1. What we collect
We collect information in four ways:
- Anonymous Usage: We use Google Analytics 4 to see which mountain zones are being viewed most often and which features get the most clicks. This is not tied to your identity.
- Account Information: We collect your email address and basic profile information (such as your name and profile picture) provided by Google or Apple, depending on which you use. If you use a Magic Link, we only collect your email address.
- What You Send Us: Ratings and comments you leave on a report, and messages you send through the "Get in touch" form. A contact message is stored with the email address on your account, so that we have somewhere to reply, and is also delivered to our business inbox at hello@snowdoctor.ca, which is hosted by Zoho in Canada.
- Plans: When you create or join a plan, we store the plan, the zones you propose to it, your ranking of its options, the notes you write, and the gear you claim on its checklist. The first time you use a plan we also set a display name so other people in the plan can tell who is who. It comes from the name on your Google or Apple profile, or, for a Magic Link account, from the part of your email address before the @. Your full email address is never used as your display name. See Section 5.
2. Why we collect it
Your analytics data helps us make Snow Doctor better. Anonymous stats tell us which regions need more data.
3. Authentication & Security
We use Supabase to manage secure user authentication.
- We do not store passwords. We use secure Magic Links, Google OAuth, and Sign in with Apple.
- Your email is stored in secure database clusters and is never sold to third parties.
- We use IP Anonymization with Google Analytics to ensure your specific location remains private.
4. Your Saved Zones & Stashes
Terrain you save (My Zones, stashes), including any photos you attach, is private to your account and is never published by us or shown to other users on our initiative. It's used to read each zone against the forecast (its avalanche list and its weather score) and to simulate the snowpack at each zone, and it leaves your account only when you choose to propose it to a plan (Section 5).
- Simulated snowpack: the simulation uses the zone's location, elevation, aspect and steepness, and runs on our own server. We keep its results with the zone so it can pick up where it left off each day.
- Your weather values: your answer to the onboarding question (storm days, clear days or whatever skis best) and any weather values you change in your profile are stored with your account. They're used only to work out your weather score, and they're deleted with your account.
- Weather and maps: to show the weather and maps for a zone, its coordinates are sent to our weather provider, Open-Meteo, and our map provider, Mapbox. Open-Meteo gets them from our server, with nothing that identifies you. Maps load from Mapbox straight to your device, so Mapbox also sees your IP address.
Deleting a zone deletes its photos and its simulated snowpack. Deleting your account permanently deletes all of this (see Section 8, Data Retention & Deletion).
5. Plans & Sharing
Plans are how you choose where to ski with other people, so unlike the rest of the app, some of what you put in a plan is meant to be seen.
- Proposing a zone shares it with the plan. Everyone in the plan sees the zone's name, location, shape, elevation, aspect, ATES rating, your answers about its slopes, and its notes. Photos are not shared. The plan links to your zone rather than keeping a copy, so later edits show up in the plan, and deleting the zone removes it from every plan it's in. To take it back from one plan, remove it from that plan.
- Saving and exporting are off unless you turn them on. Other people in the plan can save your proposed zone to their own zones, or export it to a GPX file, only if you allowed it with the "Allow others to save your zones" switch. A copy someone saved with your permission belongs to them from then on.
- What people in the plan see about you: your display name, the zones you proposed, the notes you wrote (with your name on them), and the gear you claimed on the checklist.
- Rankings are anonymous. Nobody, including the plan's owner, can see how you ranked the options. The plan shows only each option's average rank and how many people ranked it.
- Leaving a plan. Any member except the owner can leave a plan from its menu at any time. Your ranking and the gear you claimed are removed. Zones you proposed and notes you wrote stay in the plan for the rest of the group, unless you remove them first.
- Share links. A plan's owner can share a link to it. Anyone who has the link can see the plan without an account: its title and dates, the display names of the people in it, the proposed zones including their locations and their notes, the plan's notes, the checklist, and the average rankings. The link never shows email addresses or account identifiers. Signing in through the link asks to join, and by default the owner approves each person before they can see anything beyond what the link shows. The owner can switch approval off, in which case anyone with the link joins straight away. The owner can also turn the link off or reset it, after which the old link stops working, and can remove people from the plan. Someone removed or declined can't rejoin through the link unless the owner lets them back in.
Only propose a zone you are comfortable showing to everyone in the plan and to anyone its link might be forwarded to.
6. Use of AI
To write the "Doctor's Orders" for a forecast region, we send Google's Gemini models that region's public avalanche bulletin, recent public field reports, the weather forecast, and our simulated snowpack for the region. One report is written per region and shared by everyone who opens it, and it is rewritten when a newer bulletin, weather run or field reports come in.
None of your personal information goes into the report.
Your email, name, saved zones and usage patterns are never sent to write it.
Ask the Doctor works differently, because you are asking about your own terrain. When you chat from a report, we send Gemini the conversation so far, the region's report, and the details of your saved zones in that region: their names, your answers about their terrain, their tags and notes, and how each one reads against today's forecast (its avalanche list and weather score). If you are chatting from one zone's report, that zone's location and elevation go too.
When you chat from the map, it can look across every region. We send Gemini the conversation so far and the names of your favourite regions, and, when it looks at your saved zones, each one's name, region, elevation and aspect and how it reads against the forecast (its avalanche list, with your answers about the slope, and its weather score).
Your email and name are never included, and we don't keep your chat messages on our servers. The one exception is when you rate a chat: the rating keeps your last question and the Doctor's last answer with it, so we can see what you rated.
7. Who Handles Your Data
We run Snow Doctor on a handful of outside services. Here is each one and what it handles.
- Supabase: our database and sign-in. It stores your account and everything you save in the app.
- Render: hosts our server, so everything the app sends and receives passes through it.
- Resend: sends Magic Link sign-in emails, so it receives your email address.
- Zoho: hosts our business inbox in Canada, where contact-form messages are delivered.
- Google: Gemini for the Doctor's Orders and Ask the Doctor (Section 6), Cloud Text-to-Speech to read reports aloud, Google Analytics (Section 1), and Google sign-in if you use it.
- Apple: Sign in with Apple, if you use it.
- Mapbox and Open-Meteo: maps and weather (Section 4).
- Google Fonts, cdnjs and jsDelivr: deliver the fonts, icons and code our pages load. They see your IP address when a page loads them.
Your data may leave Canada. Snow Doctor is run from British Columbia, but some of these providers store or process information outside Canada. While it is there, courts and government authorities can access it under local law.
8. Data Retention & Deletion
You have full control over your data. You may delete your account at any time through the "Delete Account" option in the main menu.
Permanent Deletion
When you delete your account, your email, profile data, and authentication record are permanently scrubbed from our database, along with your saved zones, their photos and their simulated snowpacks. This action is instantaneous and irreversible.
One thing outlives the account, and we would rather say so than surprise you. If you wrote to us through the contact form, that message and the address you sent it from are kept as ordinary support correspondence, the same way a reply sits in an email thread. They are not used for anything else, and we will delete them on request. Just ask at hello@snowdoctor.ca.
Plans work differently, because other people depend on them. When you delete your account:
- Plans you created are deleted, for everyone in them.
- Your rankings, your checklist claims, and your place in other people's plans are deleted.
- Zones you proposed to other people's plans are removed from them, because they were your zones.
- Notes you wrote and checklist items you added in other people's plans stay in those plans, without your name on them, so a trip you helped plan keeps them. If you want them gone, remove them before deleting your account, or ask us at hello@snowdoctor.ca.
- Copies of your zones that other people saved with your permission belong to them and are not deleted.
9. Your Choice
Map choices, such as which layer colours the regions and whether saved zones, resorts, cabins and mountains are shown, are kept in your browser on that device. They are not sent to us.
If you prefer not to be included in our anonymous stats, you can click "Decline" on the cookie banner or use the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on.