MapleSteps Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29 October 2026 · 简体中文在下方

What stays on your device

• Your situation: province, city, time zone, residency status, arrival date, whether you have children under 18, and whether you have filed a Canadian tax return yet.
• Any notice text you paste in, and the text recognised from an image you choose.
• The actions, reply drafts, reminder times and completion ticks you save.
• A usage log on your device (details below), and an API key for the optional cloud model, which only exists if you paste one in yourself.

You can also carry that data yourself. The You tab writes the items above into one file you then choose where to send — by mail, to a drive, anywhere — and it can load a file you pick, after showing you what it will overwrite. MapleSteps never uploads either file, and scheduled notifications are not inside them, because a reminder lives on one device.

Images

When you import a document image, the system photo picker hands one chosen image to the app. MapleSteps does not have access to your photo library. On-device text recognition reads the image and the image is not stored by MapleSteps.

The only network requests the app makes

The usage log

MapleSteps writes a small log file on your device so we can see which steps are genuinely useful. Each record holds a date, the name of an action such as "saved an action", and your language or province. It never holds notice text, addresses, document images or reply drafts.

You can stop the recording at any time in You → Usage counts on this device. The separate switch for sharing with the developer is off by default, and even when it is on, nothing is transmitted automatically — that switch only marks a file you export and send yourself. An export also contains a random per-install identifier, created on your device, which lets us read one person's sequence instead of mixing everyone together.

Children

MapleSteps is a tool for adults arriving in Canada. It is not directed at children, and because there are no accounts we do not knowingly receive anyone's personal information.

Deletion

Because we hold no copy, deletion is entirely in your hands: You → Delete all app data clears your profile, saved documents, actions, drafts and reminders, the usage log file together with its two switches and the random per-install identifier, the collection-day answer and the address it was checked for, your language choice, and the cloud model settings including a saved API key. It also removes the copy of your plan that the lock-screen widget reads, so that widget goes back to showing only the app's name, and deletes the export file MapleSteps wrote for itself — a file you already shared is yours and outside this app's reach.

After it runs, nothing you chose survives: the app comes back with the same defaults it shipped with, which includes your device's language rather than the one you picked here. Turning off the usage-log switch only stops further recording and leaves the existing file in place until you use Delete all app data. Uninstalling the app removes everything left in its container. A Keychain item sits outside that container and survives an uninstall, so the app checks on the next launch: a key left behind by an install you have since deleted is removed instead of being loaded back. If you sent us an exported log by email, ask and we will delete that message.

Third-party data

Collection-day answers come from the City of Toronto's Residential Waste Collection Schedule, made available under the City of Toronto Open Data Licence. Weather alerts and Air Quality Health Index readings come from Environment and Climate Change Canada's open data feeds on api.weather.gc.ca, used under the ECCC-MSC Open Data licence; the same attribution is shown on the card in the app. Public-holiday dates come from canada-holidays.ca, a community list that publishes no licence of its own; every row there links back to the province or territory's own page, and that page is the authority the app points you at. Welfare and program guidance in the app is paraphrased from the linked Government of Canada and Province of Ontario pages; those sites set their own policies.

Contact and changes

Questions: cczuysh+maplesteps@gmail.com. If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it.

MapleSteps gives guidance, not legal, tax or immigration advice, and it does not decide eligibility. Government rules change; confirm on the official page linked in the app before you apply.