advertising or build advertising profiles. The draw is random and the app makes no automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects.

By creating an account or joining an event you agree to this use. Organizers confirm they have permission to add the people they invite. Optional features start off: push notifications, the daily registry summary email, the calendar feed and Google Calendar stay off until you turn them on, and the postal code is optional. You can withdraw consent at any time by changing Settings, using an email’s unsubscribe link or deleting your account; without some information (for example your email address) you may not be able to take part in events.

4. Secret Santa secrecy

Pairings are encrypted with a key kept in Google Cloud Secret Manager, so they cannot be read even by looking in the database. Each person sees only who they give to; the person who gives to you sees your name, interests and wishlist. Organizers see a status table (joined, has seen their match, wishlist ready, gift status, unanswered questions, last email delivery) that never shows pairings. An organizer can reveal one person’s match only through a troubleshooting tool, after two confirmations, typing that person’s name and giving a written reason; each reveal is logged (who revealed, whose match, the reason and the time) and shown to all organizers of that event. Anonymous messages never show the giver’s identity to the recipient, and notifications never say who you are matched with.

5. Registries

Organizers see who claimed or bought each item; other guests see only how many are still available. A shipping address, if the organizer adds one, is shown only to organizers and guests who have joined. Anyone with an open registry link sees the event title, date and description, the organizer’s first name and the items, never who claimed them.

6. Link lookups and delivery estimates

When you or an organizer paste a link, our servers fetch that web page to read the product name, picture and price. Amazon pages are the exception: we never fetch them, so for an Amazon link we take the product name from the link itself, show no picture and no price, and the app says “See price on Amazon”; an Amazon price counts as unknown for budget checks. The retailer sees a request from our servers, not from your device. The result (the link and the product details, not who pasted it) is reused for 24 hours and deleted after about 7 days. For stores we have no affiliate program with, we keep the website name, a count, the first and last dates it was seen and one example link, not who pasted it, to decide which programs to join. Delivery estimates are calculated by us from typical times we set for each store and your country and postal code; nothing about you is sent to the store.

7. Affiliate links

When we take part in a retailer’s affiliate program, links to that retailer carry our affiliate tag and are listed first among places to buy. We do not send your personal information to retailers. When you follow a link to a store, you leave our app: the retailer (for example Amazon, which may process data in the United States) may set its own cookies and handles your data under its own privacy policy. We do not receive your purchase details from retailers beyond what their affiliate programs report to us.

8. Calendars and Google Calendar

“Add to calendar” links open Google Calendar, Outlook, Office 365 or Yahoo with the event’s title, date, place and a link to the event; that provider receives them when you choose it. Your calendar feed link shows your events and deadlines to anyone who has it; you can replace or remove it in Settings.

If you choose to connect Google Calendar (when offered), Google asks you to give us access with the Google Calendar scope “calendar.events”. We use that access only to create in your primary Google Calendar one event for each You Shouldn’t Have event you organize or have joined, to update that same event when the event changes (connecting again or adding the event again updates it; it never adds a copy), and to delete it when the event is deleted or you leave it. We do not read, change or delete any other event, and we use nothing from your calendar for any other purpose. We store the Google token encrypted, with the ID of each Google event we created. When you disconnect or delete your account, we delete the events we created from your Google Calendar (where Google still lets us), revoke our access with Google and delete the token; you can also remove our access at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions (the events we added then stay in your calendar until you delete them). You Shouldn’t Have’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements (developers.google.com). We do not use Google user data for advertising, do not sell it, do not use it to train AI models, and do not let people read it except with your consent, for security, or where the law requires.

9. Emails and notifications

All our emails are about events you organize, joined or were invited to: invitations (sent at an organizer’s request and naming that organizer), match notices, questions and answers, reminders and, only if you turn it on, a daily registry summary. We do not send marketing or promotional emails. Every email identifies You Shouldn’t Have and AI Eh By Solutions, with our mailing address and our contact address (contact@youshouldnthave.ca), and has an unsubscribe link for that type of email that works without signing in and takes effect right away. You can also choose each email type in Settings > Notifications. Push notifications are off until you turn them on; you choose each type, and no push notification is sent during your quiet hours (22:00 to 07:00 unless you change them).

Other participants, as described in sections 4 and 5.
Service providers that process data for us:
- Google Cloud (app servers, database, Secret Manager, scheduled tasks and backups), in the northamerica-northeast1 region (Montréal, Canada); pages are delivered through Firebase Hosting, Google’s worldwide network;
- Google Identity Platform (sign-in, including email and password and Sign in with Google), and Apple if you use Sign in with Apple where offered;
- Google Workspace, which sends our emails from noreply@youshouldnthave.ca;
- your browser’s push service, if you turn on notifications: Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome and most Android browsers), Mozilla (Firefox) or Microsoft (Edge). It receives your browser’s push address and the notification, encrypted so only your browser can read it.
Legal reasons: when the law requires it, or in a sale or transfer of our business (we will tell you).

Our database and backups are in Canada. Some providers above (sign-in, email, page delivery, push services, and stores you visit) may process data outside Quebec and Canada, including in the United States, where courts and authorities may be able to access it under local law.

11. How long we keep it

Account data (profile, notification choices, push subscriptions, consent records, calendar connection, wishlists and messages you wrote): until you delete your account (the calendar connection also ends when you disconnect). Push subscriptions are also deleted when the push service reports them invalid, or after 60 days without being renewed by your browser.
Events (with their participants, wishlists, messages, items and claims): until an organizer deletes the event, or until its owner deletes their account with no co-organizer left. Events are closed 30 days after their date but not deleted automatically.
Delivery records (section 2): 13 months after the email or notification was sent, or sooner if you delete your account.
People invited who never joined: 90 days after the event date, their name, email address, phone number, delivery records and invitation link are deleted.
Link lookups: about 7 days (section 6).
Organizer audit log (draws, changes and troubleshooting reveals): 2 years after the event date, or 2 years after the event is deleted if it is deleted before its date.
Short-lived security records (sign-in and other attempt counters, Google Calendar connection requests and troubleshooting confirmations): 30 days at most; deleted right away when you delete your account.
Unsubscribes and bounces: a one-way hash of the address (not the address itself) with the email type, kept so we never write to it again against your wishes.
Backups: copies of the database made before each update of the app, stored in Canada: 35 days.
Hosting logs: 30 days (the default period of our hosting provider, Google Cloud).
Website form messages: in our email for as long as needed to handle your request.

12. Your rights

Access and export: Settings > Download my data gives you a copy of your data in a structured, commonly used format (JSON).
Correction: edit your profile in Settings; ask an organizer to fix event details they entered.
Deletion: Settings > Delete account, or the account deletion page at youshouldnthave.ca/delete-account, which explains exactly what is deleted and what is kept.
Other requests: write to contact@youshouldnthave.ca to ask for access, correction, deletion or information about how we use your data, or to withdraw consent. We answer within 30 days.
Complaints: contact our Privacy Officer first. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca) or, in Quebec, the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (cai.gouv.qc.ca).

13. Security and incidents

Encryption in transit (HTTPS) and at rest, sealed pairings, encrypted calendar tokens, database access limited to the app’s own service account, session cookies that are HttpOnly and Secure, and logging of sensitive actions. No system is perfectly secure. We keep a record of every privacy breach (confidentiality incident). When a breach creates a real risk of significant harm (a risk of serious injury under Quebec law), we notify the people affected and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and, for people in Quebec, the Commission d’accès à l’information, as the law requires.

14. Children

Accounts are for people 14 and older (section 2 of the Terms of Use). We do not knowingly collect information from children under 14 without the consent of a parent or guardian. An organizer may include a child under 14 in an event only with a parent’s or guardian’s permission, using the parent’s or guardian’s email address. If you think a child under 14 has given us information without that consent, contact us and we will delete it.

15. Language

This policy is available in English, French and Spanish, and each version has the same effect.

16. Changes

We post changes here with a new version date and tell you in the app or by email about material changes before they take effect.