Privacy Policy

SearchSpruce Studio ("we," "us," "our") is based in Comox Valley, BC and operates this website at https://searchspruce.ca. This policy explains what information we collect when you use this site, why we collect it, and how it's handled — in plain language, consistent with British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), which is the private-sector privacy law that applies to a business operating in BC. Canada's federal PIPEDA governs federally regulated businesses and information crossing provincial or national borders.

What we collect, and why

Contact form

If you submit the contact form, we collect your name, email address, and message, plus any optional details you provide (phone number, business name, service interest). This is used solely to respond to your inquiry. Submissions are processed by Web3Forms, a third-party form-delivery service, and forwarded to our inbox — we do not store submissions in a database of our own.

Free website health check tool

If you use the free site-check tool, we collect the website URL you enter and the email address you provide. The URL is sent to Google's PageSpeed Insights API and Google's Chrome UX Report API to measure performance, and the domain name is sent to Open PageRank to estimate link authority. A full copy of the results is emailed to us via Resend, a transactional email service, with your email address set as the reply-to address so any response from us reaches you directly. We do not sell, rent, or share this information with anyone else.

The tool also offers six optional questions about things we cannot see from outside your website — whether you have a Google Business Profile, roughly how many reviews you have, whether you reply to them, your directory listings, and which city you serve. These are entirely voluntary, every one can be left blank or answered "prefer not to say," and the tool works without them. If you do answer, we use those answers solely to make the report more useful to you, and they are included in the report emailed to us.

This tool is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, a bot-verification service, which processes standard connection signals (not personal identifiers) to confirm you're a real visitor rather than an automated script. We also apply a short-term rate limit per visitor; to do this we store a temporary, automatically-expiring counter keyed to your IP address. It holds no other information about you and is deleted automatically.

We only check websites, never people. The tool does not look up individuals, and we ask that you only submit a site you own or have permission to check.

Site analytics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand how the site performs for real visitors. It's cookie-free and does not track you across other websites — it measures aggregate page-load performance, not individual visitor behavior.

Hosting infrastructure

This site is served through Cloudflare, which — like any web host or CDN — processes visitor IP addresses and standard connection data as a normal part of delivering the site to your browser. This is infrastructure-level handling, not something we access or use directly.

What we don't do

We don't run advertising trackers, we don't use Google Analytics or similar third-party tracking scripts, and we don't sell or share your information with data brokers or advertisers. There are no user accounts on this site, and no database storing your information beyond what's needed to answer your inquiry.

Third-party services we use

• Web3Forms — delivers contact form submissions to our inbox.
• Resend — delivers automated site-check report emails.
• Google PageSpeed Insights API — generates the lab performance data in site-check reports.
• Google Chrome UX Report API — provides anonymized, aggregated real-visitor performance data for a submitted website. This is Google's own public dataset about websites; it returns no information about individual people.
• Open PageRank — estimates a domain's link authority from Common Crawl's open web index. Only the domain name is sent.
• Cloudflare — hosting, security (Turnstile bot protection), and privacy-first analytics.

Each of these providers has its own privacy policy governing how it handles data in transit through its systems.

Who is responsible for privacy here

PIPA section 4 requires us to designate someone responsible for compliance, and to make that person's position and contact details public. For SearchSpruce Studio that is the Founder, reachable at info@searchspruce.ca or (778) 960-5961.

If you want to complain

PIPA section 5 requires a process for handling privacy complaints, so here is ours. Email the address above with "Privacy" in the subject line. We will acknowledge it within five business days and give you a written answer within 30 days, telling you what we found and what we changed. If you are not satisfied with that answer, you can take the complaint to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, which oversees PIPA and is independent of us.

Your rights

Under PIPA section 23 you can ask us for the personal information we hold about you, how we have used it, and who we have disclosed it to. Under section 24 you can ask us to correct an error or omission in it. PIPA does not give a general right to demand deletion, but you can withdraw your consent under section 9, and section 35 requires us to destroy personal information once the purpose for collecting it is no longer being served and keeping it is no longer necessary for legal or business reasons. Since we don't retain a database of submissions beyond what's needed to respond to you, most requests can be resolved simply by asking us to delete the relevant email thread. To make a request, contact us using the details below.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Continued use of the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your information? Reach us at info@searchspruce.ca or (778) 960-5961.