Privacy
There is no account to make, no cookie to accept and nothing here that identifies you. This page says exactly what is recorded, in the same words we would use out loud.
Last reviewed 29 August 2026.
The short version
- We do not ask for your name, your email or your phone number.
- There are no accounts, so there is nothing to sign into.
- The site sets no cookies at all, which is why you have never seen a consent banner here.
- We keep an anonymous count of the ranges people ask about, for example that somebody earning between $70,000 and $80,000 looked at cars between $20,000 and $25,000. Never the figures you typed.
- Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone.
What we never collect
No name, no email address, no phone number, no postal code, no date of birth, no Social Insurance Number and no account of any kind. We run no credit check and we talk to no credit bureau, so the credit answer on the calculator is your own estimate and it never leaves the range you picked.
We do not store your IP address or your browser’s user agent string. Both are used for one moment and explained below, and neither is written down.
What we do record
When the calculator produces a result, we record one row that looks like this, and this is the whole row:
- the time, and which page you were on;
- whether the page was viewed, a result was rendered, or an input was changed;
- the province, which today is always Ontario, and the city you picked;
- your income as a $10,000 band, so $74,500 is recorded as “70-80k”;
- the price you were looking at as a $5,000 band, so $23,140 is recorded as “20-25k”;
- the credit range you chose, the verdict the calculator gave, the loan term in months, whether you were buying from a dealer or privately, and whether the car was electric;
- a per-day code that lets two of these rows be recognised as the same visit, described in the next section.
That is the entire table. There is no column for a dollar amount, and nowhere for a note, a comment or anything you typed to end up.
Why record even that? Because nobody publishes what Ontario drivers can actually afford, and the honest version of that number can only come from people using a calculator. The bands are wide enough to answer that question and far too wide to say anything about you.
How we tell one visit from another
If you load the calculator and then change the loan term a minute later, we would like to count that as one person rather than two. The usual ways to do that are a cookie or a stored device identifier, and both mean carrying something around that identifies you.
Instead, when a row is written our server takes three things: a secret that changes at midnight, your IP address, and your browser’s user agent string. It runs them through a one-way function and keeps only the 64-character result. The address and the user agent are dropped in the same instant. They are never stored, never logged and never sent anywhere.
Because the secret changes every day, the same person tomorrow produces a completely different code. Nothing links one day to the next. That means we genuinely cannot tell whether you came back, and we have accepted not being able to answer that question.
One thing worth knowing about the link
Your answers live in the page address. That is what makes a result shareable and what lets the page work with JavaScript switched off, and it has a consequence worth stating plainly: if you copy the link and send it to somebody, the income and the numbers you entered are in the link.
Your browser also keeps that address in its history like any other page. We set a referrer policy that stops the full address travelling to other sites when you click a link away from here, but the link itself is yours to be careful with.
Where the information is kept
The banded rows are stored in a Postgres database hosted by Supabase in the Montréal region, and the site itself runs on Vercel’s Montréal region. Both are in Canada, which was a deliberate choice rather than a default.
Vercel, as the host, processes every request in order to serve it, and its own operational logs can contain an IP address for a short period. We do not add anything to those logs, we do not copy anything out of them, and nothing in them is joined to the banded rows.
How long we keep it
Banded rows are deleted after 24 months. The reason for that number is simple: a market figure two model years old has stopped telling you anything about this year’s market, so keeping it longer would be hoarding rather than research.
Your rights, and how to ask
Canada’s federal privacy law, PIPEDA, gives you the right to ask an organisation what personal information it holds about you, to have it corrected, and to withdraw your consent to its use.
We hold none, so there is no file to send you and nothing to correct or withdraw. That is not a way of avoiding the question. It is the design, and everything above is an attempt to show our working so you can check it.
Ask us anything about this page at hamata.mike@gmail.com. If you are not satisfied with an answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.
When this page changes
If what we collect changes, this page changes at the same time as the code, and the date at the top moves. We will not quietly start collecting something and update the policy later.