Privacy at Minute Notary.

This Privacy Policy explains how Minute Notary, a notary public office in Ottawa, Ontario, handles personal information collected through this website and during in-person, mobile, and remote online appointments. It applies to anyone who books an appointment, uploads a document, lists a signer, contacts the office, or otherwise interacts with the service.

We handle personal information in line with Canada's federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable Ontario law, including the duties that govern notaries public and commissioners for taking affidavits.

This Policy does not apply to anonymized or aggregated information that cannot identify you, or to third-party websites you reach through links from our pages. Those sites have their own privacy practices, and we encourage you to read them.

When you use our notary services, we may collect the following personal information:

• Personal contact information, including name, address, phone number, and email
• Signer details, including date of birth when needed for identity review
• Government-issued ID images or details used for verification
• Unsigned documents and completed notarized PDFs related to the appointment
• Appointment details, comments, service selection, stamp or seal count, and Google Meet attendance details
• Payment status, amount, currency, Stripe reference, and receipt information when applicable
• Website AI chat details, including the name and email you provide and the messages you submit

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide notarization services as requested
• Verify your identity as required by law
• Communicate with you and other listed signers about appointments
• Create Google Calendar invitations and Google Meet links for remote appointments
• Route appointment documents through controlled Google Drive folders
• Send confirmation and completed-document emails through the approved office email system
• Record payment status and receipts after Stripe confirms payment
• Answer website AI chat questions and follow up on chat enquiries when needed
• Maintain records as required by Ontario regulations
• Protect the service from fraud, misuse, double-booking, and unauthorized access

Under Canadian privacy law we collect, use, and disclose personal information with your consent, which may be express or implied depending on the sensitivity of the information and the context. Booking an appointment and uploading a document is treated as your consent to the handling described in this Policy. In practice we rely on the following grounds:

• Consent — for identity verification, storing your appointment files, and contacting the signers you list.
• Performance of our service — to do the notarial work you have asked for, schedule the appointment, and take payment.
• Legal and professional duty — to meet the record-keeping and identity-verification obligations Ontario places on notaries and commissioners.
• Legitimate operation of the service — to prevent fraud, secure accounts, and resolve disputes or support requests.

You can withdraw consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual limits. Withdrawing consent may mean we can no longer complete a notarization or keep serving you, and it does not affect records we are legally required to retain. To withdraw consent, contact the office using the details below.

Remote online appointments use the website for intake, upload, scheduling, review, and payment. The operational work is handled with trusted providers:

• Google Drive stores unsigned documents, signer ID photos, pending appointment files, and completed PDFs in appointment-specific folders.
• Google Calendar and Google Meet are used to book the appointment, invite the client and listed signers, and host the remote meeting.
• Gmail or the approved office email system sends appointment confirmations and completed-document delivery messages.
• Stripe handles card and wallet payment details, including Google Pay where available. This website stores only the booking payment status and Stripe reference.

Remote service is available only when the document, signer identity review, video meeting, and the notary's professional judgement allow it. Some documents may still require an in-person appointment or manual review.

We use administrative, technical, and operational safeguards to protect personal information. Connections to this website are encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Access to booking files is limited to authorized notary/admin users. Admin accounts are password-protected and support two-factor authentication, and sensitive actions such as file view, resend, delivery, and status changes are logged.

Online forms are protected against automated abuse by Cloudflare Turnstile. Electronic signing normally takes place on our own website, and each completed document is sealed with a tamper-evident “Verified by Minute Notary” digital signature and an independent, trusted timestamp so later changes can be detected. If our own signing system is temporarily unavailable, we may fall back to a trusted third-party e-signature provider (SignNow) so a signing can still be completed. No safeguard is perfect; if a breach affecting your personal information occurs, we will respond and notify you as required by law.

Appointment files are not stored in public website media storage. Blog images, frontend assets, and other public website media may use Cloudflare R2, but online booking documents, ID photos, and completed notarized PDFs are routed through Google Drive.

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer your personal information to third parties for marketing. We may share information only when required by law, with your consent, with another signer you listed for the appointment, or with the service providers needed to operate the booking, payment, meeting, file storage, signing, and email workflow. Those providers may process information only for us:

• Stripe — processes card and wallet payments. This website stores only the payment status and Stripe reference, never full card numbers.
• Google Workspace (Drive, Calendar, Meet, and email) — stores appointment files, schedules and hosts remote meetings, and delivers confirmation and completed-document emails.
• Independent timestamp authority — electronic signing runs on our own website, and a completed document is sealed here. Only a one-way fingerprint (hash) of the document is sent to an independent timestamp authority to certify the date and time; the document itself and your personal information are never sent.
• SignNow — a third-party e-signature provider used only as a backup if our own signing system is temporarily unavailable, so a signing can still be completed.
• Cloudflare — provides the Turnstile anti-abuse check and R2 storage for public website assets such as blog images.
• Microsoft Clarity — provides strictly masked, cookie-free page interaction analytics, heatmaps, and session replay so we can improve website usability. We do not connect Clarity to advertising or Google Analytics.
• Anthropic — processes the messages you submit to the website AI chat assistant to generate its replies. Minute Notary stores the name and email collected by the chat for follow-up and transcript attribution; the application does not intentionally include those identity fields in the model prompt.
• Oracle Cloud (OCI Vault) — holds the private key that seals completed documents inside a hardware security module. Only a one-way fingerprint (hash) of the document is sent for sealing; the document itself and your personal information never leave our systems.
• Log storage (VictoriaLogs) — receives operational and security logs so we can run and safeguard the service. Logs are scrubbed of personal information (emails, phone numbers, names, addresses, dates of birth, and IP addresses are masked or removed) before they are sent.
• Discord — used for internal team notifications.

The office is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and your notarial records stay under our control here. Some of the trusted providers above (for example Stripe, Google, Cloudflare, Microsoft Clarity, Oracle Cloud, Discord, and SignNow when used as a signing backup) operate data centres in the United States and other countries. Anthropic also processes AI chat messages on our behalf. As a result, limited personal information may be processed or stored outside Canada; provider locations and subprocessors can change over time.

When information is handled outside your province or country, it may be subject to the laws of those places, including lawful access by their courts and authorities. We use providers that offer contractual and technical safeguards for the information they process on our behalf. By using the online booking service, you consent to this processing and storage.

This website uses a small number of cookies and similar browser storage. We keep them to the minimum needed to run the site and understand, in aggregate, how it is used:

• Essential cookies — keep you signed in to an account, remember a booking in progress, and support security checks such as Cloudflare Turnstile. The site cannot work properly without these.
• First-party analytics — on our own systems, we keep aggregate page activity and bounded first- and last-touch context (such as source category, campaign label, landing-page category, language, and booking-funnel stage). We do not store the referring URL, full query string, IP address, contact details, or browser fingerprint in these records.
• Microsoft Clarity — we use cookie-free behavioral analytics, heatmaps, and page-level session replay to understand navigation and usability. Clarity is configured with strict masking so page text and user-entered content are masked before transmission, advertising storage is denied, and visits are not linked across sessions. Microsoft still receives limited interaction and technical usage data needed to provide the service.
• Embedded providers — pages that load Stripe or a security check may set their own cookies needed for those features to function.

We do not use cookies to sell your information or to build advertising profiles. Analytics collection is disabled when your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, and the site also supports an analytics opt-out that covers both our first-party metrics and Microsoft Clarity. You can block or delete cookies and browser storage through your browser settings, though some essential features, such as signing in or completing a booking, may stop working if you do.

We keep personal information only as long as needed for the service, legal records, accounting, fraud prevention, and dispute handling. For an unconfirmed online booking, form details may remain available in the same browser for up to 24 hours after your last successful booking activity. Uploaded unsigned documents and ID images on that unconfirmed draft are removed after 6 hours of inactivity. If the form details are still available after the files expire, you must upload the files again before continuing.

When an unconfirmed draft is removed, we keep a short summary of the enquiry so we can follow up and help you complete the booking. That summary is limited to your name, email address, phone number, the service and options you selected, and how far you got in the form. It does notinclude your date of birth, your home or service address, other signers' details, your uploaded documents, or your ID images — those are deleted as described above and are not recreated.

Your contact details in that summary are kept for a maximum of 2 days after your last activity on the form. After that we mask them permanently: we keep only an initial of each part of your name, the first letter of your email address with its domain, and the area code of your phone number — for example P•• C•••••, p••@example.com, 613•••••••. Masking cannot be undone, and anything you typed into the free-text comment box is deleted at the same time. Once masked, the record can no longer be used to contact or identify you.

The masked summary — the service you chose, how far you got, and where you arrived from — is kept for up to 12 months so we can count how many enquiries were started and see where the booking form loses people. You can ask us to delete the summary at any time.

Once a booking is confirmed, payment evidence, audit records, protected customer originals, identity-verification records, signed documents, and notarial records follow their separate legal and operational retention rules. Disposable post-booking working copies may be removed from Google Drive after a short period, currently up to 7 days. Records we are required to keep are retained for the longer periods required by Ontario law and notarial practice so we can meet regulatory, dispute, and audit obligations.

Website AI chat messages are scrubbed of detectable personal details before they are stored, and chat conversations are automatically deleted after about 30 days.

Under Canadian privacy law you have rights over the personal information we hold about you. Depending on the circumstances, you can:

• Ask whether we hold personal information about you, and request access to it
• Ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete
• Withdraw your consent to future uses, subject to legal and contractual limits
• Ask us to delete information that is no longer needed, where no law requires us to keep it

To exercise any of these rights, contact the office using the details below. We may need to verify your identity before we respond, and we will reply within the time Canadian privacy law allows. Some requests may be limited or refused where the law requires it, for example where releasing information would reveal another person's personal information or where we must retain a notarial record.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices, the tools we use, or the law. When we do, we revise the “Last updated” date shown at the top of this page. For significant changes, we will take reasonable steps to highlight them. Continuing to use the website or our services after an update means you accept the revised Policy.