Privacy policy.

This policy explains how Crown Stack Systems (“we,” “us,” “ShieldID”) collects, uses, discloses, retains and protects personal information through the ShieldID identity verification service and the myshieldid.com website (also reached at shieldid.ca and myshieldid.ca). It is written to reflect what the product actually does today, and we update it, and the date above, as the service and our legal review progress.

ShieldID is generally used in two ways. A business (a “customer”) integrates ShieldID to verify the identity of its own applicants, customers, tenants or clients (the “applicant”). In that relationship, the customer decides what verification to run and why, and is responsible for its own privacy notice to its applicants; ShieldID processes personal information on the customer's behalf to deliver the verification. Separately, if you visit this website, fill out a contact form, or create a sandbox account yourself, we are directly responsible for that information as described below.

1. Accountability

Crown Stack Systems is accountable for personal information under our control, including information transferred to third parties for processing. Questions, access requests and complaints go to the contact address at the end of this policy and are handled by the person responsible for privacy compliance at Crown Stack Systems.

Where we use other companies to help provide the service — for example, infrastructure or communications providers — we remain responsible for the personal information we share with them, and we expect them to protect it to a standard consistent with this policy.

2. Identifying purposes

We identify why we collect personal information before or at the time we collect it. For an identity verification, that purpose is: to confirm the applicant's identity by reading their government ID, matching a live face to the document photo, confirming a real person is present (liveness), and reporting fraud and document-tamper signals, so the requesting business can make its own decision.

• To perform the specific verification the customer requested (document reading, face match, liveness, fraud signals).
• To deliver the result to the customer that requested it, by API response, webhook and dashboard.
• To maintain the Activity Ledger — Trust Ledger's append-only record — for customers integrated with Trust Ledger; equivalent ledger entries for a standalone ShieldID API account are coming soon.
• To operate, secure, support and bill for the service, including detecting fraud or abuse of the platform itself.
• For visitors to this website: to respond to a contact form submission, or to operate a sandbox developer account you create yourself.

3. Consent

Meaningful consent is obtained before an applicant's personal information is collected for verification, through the verification flow itself and, in the underlying business relationship, through the customer's own arrangement with its applicant. If a customer is requesting identity verification of its applicants, the customer is responsible for ensuring it has a lawful basis and appropriate consent to do so under its own privacy notice — ShieldID is not a party to that underlying relationship and does not provide legal advice on what consent your specific use case requires.

You may withdraw consent at any time, subject to legal or contractual restrictions, by contacting us or the business that requested your verification; withdrawing consent may mean a verification cannot be completed or a service cannot be provided.

4. Limiting collection

We collect only the personal information a verification's stated purpose requires: the information printed and encoded on a submitted government ID (name, date of birth, document number, expiry, address where present), a photo and liveness capture of the applicant's face, and the technical information needed to run and record the check (such as which checks ran and their outcome). We do not collect more than the verification needs, and an unfamiliar or non-standard document is read for what it contains rather than used as a reason to request additional, unrelated information.

5. Limiting use, disclosure and retention

We use personal information only for the purposes identified above, and disclose it only to the customer that requested the verification and to service providers who need it to help us operate the platform, unless we are required or permitted by law to disclose it otherwise (for example, in response to a valid legal request). We do not sell applicants' personal information, and we do not use it to train models.

Retention is the area where we can be most concrete. ID images — the document and selfie photos captured during verification — are purged automatically on a short timer, seven days by default, by an automated process that runs on an hourly schedule. The verification record itself (that a check happened, and its outcome) is retained separately, for as long as necessary to provide the service, support the customer's own recordkeeping and compliance needs, and meet our own legal and operational obligations; it is not kept indefinitely by design, but a specific fixed deletion date for that record has not yet been finalized. Per-account, configurable retention settings for a customer's own verification records are planned and not yet available.

6. Accuracy

We aim to keep personal information as accurate and complete as the identification purpose requires. Because ShieldID reads fields from multiple independent sources on a document (the printed face, the barcode, and, for passports, the machine-readable zone) and cross-checks them against each other, a discrepancy between sources is reported as its own signal rather than silently resolved. If you believe information we hold about you is inaccurate, see “Individual access,” below.

7. Safeguards

We protect personal information with safeguards appropriate to its sensitivity. ID images and an applicant's date of birth are encrypted at rest; traffic to our service is encrypted in transit; access to secrets and credentials used by our systems is centralized and access-controlled rather than scattered through code or configuration. We limit who can access verification data to what their role requires. No system is perfectly secure, and we continue to invest in these safeguards as the service grows.

8. Openness

This policy is published openly at myshieldid.com/privacy, in plain language, so you don't need to be a lawyer to understand how we handle personal information. If anything here is unclear, contact us and we'll do our best to explain it in plainer terms still.

9. Individual access

You may ask us what personal information we hold about you, how it has been used, and to whom it has been disclosed, subject to limited exceptions permitted by law. If you were verified through ShieldID by a business you have a direct relationship with (for example, a landlord or a lender), we recommend starting with that business, since they hold the underlying relationship and can usually resolve most requests directly. You can also contact us directly at the address at the end of this policy; a fully self-service, applicant-facing view of your own verification history is planned and not yet available, so today we handle these requests by hand. We acknowledge every request and respond within the time PIPEDA allows, which is thirty days unless the law permits an extension.

10. Challenging compliance

If you believe we have not complied with this policy or with PIPEDA, you may submit a complaint to us at the contact details below, and we will investigate and respond. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may escalate your complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. If you are a resident of Quebec, you may also contact the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec.

A note for Quebec residents: Law 25

Quebec's Law 25 sets additional, generally stricter requirements on top of PIPEDA for organizations handling the personal information of Quebec residents, with particular attention to biometric information — which is directly relevant to face matching and liveness detection. We are working through what Law 25 requires specifically for ShieldID, including the privacy impact assessment and any biometric-specific disclosure, and we will update this section as that work completes. Until then, a Quebec customer should treat biometric verification of Quebec residents as requiring its own Law 25 review.

Cookies and this website

The myshieldid.com marketing site is a static website. We do not run third-party advertising or analytics scripts on it. It may use your browser's local storage to remember a display preference, such as light or dark mode; that information stays on your device and is never sent to us. If you submit the contact form, the information you enter is sent to our contact-handling service to route your message to us.

Where your information is stored

Identity verification data is processed and stored on our own servers in Canada: self-managed hardware on a private network, not a public cloud provider. We do not move applicants' verification data outside Canada to provide the service. If that ever changes, this section will say so before it does.

Children's information

ShieldID is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children through this website. Identity verification is used by our customers on their own applicants under their own eligibility rules (for example, age requirements tied to a tenancy or a financial product); those rules belong to the customer, not to ShieldID.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the service changes or as our legal review progresses. We will update the effective date above when we do. Material changes will be reflected here before they take effect.

Contact us

Questions, access requests and complaints about this policy can be sent to [email protected] with “Privacy” in the subject line, or by post to Crown Stack Systems, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.