Privacy Policy

There are two kinds, and they work quite differently:

We collect personal information for limited and identified purposes: to answer the messages you send us, to correct errors that readers report, to operate and secure the site, to understand in aggregate which pages are read and where they fall short so that we can improve them, and to meet our legal obligations. We do not use it to make decisions about you, we do not build individual profiles for targeting, and we do not sell your personal information.

We rely on your consent to collect and use personal information, and we ask for it in a way that suits how sensitive the information is. Sending us a message is express consent to use your contact details to reply to you. Continuing to browse the site with standard analytics and cookies operating is treated as implied consent for that limited purpose, and you can decline it through your browser settings as described below. You can withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal and contractual limits and reasonable notice, by using the form on our contact page. If you withdraw consent we may no longer be able to correspond with you, but you can continue to read the site.

The site uses cookies and similar technologies, some of which are necessary to serve pages and remember basic preferences such as your language, and some of which support aggregate analytics about how the site is used. Analytics tell us things like which guides are read and where people leave, not who you are as an individual. You can control all of this from your browser: most browsers let you block or delete cookies, clear stored site data, refuse third-party cookies, and send a do-not-track or global privacy control signal. Blocking cookies that are strictly necessary may stop parts of the site from displaying correctly.

This site links to other websites, including, when partner arrangements exist, providers we may be compensated for referring you to. Once you follow a link away from The Payday, you are on someone else's site, governed by their privacy policy and their practices, not ours. We do not control what they collect, how they use it, or how long they keep it, and we are not responsible for it. Please read the privacy policy of any provider before you give it personal or financial information.

We keep personal information only as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, or as long as we are required to keep it to meet a legal or accounting obligation. Correspondence is kept while it is useful for handling your question, for following up on a correction you reported, and for our own record of what was asked and answered. When personal information is no longer needed for any of those purposes, it is deleted or de-identified. If you want your correspondence deleted sooner, write to us and we will do so where no legal obligation requires us to keep it.

We protect personal information with safeguards appropriate to how sensitive it is, including encrypted connections to the site, access controls so that only people who need the information can reach it, reputable service providers for hosting and email, and keeping collection to a minimum in the first place. Minimal collection is the strongest safeguard we have: information we never collect cannot be exposed. That said, no method of transmitting or storing information over the internet is completely secure, so please do not send us anything sensitive by email.

Under Canadian federal privacy law you have rights over your personal information, and you can exercise them by writing to us:

The service providers we rely on for hosting, email and analytics may store or process information on servers located outside your province or outside Canada. Where that happens, the information may be subject to the laws of the country where it is held, including lawful access requests by the courts or authorities of that country. We choose providers that offer a comparable level of protection and we remain accountable for information we transfer to them for processing.

This site addresses borrowing and credit, which are adult matters, and it is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy as the site changes, as partner arrangements are put in place, or as our obligations change. The current version is always the one published on this page, and it carries a date so you can see when it was last revised. If a change materially affects how we handle your personal information, we will make that clear on the page rather than revising it silently.

For any privacy question, to exercise your access, correction, deletion or withdrawal rights, or to complain about how your personal information has been handled, use the form on our contact page. Please describe your request clearly so that we can identify the information you are asking about. We will acknowledge your request and respond within the time frame required by Canadian federal privacy law. If our answer does not satisfy you, you may take the matter to the applicable privacy regulator.