Privacy

What we collect

Viewing inquiries. When you request a viewing we receive what you put in the form: your name, email address, phone number, preferred move-in month, number of occupants, and your message. It is stored in our database and the owners are notified privately.

Tenant accounts. Accounts exist only for our tenants and are created by the owners. An account holds what the tenancy needs: your contact details, your lease, rent records and receipts, repair requests, messages with the owners, and documents shared either way. If you give us a guarantor, we hold their name and contact details too.

Rental pre-qualification references. Before an account is created, an owner may invite an applicant to confirm their name, email and phone number and to share one or two parent or guarantor references. The applicant confirms they have permission to share each contact. Each reference receives a separate private link and confirms their own contact details, residential address and permission for us to use those details for the rental reference and, if the application is approved, onboarding. They may also answer a short set of reference questions, add an optional note and acknowledge that a separate Guarantee Agreement would follow if the application proceeds. The answers and acknowledgment are shared with owners in the same Keyhold portfolio, including by email, solely to support each owner's own reference decision. An owner may contact the reference. We do not use this process for automatic decisions or scoring.

Signing in and notifications. We keep what your sign-in needs: your password (stored only as a hash, never readable), any passkeys you register, and, if you use Google to sign in, the Google email linked to your account. We also keep your notification preferences and, if you turn on push notifications, the browser subscription that delivers them.

The mobile app. Our iPhone app signs in to the same account and shows the same records as the portal; it collects nothing beyond what this page already describes, with two additions. If you turn on notifications, Apple issues the device a delivery token and the app stores it with a random installation identifier so we can send your notifications and stop sending them when you sign out. And Apple can share anonymous crash and performance reports about the app with us; before anything is kept, the app strips every name, path, and free-form text from those reports, so they describe the app's behaviour, never yours.

Signing records. When a lease or notice is signed through the portal, we keep the drawn signature along with the time, network address, and browser it was signed from. That record is what makes the signed document dependable, so it stays with the document.

Rent paid by e-transfer. When rent arrives by Interac e-transfer, the bank's notification email lands in the owners' own mailbox. An owner can connect that mailbox to Keyhold with read-only access (Google's gmail.readonly permission); Keyhold then reads those deposit notifications, which carry the sender's name and the amount, to mark rent received, and notices when a guarantor has replied to a guarantee request. Connecting stores a long-lived access credential for that mailbox on our server. This applies to the owners' inboxes only, it is never connected to a tenant's mailbox, and it never sends, changes, or deletes mail.

Server logs. Like almost every website, our server keeps routine technical logs (network address, page requested, time). We use them only to keep the site working and secure.

What we don't do

• No advertising and no analytics trackers, from us or anyone else.
• We never sell your information or share it with third parties for their own use.
• Browsing the public site sets no cookies at all.

If an application is approved or withdrawn

If an owner approves an application, they may create a tenant account and carry the confirmed applicant and guarantor details into that account and tenancy record. A private summary is retained for the owners' file. If a request is not pursued, an owner can revoke the active request and its private links expire automatically. How long we keep a record depends on whether the application proceeds and any legal or recordkeeping need. Contact us using the details below if you want to ask about access, correction or deletion of information we hold.

Cookies

The public site sets no cookies. The portal uses five, all essential and none used for tracking:

• kh_session keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. It holds your account id, role, and name, signed so it cannot be altered.
• kh_oauth lives for up to 10 minutes while a Google sign-in completes.
• kh_chal lives for up to 5 minutes while a passkey is registered or used.
• kh_gmail_oauth lives for up to 10 minutes while an owner connects a deposit mailbox (owners only; it is never set for tenants or visitors).
• kh-theme remembers your light or dark appearance choice for up to one year.

Only kh-theme is readable by page scripts, so the appearance switch can update immediately. The other four are not readable by page scripts, and none records what you browse.

Where your information lives

Your records live on a single private server we rent and run ourselves in a data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, in the United States. Encrypted backup copies of the database and uploaded documents are kept with Cloudflare, an American cloud provider: a continuously updated copy we can restore from covering the last three days, and nightly snapshots kept for about two months. Because Canadian tax law requires business records to be kept in Canada, we also refresh a weekly copy of those records onto our own machine at our home office in Ontario. The backups and that copy contain the same records as the server, so everything on this page about what we hold applies to them too. Records removed from the server age out of the backups, and because each weekly refresh mirrors the most recent nightly snapshot, a removed record leaves the Ontario copy at the first refresh after a snapshot has recorded the removal, about a week at the longest. We remain responsible for your information in all of those copies.

A few things also pass through outside providers, and we send each one only what its job needs: if you sign in with Google, Google handles that sign-in and confirms your email to us; if an owner connects a deposit mailbox, Google provides the read-only mailbox access described above; push notifications travel through your browser's push service as an encrypted payload; email notifications pass through our email provider; text messages pass through Twilio with the phone number and message text. Each provider handles that data under its own terms, the same way any email or text you send does.

How long we keep it

When you send a viewing inquiry, three copies come to exist: the inquiry itself, a short notification to each owner inside Keyhold, and an email to the owners. The inquiry and the notifications are deleted together by a sweep the owners run every quarter, which removes anything more than nine months old, so nothing reaches twelve months after our last contact about the home. The email copies sit in the owners' own mailboxes and are cleared by hand on the same schedule.

Tenancy, rent, and signing records are kept for the tenancy and up to 7 years after it ends, then deleted; the same quarterly sweep reviews them, so in practice they go a little earlier. Push subscriptions last until you turn them off or they stop working. Server logs are capped at 90 days, and backups expire on the rotations described above. The full schedule, including how each kind of record is disposed of, is written down in our retention procedure and followed by the owners.

Your choices

You can ask what we hold about you, how it has been used, and who it has been shared with. You can ask us to correct it or delete it, and we will unless the record is one the law requires us to keep. Alima Ali is responsible for privacy at Keyhold Homes; either owner can help:

• Alima Ali

  (647) 230-7731

• Adam Ali

  (416) 912-9822

You can also write to us by mail: Alima Ali, 3055 Prentiss Road, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 3W7. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can raise it with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Changes

If how we handle information changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.