Privacy policy
Last updated
This site is run from Quebec, Canada. This policy follows Quebec’s Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, as amended by Law 25, and applies to all readers, wherever they live.
Who is responsible
The person in charge of protecting personal information is the site owner. Contact: contact@outagehouse.com.
What we collect today
- No account, no newsletter, no comment form. We do not ask for your name or email.
- Emails you send us. Messages to contact@outagehouse.com pass through Cloudflare Email Routing, which forwards them to a Gmail mailbox (Google). Cloudflare says it does not store or read the messages themselves, but its activity log shows us the sender, recipient, subject, date and spam checks of each message. Cloudflare and Google may process this information outside Quebec (see the Google privacy policy). Our replies are sent from that Gmail mailbox, so they show its address. We use your message only to answer you and, if you report an error, to correct our guides (see Retention below).
- No tracking cookies. We do not use advertising cookies, and our visit counter (below) does not use cookies to track you.
- Server logs. Our host, Cloudflare, records technical data such as your IP address and browser type to deliver the site and block attacks. Our Cloudflare dashboard can show us a sample of these requests (IP address, browser, country, page) and totals such as the number of requests from search-engine and AI robots. We use them to keep the site working and secure and to see which robots read it. Cloudflare may process this data outside Quebec. See the Cloudflare privacy policy.
- Fonts and styles are served from our own site, and your browser does not contact Google when you read a page. It does contact Cloudflare: the visit counter script loads from static.cloudflareinsights.com (see How we count visits), and if a page or file fails to load, your browser may send an automatic error report to Cloudflare.
- Your choices on the page. If you switch Outage mode on or off, your browser stores that choice on your device only. The rooms you tap on the home page, the appliances you pick in the calculator and the boxes you tick on an outage card are not stored or sent anywhere.
How we count visits
We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see how many people read the site and which guides help them. It works through a small script that Cloudflare adds to each page.
- What it measures: which pages are viewed, the website that sent you here (if any), your country, your type of device (computer, phone or tablet), your browser and operating system, how you reached the page (link, reload or back button), and how fast the page loads and responds. Cloudflare works out your country from your IP address (Cloudflare analytics FAQ).
- What we see: in these visit reports, totals only, for example the number of visits from Canada in a week. The reports do not show who you are and do not follow you from page to page.
- What Cloudflare says about it: Cloudflare states that Web Analytics “does not collect or use your visitors’ personal data” (documentation). When it launched the tool in 2020, it said the tool does not use cookies or local storage to track visitors and does not “fingerprint” them through their IP address or browser details (announcement). Its FAQ says it does not log the part of a web address after a “?” (FAQ).
- European Union: we set the tool so that it does not run for visitors in the European Union.
- Where the data goes: Cloudflare may process it outside Quebec; it says it mainly stores data in the United States and the European Economic Area. Its privacy policy applies.
If we find that this tool stores anything on your device, we will update this policy.
If we add other tools later
If we ever add a tool that can identify you, locate you or build a profile of you (for example Google Analytics or advertising tags), it will stay off until you turn it on yourself (for example through a consent banner), as Law 25 requires. This policy will be updated before that happens.
Links to sellers
Today our guides do not link to sellers. If we add such links later, clicking one takes you off this site and the seller’s privacy policy applies; the seller may set its own cookies. We have not joined any affiliate program (see our affiliate disclosure); if we do, those cookies are how a seller would credit us with a commission.
Your rights
You can ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, and withdraw a consent you gave. Write to contact@outagehouse.com; we answer within 30 days. If we refuse a request to see or correct your information, or do not answer within 30 days, you can ask the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec to examine the disagreement, within 30 days of our refusal or of the end of those 30 days. For anything else, you can file a written complaint with the Commission about our practices at any time.
Retention
We keep messages you send us, and our replies, for as long as needed to answer them, and no longer than 12 months; after we delete them, they stay in the mailbox’s trash for up to 30 days. Cloudflare decides how long it keeps its email activity log; see its privacy policy. Cloudflare keeps detailed visit-counter data for 7 days, then keeps it only in aggregated form (FAQ); we can view the last six months. The request samples in our Cloudflare dashboard cover up to the last 31 days.