Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2, 2026

Ontario Severance (ontarioseverance.ca) is a free educational tool about Ontario employment law. This page explains what information we collect, why, where it is stored, who we share it with, and what you can do about it. Questions: support@ontarioseverance.ca.

What we collect

AI chat: the questions you ask and the answers, saved as conversations.
Documents you upload to the chat or the calculator (PDF, Word or images), and the review of them.
Severance calculator: your age, the months you started and stopped working, your pay (salary or hourly rate, bonus and other pay, whether you had benefits), position, job title, industry, how your employment ended, your answers about your contract's termination clause, a union, a federally regulated employer, being recruited and a mass termination, your employer's size, and the estimate; if you enter one, the package your employer offered (amount, the date to sign by, whether it asks for a release); and if you ask us to email you the result, the address you gave and when we sent it.
Consultation requests: your name, email, phone number if you give one, the description of your situation, and any optional details you add (employer, years employed, status, urgency, how to reach you, the offer you received and its deadline, your last day of work), and the emails our team sends you about your request, kept with it.
Contact form: your name, email address and message. We email you a short confirmation that doesn't repeat your message.
Account: if you sign in, your email address, name and a user ID from Google sign-in or email and password (Firebase Authentication). You can use the calculator and the chat without an account.
Usage and technical data: pages visited and features used, through Google Analytics, which uses cookies and similar identifiers; and your IP address, browser and the time of each request, which our servers log and use to apply daily usage limits.
Ad measurement: the Meta Pixel, from Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram), tells Meta which of our pages you visit and whether you ran a calculation, started a chat, uploaded a document or sent a request, never what you entered, typed or uploaded. Meta links this to your Facebook or Instagram account if you have one, using cookies and similar identifiers, so we can see which of our ads bring people to the site and Meta can show them to people likely to find the site useful. Pages whose address holds a search or an access link, and our admin pages, are not reported.
Bot protection: when you run a calculation, send a chat message or document, search court cases or send a form, Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise (through Firebase App Check) checks that the request comes from this site and not from an automated program. It collects information about your browser and device and how you use the page, and sends it to Google, under Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
On your device: a random session ID that keeps your conversations yours without an account, your light or dark mode choice and the width of the side panel, in your browser's local storage.

How we use it

To answer your questions, analyze your documents and calculate your estimate.
To email you your result when you ask. We send that one email only and don't add your address to any list.
To show you your conversations and saved checks again later.
To reply to your request to be contacted and help you find an Ontario employment lawyer, and to answer your messages.
To keep the service running and secure, prevent abuse, and learn which features help so we can improve them.

We don't sell your information. Nothing you type, upload or enter in the calculator is used for advertising; only the ad measurement described above is.

AI processing

Your chat messages, uploaded documents and calculator details are sent to Google's Gemini models on Google Cloud (Vertex AI) to produce the answers, analyses and estimates. Google processes them for us as a service provider and, under its Google Cloud terms, does not use them to train its models. The answers are generated automatically and can be wrong: they are information, not legal advice.

When you upload a photo or a scanned document, its text is also read by Google Cloud Vision, so we can check each value we read (a date, your salary, the offer) against the words in your document and mark any we couldn't confirm.

Who we share it with

Google (Google Cloud and Firebase), which hosts the service and stores the data, Google Analytics, and reCAPTCHA Enterprise.
Meta Platforms, through the Meta Pixel described above, under Meta's Privacy Policy.
Postmark (ActiveCampaign), which delivers the emails we send: results you ask us to email, consultation request and contact form confirmations, our team's replies to a request to be contacted, the notifications our team receives about them, and account emails such as email confirmation and password reset. It receives the recipient's address and the content of each email.
For a request to be contacted: our team, by email; and an Ontario employment lawyer, only if you tick the box on the form asking us to pass your request on, or agree to it later by email. The lawyer receives your contact details, what you told us and your estimate. You can withdraw by replying to our email.
Anyone the law requires us to disclose information to.

Where it is stored

In Google Cloud and Firebase data centres in the United States, and for emails, with Postmark, also in the United States. What the Meta Pixel reports is kept by Meta, which stores data in the United States and other countries. Information stored there is subject to US law, and may be accessed by US authorities under that law.

How long we keep it

We keep conversations, uploaded documents, saved checks and consultation requests until you ask us to erase them. You can delete a conversation or a severance check from the Recent list in the sidebar, and signed-in users can delete their documents from the Documents page; deleting a conversation also removes the documents you uploaded in it. What you delete disappears from your account and the site at once, and we keep a record of it for audit and security purposes. To have your data erased for good, including your account, email us. Server logs are kept for 30 days.

Your choices and rights

You can ask to see, correct or delete the personal information we hold about you by emailing support@ontarioseverance.ca. We answer within 30 days.
You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings; the site works without analytics cookies. Clearing your browser's storage ends your anonymous session, and the conversations it held can no longer be opened.
The Meta Pixel doesn't load in a browser that sends a Global Privacy Control signal. You can also control how Meta uses such information in your Facebook ad preferences.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Court decisions that name you

The Court Cases pages summarize decisions that Ontario courts have published. Each page gives the decision's citation, a summary and a link to the full text on CanLII, and search engines can list it. A person's name is shown as an initial ("M. v. ConCreate USL Limited Partnership"), in the page, its title and its address, so that searching for a name doesn't bring up the page. Organizations are named in full. A small number of leading cases, which lawyers and courts refer to by a party's name, keep that name.

If you are a person named in one of these decisions and want its page taken off this site, email support@ontarioseverance.ca with the page's address. We take the page down. The decision then no longer appears in our lists or our search, and isn't used in new chat answers or estimates. We ask Google to drop the page from its results; other search engines drop it as they revisit the site. We answer within a couple of days.

So that the decision isn't published here again, we keep its reference on a list, without your name. We use your email only to handle your request.

We can't change the decision itself. Courts publish their decisions, and CanLII and other legal publishers carry them: taking our page down doesn't remove the decision from those places.

Security

Information is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and at rest in Google Cloud, and only Ontario Severance administrators can access stored data. No system is perfectly secure, so don't upload information you don't need to share, such as your Social Insurance Number or banking details.

Children

Ontario Severance is meant for working adults and is not directed at children under 16.

Changes to this policy

When our practices change, we update this page and the date at the top.