Privacy Policy

ROMULUS & CO ("ROMULUS", "we") operates ROMULUS Municipal, a monitoring, intelligence and reporting service for Ontario municipalities, and this website. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why, and your rights under Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Our municipal clients are institutions under Ontario's Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA); for the information we handle on a client's behalf, we act on that client's instructions under a data-processing agreement.

1. Information we collect from website visitors

The public site sets no advertising or analytics cookies and does not track visitors. If you request a demo or a quote through our forms, we collect the name, email address, organisation, role and message you provide, solely to respond to your inquiry. Form submissions are received by our website's own form handler and stored in our Canadian-hosted database.

2. Information we collect from clients

When a municipality becomes a client we collect account details for its staff users (work email address and a password, stored using industry-standard hashing by our authentication provider), billing contact details, and the information needed to set up and provide the service. Card payments are processed by our payment processor; we never see or store your full card number.

3. Public-source monitoring data

The service collects information about each client municipality from publicly available sources only: council records, published news, the municipality's own website, provincial and sector publications, public posts by official accounts, and public community spaces approved by the client. We do not collect from private or closed groups or from behind a login, and we do not sell this information.

The service is designed around topics, not people. Names and handles of private individuals are hidden by default; public officials and organisations are shown by role and public record only. Raw posts from community spaces and social media are deleted after the client's retention period (90 days by default); summaries are kept. Each client's data is held in its own isolated environment and is never shared with, or visible to, any other client.

4. Where your data lives

Client data and our own business records are stored with Supabase in the ca-central-1 (Canada) region. Limited service providers process data on our behalf: Supabase (database, authentication, file storage), Cloudflare (website delivery and sign-in), GitHub (code hosting and scheduled collection jobs), Anthropic (AI-assisted analysis of collected public content and of documents a client uploads), Apify (collection of public social-media posts), Firecrawl (reading public web pages and documents), Resend (email delivery of the daily brief), and our payment processor. Some providers process data outside Canada; where they do, it may be subject to the laws of those jurisdictions. We use providers' business-grade offerings under their published data-protection terms and do not permit them to use your information for their own purposes.

5. Retention

Demo and quote inquiries are kept for up to 12 months, then deleted. Client account and service data is retained for the life of the engagement, subject to the client's retention settings; when an engagement ends, the client's isolated environment is destroyed within 60 days and residual backups age out within a further 30 days. Records we must keep by law (for example, invoices and tax records) are retained as required.

6. Your rights

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information, or withdraw consent, by emailing andrew.smith@romulus.services. We respond within 30 days. If you are unsatisfied with our response you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca). Requests about records a municipality holds should go to that municipality, which handles them under MFIPPA; we will assist the municipality as our agreement requires.

7. Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS). Access to client data requires an authenticated login issued by us or by the client's administrator; each client's data is isolated at the infrastructure level with row-level security, and changes to a client's configuration are logged. We review our security controls on an ongoing basis.

8. Changes

We will post any changes to this policy on this page with an updated date. Material changes affecting clients will be emailed to the client contact.