Privacy Policy

Your assessment answers. The questionnaire asks about your age, citizenship and where you live, your immigration status and history, your education, language test scores, work experience, family situation, settlement funds, and admissibility-related questions. We collect this because those are the factors the published immigration criteria actually use — each step explains why it asks. You choose what to enter, and you can leave questions unanswered.

Your account details, if you create one. Your email address, whether it has been verified, the date you agreed to this policy and which version, and a record of your sign-in sessions. Each session record includes the IP address and browser or app the session was created from, so we can show you your own sessions and end them.

If you sign in with Google (or Apple, where it is offered) instead of an email link, we store the account identifier that provider gives us and your verified email, so that sign-in resolves to the same PathwayCheck account as your email link. We do not keep the access or identity tokens the provider issues at sign-in: PathwayCheck never calls a Google or Apple service on your behalf, so it has no use for them, and they are discarded rather than stored.

Your purchase. If you buy results, we record that your account paid and the Stripe references for the payment (checkout session, payment intent, charge, customer and price identifiers), the amount, the currency, the date, and whether it was later refunded or disputed.

What you choose to keep. Assessments you save, pathways you choose to track — including the status you set, the checklist items you tick and any notes you write — and your preferences about update notices.

Technical records. Our hosting provider processes the ordinary information any web request carries, such as your IP address, the page requested and timing, and keeps short-lived security and delivery logs. Our own application logs record which endpoint ran, how long it took and whether it succeeded; your answers, your email address and your financial figures are excluded from them by design.

Product milestones. For signed-in accounts we record a few moments in the journey, once each, so we can see whether the product works: an assessment was started, an assessment was completed, a checkout was started, a checkout converted (and whether that was a paid purchase or a free promotion — so we can tell a sale from a no-charge promo code), and results were generated and provided. The “results were provided” moment is what our refund policy turns on; it records only that they were provided, never any part of what they said. These are counts we hold ourselves. There is no advertising or analytics service on this site, and no third-party tracking. If you arrive from a campaign link, the campaign tags in the address (the utm_ values) are kept on your device and sent only when you start a checkout, so a sale can be attributed — never any personal or assessment information.

• Your card number, or any payment credential. Those are entered on Stripe's own checkout page and never reach our servers.
• A password. Signing in uses a one-time link emailed to you, so there is no applicant password for us to store or for anyone to steal.
• Uploaded documents. PathwayCheck asks whether you have a document, never for the document itself. There is no upload anywhere in the product.
• Your information for advertising. We do not sell it, rent it, or share it with advertisers or data brokers.

While you answer the questionnaire without signing in, your answers are kept in your browser's local storage on your own device so that a refresh or a closed tab does not lose them. They are not sent to us. Submitting clears that draft; “Start over” clears your answers back to a blank assessment.

After you submit, your results are held in that browser tab's session storage so the results page can display them. Session storage is cleared when you close the tab, and does not carry to another tab, device or visit.

If you arrive from a campaign link, the campaign tags in the address (the utm_ values only) are kept in your browser's local storage on your own device. They hold no personal or assessment information, are not a tracking cookie, and are sent to us only when you start a checkout, so that a sale can be attributed to the campaign.

In the iPhone and iPad app, the only thing stored on the device is your sign-in token, held in the iOS Keychain, marked as this device only and excluded from backups, plus a flag recording that you have seen the welcome screens. Signing out deletes the token. Your answers are not written to app storage.

Submitting an assessment does not create a record of it. The evaluation runs and the results are returned to you; the application does not retain a copy of your submitted assessment or its results afterwards. Two things are stored, and only for signed-in accounts:

• Your in-progress assessment. Once you are signed in, your current answers and your position in the questionnaire are saved to your account so you can continue on your phone, tablet or computer. This is what “Save & continue later” and cross-device resume use. One draft is kept per account, replaced as you go, and removed when you submit or start over.
• Assessments you explicitly save. If you choose Save on your results, we store that assessment's answers and its results snapshot with the versions they were produced under, so you can reopen them later. Nothing is saved automatically.

Account, consent, session, purchase, saved-assessment and tracked-pathway records are held in a dedicated applicant database, kept separate from the database of published government rules that powers the assessment itself.

We use a small number of service providers. Each one receives only what it needs to do its job.

• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the website and API. Processes request metadata such as IP address and timing.
• Neon — the managed Postgres database holding the account data described above.
• Stripe — payment processing. Stripe receives the payment details you enter on its own checkout page and your email address for the receipt; we receive references to the payment.
• Resend — sending your sign-in link and handling email sent to our support address.
• Google (and Apple, where it is offered) — verifying who you are when you choose to sign in with that provider instead of an email link. They confirm your identity to us; we keep only the account identifier and verified email needed to link the sign-in to your account, not the provider's tokens.
• Sentry — error monitoring in production. It receives error reports and the route that failed. It is configured with no session recording, no performance tracing, and no automatic collection of personal data.
• Apple — if you buy from the iPhone or iPad app, Apple processes that purchase under its own terms and tells us that a purchase was made; we never see your Apple payment details.

The applicant database is hosted in the United States (Amazon Web Services, US East). Our hosting, email, payment and error-monitoring providers operate internationally and may process information outside Canada. Information stored outside Canada can be subject to the laws of the country it is stored in. We tell you this plainly rather than implying Canadian-only storage: PathwayCheck is a Canadian company, but its infrastructure today is not exclusively in Canada.

The public pages — home, assessment, results, sample, glossary and the legal pages — set no cookies. If you sign in, one HTTP-only session cookie is set so you stay signed in; it is secure in production and is never used for tracking, analytics or advertising. Administrators signing in to the separate operations portal have their own session cookie, which is never set for a customer.

• Anonymous questionnaire answers: in your browser only, until you submit, start over or clear your browser data.
• Your in-progress assessment: until you submit it, start over, or delete your account.
• Saved assessments, tracked pathways and notes: until you delete them or delete your account.
• Account, consent and session records: until you delete your account. Sign-in links expire minutes after they are sent.
• Payment records and product-milestone counts: kept after account deletion, unlinked from you — a payment is a financial record of something that happened, and a milestone count carries no identifying information once the link is removed.
• Database backups: our database provider keeps a short point-in-time recovery window so the database can be restored after an incident. Deleted data can persist in that window until it passes.

You are not required to create an account to complete the questionnaire. Viewing pathway results requires a signed-in account and a one-time purchase. Unpaid answers stay in this browser.

When you ask for a sign-in link we send a one-time magic link to the address you enter and record your agreement to this policy. Your account, consent, sessions, saved assessments and purchase records live in the dedicated applicant database described above. There is no password.

Tracked pathways. If you track a pathway from a saved assessment, we store which pathway it is, its name and classification at the moment you tracked it, the status you set, which checklist items you have ticked, and any note you write. Notes are yours: nobody else reads them, we do not analyse them, and they never change your results. Tracking is your own record of what you are pursuing — it is not an application, it is not advice, and it does not submit anything to any government.

Update notices. If you track a pathway, PathwayCheck compares what your saved assessment recorded against what it records today and tells you when an official page behind that pathway has been re-checked or your assessment has aged. Those comparisons are worked out fresh each time and are not stored. What we store is your own choices about them: whether you want notices shown, whether you would want them by email, and which notices you dismissed and when. No update emails are sent today; that preference is recorded for a feature that does not exist yet, and the only email this service sends you is your sign-in link.

Viewing pathway results requires a signed-in account and a completed one-time purchase. The price is shown before you are sent to pay, the charge happens once, and it is not a subscription and does not renew. You can see what the results contain before buying on the sample result page.

Payment is processed by Stripe on Stripe's own checkout page. We do not store card numbers. We receive references to the payment so we can record that this account has paid and support a refund if one is needed.

Completing the questionnaire does not require payment, and a refund or chargeback re-locks results rather than deleting your account.

• You can use the whole questionnaire without an account and stop at any time.
• You can clear your browser's storage at any time to remove your local draft and last results.
• You can download everything your account holds as a JSON file from the Account page.
• You can delete your account from the Account page — see how to delete your account for the full process. Deletion is immediate and permanent: we hard-delete your account, consents, sessions, saved profile, saved assessments, tracked pathways, checklist items, notes, preferences and your paid access, with no anonymized stub kept. Two things survive, both unlinked from you and neither identifying: the payment record kept as a financial record of a transaction that happened, and the product-milestone counts described above.
• You can ask us about any of this, or ask us to correct something, by writing to support@pathwaycheck.ca.

Traffic to PathwayCheck is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Access to paid results is enforced on our servers on every request. Sign-in uses one-time links rather than passwords, session cookies are HTTP-only, and the operations portal administrators use has its own separate login with a second authentication factor. The evaluation endpoint validates its input and rate-limits requests to reduce misuse.

No system is perfectly secure, and PathwayCheck does not hold a security or privacy certification today — see Trust & security for what we do and do not claim. Please do not enter information you would not want stored, and tell us at support@pathwaycheck.ca if you believe you have found a problem.

Write to support@pathwaycheck.ca with any question about this policy or the information we hold about you. Our Contact page lists every way to reach us.

If what we do with your information changes, we update this page, its “Last updated” date and its version number, and ask you to agree again where that is the right thing to do. Past releases are listed in our version history.