Privacy notice: ProveItNL

Who are we?

We are ProveItNL, an independent volunteer group. We are not incorporated.

Do you have a question, or want something removed? Email tom@proveitnl.ca.

What does this notice cover?

It covers:

• the paper petition sheets
• email sent to our group
• the volunteer form on this website
• our private, invite-only area at admin.proveitnl.ca

Is volunteering the same as signing?

No. Filling in the volunteer form does not sign the petition.

The only way to sign is by hand, on a paper sheet, in person.

The paper petition

What do you collect on paper?

Each signer writes:

• the date
• their printed name
• their address
• their handwritten signature

The House of Assembly's petition form requires these fields.

Why?

To present the petition to the House of Assembly.

Does the paper petition become public?

Yes. The House of Assembly's own form says: "This petition may be tabled in the House of Assembly. If tabled, the petition will be a document of the House of Assembly and the name and address of every person who signs it will be available to the public." (Standing Orders, Appendix 3(c); https://www.assembly.nl.ca/HouseBusiness/Petitions/). ("Tabled" is the House's word for presenting a petition in the House.)

Once a sheet is presented in the House, nobody can withdraw your signature or remove your name from the House record, including us.

Who sees the sheets?

• our organizers
• the MHA who presents the petition
• the House of Assembly
• once the petition is presented in the House, the public

How do you look after the sheets?

• We number every sheet, so we can account for each one.
• The group's organizers keep signed sheets locked in a place they control, until the sheets go to the House.
• We never photocopy, scan or photograph signed sheets. The only thing we keep is a count of signatures, with no names.
• We never use or build a voters list. We never match signatures against one.
• We never copy signer details into the volunteer list.

The volunteer form

What do you collect?

• your first name
• an email address or phone number
• your community
• how you'd like to help (staff a table, help at a signing spot in a public place, collect and return sheets in your community, or something else)
• that you agreed to be contacted
• the date and time you sent the form

Nothing else.

Do you need my OK?

Yes. The form only works if you tick the box agreeing that we may contact you.

The box starts unticked. If you don't tick it, we store nothing you typed.

The box reads: "Yes, ProveItNL may contact me by email or text about volunteering for this campaign. I can opt out at any time. Contact: tom@proveitnl.ca."

Why do you collect it?

Only to contact you about the help you offered. We do this by email or text, using the contact you gave us.

• We never table volunteer details or make them public.
• Every message names us and gives a contact address.
• You can opt out at any time. Reply to us, or email tom@proveitnl.ca.
• We act on opt-outs within 10 business days.
• We send no fundraising messages.

How do you stop spam?

We don't want the form flooded. So our server limits how many times it can be sent from one connection in an hour.

To do this, it keeps a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address in the server's memory for no more than one hour. It never writes this to disk. It never stores it with your form details.

Who sees it?

Only our organizers, through the private area described below.

The private area (admin.proveitnl.ca)

Our organizers and volunteers use a private, invite-only area to run the paper petition.

There is no public sign-up. We ask search engines not to list it.

What kinds of account are there?

Two kinds:

• Organizer accounts belong to the people who run ProveItNL (directors, coordinators and sheet custodians).
• Volunteer accounts belong to people who signed up to help with this campaign, including team captains.

What do you keep about account holders?

• your name and email
• your role
• your area (picked from a fixed list of communities or the first 3 characters of a postal code, never a home address)
• your field job, team captain, and whether and when you were trained
• whether you agreed to be contacted
• whether your account is active

If you handle petition sheets, we also record the sheet numbers you hold, the dates and the signature counts.

We never record a signer's name, address or signature in this area.

Who sees what?

• Directors and coordinators see the volunteer list.
• Sheet custodians see only the sheet screens, never contact details.
• A team captain sees only their own team. They see contact details only for people who still agree to be contacted.
• A volunteer sees only their own record.
• Only directors can delete records, export sheet counts, or see the activity log.

How do I sign in?

We store no passwords. You sign in one of two ways:

• with a passkey (your phone or computer's screen lock), or
• with a one-time email link. It works once and expires after 15 minutes.

Everyone who signs in to the private organizer area also uses a 6-digit code from an authenticator app.

For a passkey, our server stores only a public key and a label (phone, computer or security key). Your fingerprint, face or PIN never reaches our server.

Do you use cookies?

One sign-in cookie. Signing in sets one strictly necessary cookie, on admin.proveitnl.ca only, to keep you signed in. It ends after at most 8 hours (2 hours for directors), after 30 minutes of inactivity, or when you sign out. The public website at proveitnl.ca sets no cookies.

What about sign-in emails?

We send sign-in links from our group email. Zoho Mail hosts it in its Canada data centre.

Sent sign-in emails are deleted from that mailbox after 7 days.

Do you keep an activity log?

Yes, to keep the area secure. We log sign-ins, invites, role changes, exports, sheet entries and removals.

Each entry holds only:

• the date and time
• the internal account number of who did it
• the action
• an internal number for what it was done to
• whether it worked

Activity log entries hold no names, email addresses or IP addresses. Sign-in attempts are kept separately, in the sign-in security record below.

We delete each entry 180 days after it was made. We do not delete this log when the campaign ends.

Sign-in security record. When someone signs in to the private organizer area, we also keep a short record of each password and code attempt. It holds the date and time, which step it was, whether it worked, and a shortened IP address with the last part removed. A shortened IP address can still show a general area or internet provider. We delete each record after 30 days.

What happens when someone leaves?

• We switch off their access within 24 hours.
• We delete their sign-in keys.
• We reassign any sheets they held.

We switch off accounts not used for 30 days. We delete a switched-off account 90 days after we switched it off.

What if something goes wrong?

If we ever learn that the server or an account was broken into, we will:

• shut the private area
• tell affected volunteers directly by email or text, within 3 days of confirming it
• post a notice on this site

Email to the group

Zoho Mail handles email to tom@proveitnl.ca, in its Canada data centre.

We use it only to answer you, to send sign-in links, and to handle removal requests.

This website and server

What does this website collect?

This website sets no cookies and runs no outside scripts.

It collects no signatures. It has one informal poll, at /poll/. The poll does not ask for your name, email or postal code, and sets no cookie. We keep only the running totals of Yes, No and Undecided answers, and the date (not the time) of the most recent answer. A poll answer is not a signature and is never presented in the House of Assembly.

To keep the poll fair, it counts one answer every 30 minutes from the same internet connection. To do that, the server uses a scrambled form of your internet address, kept only in its memory: for up to 60 seconds while it checks an answer, and for 30 minutes after an answer is counted. It is never saved, logged or linked to your answer, and restarting the poll service clears it. People who share a connection, like a household, office, campus or mobile network, share the same 30-minute wait. Separately, if the server hits a technical error, its system log may record the connection address to help us fix the problem. That log stays on our server and is deleted within 14 days.

Anyone can answer, and the same person can answer again after 30 minutes or from another connection, so the results are informal and not a scientific survey. We delete the poll totals 90 days after the campaign ends, and no later than June 29, 2027. We may publish the final totals, which contain no personal information.

Our web server keeps no log of the pages you visit.

It does keep a security log of blocked connections, and of logins and login attempts to the server itself. That log can include IP addresses. We use it only to protect the server. It is deleted automatically after 14 days.

Where is it stored?

The volunteer form data and the private area are on our own server at LunaNode in Toronto, Canada.

Before each change to this website, we save a copy of the website's data on the same server, so we can undo the change if something goes wrong. These copies include everything the site stores, including volunteer form answers. Only the person who runs the server can open them. We keep no more than the 3 most recent copies, and each is deleted within 30 days, so information we delete may stay in a copy until then.

We have turned off our hosting company's backup service, so it does not keep daily copies of the server for us.

Only our organizers have access to the server.

Do you sell or share my information?

No. We never sell, rent, trade or share your information. We never give it to any business or political party, or let them use it.

We use outside services only to run things for us: Zoho for email and LunaNode for the server.

How long do you keep it?

• Signed sheets leave our hands when we give them to the MHA who presents them.
• Sheets that are never presented in the House are cross-cut shredded within 30 days of the last presentation or the end of the campaign. In any case, this happens no later than 90 days after March 31, 2027.
• Volunteer details means volunteer form details, volunteer accounts, and anything that links a volunteer to the sheets they handled. We delete these 90 days after the campaign ends, and in any case no later than June 29, 2027. We delete them sooner if you ask.
• Organizer accounts continue after the campaign, because ProveItNL continues as a group. We switch off an organizer's account when they leave, and delete it 90 days later.
• Sheet counts (sheet numbers, dates and signature totals, with no signer details and no link to any volunteer) may be kept with our own records.
• Activity log: we delete each entry 180 days after it was made.
• Sign-in security record: we delete each record 30 days after it was made.
• Sign-in links last 15 minutes.
• Sent sign-in emails are deleted after 7 days.
• Invitations are deleted once used, or 7 days after they expire.
• Backups: anything deleted is gone from our server backups within 30 days, as old copies are deleted.
• Our record of removal requests is kept for 1 year, so we can show we honoured them. Then we delete it.

What if ProveItNL carries on?

We will keep going after this campaign. If we ever want to use your information for a new purpose, we will ask you first.

What are my choices?

To see your own account details, sign in and open "My account".

You can email tom@proveitnl.ca to:

• be removed from the volunteer list
• close your account
• have your signature taken off a paper sheet before it is presented in the House

In your email, tell us your name and whether you volunteered or signed. If you signed on paper, give your community too.

• We'll confirm we got your request within 5 business days.
• We'll act on it within 10 business days.
• Copies in our server backups are gone within 30 days after that. We never use them to put you back on the list.

When a volunteer is removed, sheet counts they recorded stay, marked "removed volunteer".

Signatures that have already been presented in the House can't be withdrawn.

What about the law?

We believe federal private-sector privacy law (PIPEDA) likely does not apply to a non-commercial volunteer group. We also believe that Newfoundland and Labrador has no general private-sector privacy law.

We follow the practices above either way.

Our messages follow Canada's anti-spam law (CASL).

Page counts

We count how many times each page is viewed, and that's all. The counting happens on proveitnl.ca itself. Each page loads one tiny image from our own server, and that adds one to the count for that page for that day (Newfoundland time). Pages that aren't on our list are counted together as one number. There are no cookies, no outside scripts, and nothing that tracks you as a person. We never store your IP address, your browser or device details or any visitor ID, not even in scrambled form. Nothing we keep links a page view to you. We skip obvious robots, using only the name their software sends, and we don't keep that name. Only ProveItNL organizers can see the counts, in our private admin pages. We don't publish them. The counts contain no personal information. We delete them when the campaign's data is deleted, and no later than June 29, 2027.

Will this notice change?

We will update this notice before we collect anything new or use your information in a new way. When we do, the version and date on this page will change. Page counts, added in version P2.2, are explained under 'Page counts'.

How do I contact you?

Email tom@proveitnl.ca.

Notice version P2.5 · effective November 1, 2026. Questions or removal: tom@proveitnl.ca.