ShiftTally Privacy Policy

The short version

ShiftTally exists to keep a defensible record of your own driving. Your records live on your phone first, and are copied to your private cloud account so they survive a lost device.

• Your GPS coordinates never leave your phone. Only the distance worked out from them is stored in the cloud.
• Nothing is sold, rented or shared with advertisers, data brokers or platforms such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash or Instacart.
• There are no advertising identifiers, no ad networks and no cross-app tracking.
• You can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app, at any time.

Location data

Distance is the whole basis of a CRA motor-vehicle claim, so the app measures it from your device location. Each reading is a latitude, a longitude, a timestamp and an accuracy figure; readings less accurate than 75 metres are discarded. The app does not record your speed.

With location permission granted while the app is open, readings are taken about every 4 seconds or every 20 metres. If you turn on shift tracking or automatic drive detection and grant "Allow all the time", readings continue while the app is in the background or closed — every 5 seconds or 25 metres during a shift, and every 15 seconds or 40 metres while waiting to detect a drive. Automatic detection is off until you switch it on, and iOS shows a status indicator whenever it is running.

Readings are used to add up distance and, on iOS and Android, to ask the operating system for a street or city label for where a drive started and ended. That lookup is done by the device, not by us. Individual coordinates are held in your phone's app storage only while a drive is being measured, and are then reduced to a distance.

What is copied to your cloud account is the drive itself: start and end times, distance in kilometres, odometer readings you type, the business or personal category, the platform, the vehicle, and the start and end address labels if the device produced them. No coordinate trail is ever uploaded.

You can stop all of it. Turn off automatic detection and shift tracking in the app, or revoke location permission in your device settings. The app keeps working as a manual logbook.

Records you enter

The rest of the app is what you type, and all of it is copied to your cloud account so it is not lost with the phone:

• Drives: dates, times, distance, odometer readings, purpose, platform, category, earnings and which vehicle.
• Expenses: category, amount, date, vendor, vehicle and the receipt image.
• Income: daily or per-trip amounts, platform, trip counts and notes, including rows created by importing a platform statement file.
• Tax settings: tax year, annual odometer readings, marginal tax rate, cost per kilometre, GST/HST province, registration status, method and filing period.
• Vehicles: name, make, model, model year and licence plate, plus per-year odometer readings.
• Set-aside entries: date, amount and note.
• Preferences: light or dark theme, accent colour, notification choices.

Receipt photographs

When you attach a receipt, the app uses your camera or photo library — with your permission, requested at the moment you tap — and uploads the image to private storage in your cloud account, filed under your user ID. Only your signed-in account can read it. Deleting the expense deletes the image.

The image is uploaded as your device produced it. Photos can carry embedded metadata such as the time and the GPS position where the picture was taken, and ShiftTally does not currently strip it. If that matters to you, turn off location for your camera app before photographing receipts.

Your account

Signing up requires an email address and a password. Your password is handled and stored by our backend provider in hashed form; ShiftTally never sees it and never stores it on your device. Verification and password reset use a six-digit code sent to your email.

Your device keeps a session token so you stay signed in, and the user ID that ties your records to you. Your email address is used to sign you in, to verify the account and to recover it — not for marketing.

Subscription and payment

Subscriptions are sold and billed by Apple through your App Store account. Payment happens inside Apple's system: ShiftTally never receives your card details, your Apple ID or your billing address.

What the app receives is the answer to one question — whether this account currently has an active subscription, and which one. That answer is stored with your settings so the app opens correctly on a second device and while offline.

Notifications

Reminders about detected drives and GST/HST filing deadlines are scheduled by your own device and delivered by it. There is no push server and no push token: nobody outside your phone knows a notification was sent or opened. Declining the notification permission only means those reminders do not appear.

Analytics

The iOS and Android apps contain no analytics: no usage events are collected or transmitted.

The browser version can load PostHog product analytics, but only when it is opened with the specific parameters used for development previews — which includes session replay of that preview. A normal install never enables it.

Maps in the browser

If you view a map in the browser version and switch to the satellite or terrain style, map tiles are fetched from Esri ArcGIS Online and OpenTopoMap. Those requests tell the tile provider which part of the map you are looking at, and are subject to that provider's own privacy policy. The standard map style and the iOS and Android maps do not use them.

Who else handles your data

Only the services that are needed to run the app:

• Our cloud backend, which hosts the database that stores your records, the private storage that holds your receipts, and the sign-in system.
• Apple, for subscription billing and, on iOS, the on-device location and geocoding services.
• Google Play services, on Android, for device location.
• PostHog and the two map tile providers, in the browser version and only in the narrow cases described above.

How long it is kept

Your records are kept until you delete them. That is deliberate: the CRA can ask a self-employed driver to support a claim for six years after the end of the tax year it relates to, and a logbook that quietly expired would be worse than none.

Deleting a drive, receipt or income entry removes it from your device and from the cloud on the next sync.

Deleting your account

The Tax tab has a Delete Account option. It removes your receipt images, then every row we hold — drives, expenses, income, set-asides, vehicles, odometer years and settings — then your sign-in itself, and finally clears the copy on your device. It cannot be undone and there is no backup we can restore from, so export your report first if you may need it.

Deleting your account does not cancel an App Store subscription. Cancel that in your device's subscription settings.

Security

Everything that leaves your device travels over an encrypted connection. In the database, row-level security ties every record to your user ID, so one account cannot read another's. Receipts are stored privately and reached through short-lived signed links, never a public address.

On your device, records are held in the app's own storage, protected by the operating system and by your device passcode. No system is perfect, and we will tell affected users if we ever become aware of a breach that puts their records at risk.

Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) and comparable provincial legislation you may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, withdraw consent for optional collection such as location, and ask for it to be erased.

Most of this you can do yourself: the app shows every record it holds, lets you edit or delete any of them, exports the lot as PDF or CSV, and deletes the account outright. For anything else, or to complain about how your information was handled, write to shifttally@mpoweredstudio.com.

Children

ShiftTally is a tool for self-employed adults and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who receives it, the updated date at the top will change and the new version will ship with an app update. Continuing to use ShiftTally after that means accepting the revised policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your information: shifttally@mpoweredstudio.com.