Privacy Policy (PIPA)

Last updated: June 30, 2026 · Governed by British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act — OIPC BC.

EZtoFind.ca collects personal information under British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). We collect information you voluntarily provide via forms and Doogie AI chat. We use it solely to respond to your inquiry, provide referrals within our network, and (with your consent) send commercial electronic messages under CASL.

What personal information we collect

• Contact details — your name, email address, and (optionally) phone number when you submit a lead, valuation, referral, contact, or REALTOR® network form.
• Form submissions — the content of any inquiry you send, including buyer/seller/valuation details, areas of interest, budget range, and timeline you choose to share.
• Saved searches & email-alert preferences — the search filters you ask us to monitor and the email address where you want saved-search alerts and our weekly "Friday digest" sent.
• Doogie AI chat messages — what you type to our on-site assistant (personal identifiers are automatically redacted before storage; see the AI Use Disclosure below).
• Technical & security data — your IP address and browser user-agent, used for rate-limiting, spam/abuse prevention, and as tamper-evident proof of CASL consent.
• Cookies & device-side storage — subject to the choices you make in our cookie banner (see the Personalized Homepage section below).

How we use your information

• Respond to your inquiry — so Doug, or where applicable a vetted referral REALTOR®, can reply to you.
• Send the Friday digest & saved-search alerts — only where you have given CASL consent; every message includes a one-click unsubscribe link.
• Provide referrals — to a licensed REALTOR® in our network when your inquiry falls outside Doug's focus areas or specialties, and only with your consent.
• Operate, secure & improve the site — including rate-limiting, fraud/abuse prevention, and understanding which content is useful through aggregate, non-identifying analytics where you have consented.

Data is stored on secured servers. You may request a copy of your personal information at any time via our self-service data export tool (a secure download link is emailed within seconds under PIPA s.23). To request correction, withdrawal of consent, or destruction of personal information whose collection purpose has been fulfilled, email info@eztofind.ca.

We do not sell your data. We may share your inquiry with a REALTOR® in our referral network only if it falls outside Doug's focus areas or specialties — and only with your submission of a lead form indicating consent.

Third-Party Sharing & CREA DDF® Listing Data

MLS® listing content shown on EZtoFind.ca is licensed from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) under the Data Distribution Facility (DDF®). That listing data belongs to CREA and participating boards and brokerages — it is not your personal information, we do not sell it, and under the terms of the CREA DDF® licence it may not be used to train, fine-tune, or build artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models. EZtoFind.ca does not use CREA DDF® listing data for any AI-training purpose: our Doogie assistant answers questions using only the licensed display feed and never feeds DDF® data into model training. Your own personal information (the details you submit through forms) is likewise never sold and is never used to train third-party AI models.

Data Residency & Hosting

Personal information collected via EZtoFind.ca is stored in a secure, industry-standard cloud database managed by our platform hosting provider. Data may be transiently processed by our compliance-vetted AI provider (a leading commercial AI service) solely to power the Doogie AI assistant. Personal data may be processed on servers located in Canada and/or the United States. By using EZtoFind.ca you consent to this cross-border processing, which remains subject to Canadian privacy law and this Privacy Policy. All such providers are contractually bound to provide a comparable level of protection to that required under BC's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), to use your personal information only to perform services for us, and never to use it for their own purposes or to train their AI models. If our hosting region changes materially, this policy will be updated and posted here.

Retention

Under PIPA s.35, we retain personal information only as long as the collection purpose remains active OR a specific legal or business retention obligation applies — whichever is longer. When neither condition is met, records are destroyed or anonymized. Retention periods are data-class specific:

• Doogie chat messages — automatically purged after 30 days via a database time-to-live policy.
• CASL consent records — retained for 3 years as required by CASL for tamper-evident proof of consent (see below).
• Brokerage transaction records — where a form submission progresses into an active brokerage transaction with Doug (executed offers, agency contracts, deposits, trust-account paperwork tied to a completed transaction), the resulting transaction records are retained for a minimum of 7 years as required by BCFSA under the Real Estate Services Act and Rule 8-5.
• Buyer / seller lead form submissions and REALTOR® network applications that do NOT progress into a brokerage transaction — retained only as long as the collection purpose remains active (typically until the inquiry is closed out or the applicant is no longer under consideration), and are then destroyed or anonymized in accordance with PIPA s.35. Longer retention applies only where you have consented to ongoing marketing communications, or where a specific business purpose (such as an active client relationship) supports it — and, in either case, is subject to your right to withdraw consent at any time.

You may request earlier destruction of any record whose retention purpose is no longer active by emailing info@eztofind.ca. See our full Data Retention Schedule for the specific holding period of every data class we collect (available on request from the Privacy Officer).

Consent Records (CASL)

When you submit a form with consent, we record your email, timestamp, IP address, and browser user-agent as tamper-evident proof of consent, retained for 3 years per CASL requirements. On request, we can provide you with a full copy of your consent record. Every commercial email we send includes a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can withdraw consent at any time on our unsubscribe page or by emailing the Privacy Officer.

Breach Notification

In the event of a privacy breach that could reasonably result in significant harm, we will notify the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC BC) and affected individuals as soon as feasible, in accordance with PIPA and our internal Breach Response Policy. Suspected breaches can be reported 24/7 to info@eztofind.ca.

Personalized Homepage (Local-Only)

Returning visitors may see a "Welcome back — picking up where you left off" section on the homepage showing their last search, saved favorites, and a market-change indicator for the last community they viewed. This personalization is powered entirely by your browser's own local storage (device-side). No user identifier, saved search, favorites list, or viewing history is ever transmitted to our servers for this feature — the module simply reads what your browser has stored and queries our same public listing/community endpoints anonymously. You can turn this off at any time by opening Cookie Preferences (footer) and disabling the "Personalization" category, by using the "Clear my browser data" link within the module, or by clearing your browser's site data. This feature falls under the "session" cookie category to which you have already consented via our PIPA cookie banner.

AI Use Disclosure (BCFSA Compliance)

EZtoFind.ca uses artificial intelligence in three specific ways: (1) Doogie, our on-site chat assistant, is powered by a commercial generative-AI language model operated by a third-party provider on servers that may be located outside Canada (see Data Residency & Hosting above). Because it is a generative model — not a fixed, rule-based script — its answers are general information only and can occasionally be incomplete or inaccurate; always confirm anything important with Doug LeMaire, REALTOR®, or the relevant licensed professional. Chat messages are transmitted to that provider and, before storage in our system, are automatically scanned to redact personal identifiers such as SIN, credit card numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, postal codes, and street addresses. (2) AI-drafted content — community synopses, weather summaries, and glossary FAQs are drafted by the same AI provider and reviewed and approved by Doug LeMaire, REALTOR® before publication. (3) Compliance guardrails — Doogie is prompt-engineered and output-filtered to never provide financial, legal, tax, or property-specific advice; those matters are directed to the appropriate licensed professional.

Under BCFSA's AI Guidelines, licensees remain responsible for all AI-generated output. Please do not share confidential information (full names, addresses, financial details, negotiations) with Doogie.