Privacy Policy

PAWCAP (the Partnership for Animal Wellbeing & Credentialed Animal Professionals), [legal entity name and mailing address], runs pawcap.org, the Find a Trainer site, and the PAWCAP app. This policy explains what we do with personal information. It applies to members, organization staff, pet owners who book or message a professional, website visitors, and people who receive our emails.

What we collect

• Account: your email, name, display name, a hashed password, your photo, and the dates you signed up and last signed in. A 6-digit code proves an email is yours.

• Credentials: the organizations that credentialed you, your credential numbers, statuses, and dates. Partner organizations share member lists with us so we can confirm them; those lists hold names, emails, credential numbers, and dates.

• Profile and listing: headline, bio, location, species, services, badges, logo, color, and your reviews.

• Bookings: who booked, their email, their answers to your questions, their animal's details, the time, the place, the price, payment status, attendance, and notes you add. Where a booking came from (your website, a link, a referral).

• Payments: Stripe or PayPal handle card details; we never see a full card number. We keep the amount, currency, tax lines, fees, status, and the Stripe or PayPal reference. For membership we keep a Stripe customer reference.

• Content: articles, courses, lessons, quizzes, forum posts, comments, surveys and answers, messages, and files you upload (pictures, PDFs, video, slide decks).

• Activity: useful votes, saves, follows, enrollments, progress, certificates, CE records, points, notification settings, and the audit trail of staff actions.

• Connections you choose: tokens for Google Calendar, Outlook, Mailchimp, Brevo, ActiveCampaign, or MailerLite, so we can read busy times, write bookings, and add contacts to your lists.

• Technical: IP address, browser, device, and the pages you load, in server logs kept for a short time. Web push subscriptions if you turn banners on.

• Website chat and leads: messages a visitor types on your website or on pawcap.org, and the email they give us.

Why we use it

• To run the Service: accounts, verification of credentials, bookings, payments, courses, certificates, messages, the directory, the forum, and notifications.

• To confirm who is credentialed and show that to pet owners and colleagues, which is the point of PAWCAP.

• To send the emails you expect: confirmations, reminders, receipts, replies, the weekly newsletter, and notices about your credential or membership. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link.

• To keep the Service safe: rate limits, spam traps, blocks and reports, moderation, and an audit log.

• To improve the Service, using counts and patterns rather than reading your private content.

• To meet legal duties, such as tax and accounting records.

Where a law asks for a legal basis, ours is the contract with you for running the Service, our legitimate interest in keeping it safe and useful, your consent for optional things such as marketing emails, calendar and email-tool connections, web push, and embedded video, and legal obligation for records we must keep.

Who sees what

• The public sees your public profile and listing (only while you hold a current credential), your published articles, your mentor page, public events, and your reviews.

• Members also see your forum posts and comments, your level badge, and the courses you publish.

• Your organization sees your credential record with it, your CE submissions to it, your answers to its surveys (anonymous unless the survey says otherwise), and its private forum space.

• Your clients see what you share with them: your booking page, your messages, and your emails. You see what they share with you.

• PAWCAP staff can see account and content data to verify, moderate, support, and bill. We do not read private messages unless a report, a legal request, or a safety issue requires it.

• Sponsors get counts of impressions and clicks. They never get your name or email.

Services that process data for us

We use a small number of outside companies to run PAWCAP. Each one processes data only on our instructions.

• Heroku (Salesforce) hosts the app, and MongoDB Atlas holds the database, in the United States.

• Cloudflare R2 stores uploaded files; Cloudflare Stream stores and plays private course video.

• Resend sends our emails.

• Stripe and PayPal process payments and hold card details.

• Google and Microsoft when you connect a calendar; Mailchimp, Brevo, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite when you connect an email tool.

• YouTube and Vimeo when a video you or another member embedded is played; see the Cookie Policy.

• OpenStreetMap tiles draw the map on Find a Trainer.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. We share it only with the services above, with your organization as described, with the people you choose to share it with, and when the law requires.

Professionals and their clients

When a pet owner books or messages you, we process their information on your behalf so you can run your business, and on our own behalf to run the Service. You are responsible for using it only for that client relationship. A client can ask either of us to see, correct, or delete their information. If they ask us, we tell you.

How long we keep it

• Your account and content: while your account exists, then removed within 30 days of a closure request, except as noted below.

• Payment and tax records: 7 years, as finance law requires.

• Certificates and CE records: kept so a certificate can be verified and a credential history stays complete, even after an account closes, with the holder's name only.

• Bookings and messages a pet owner is part of: kept for the professional's records until the professional deletes them or the account closes.

• Server logs: 30 days. Backups: up to 35 days.

• Message files: 5 GB (25 GB on Plus) per member; nothing is deleted on its own.

Your choices and rights

• Settings lets you edit your profile, credentials, notifications (email, bell, banner, text), connected tools, and storage, and download your clients and bookings as spreadsheets.

• Unsubscribe from the newsletter with the link in any issue or under Settings.

• Ask us to see, correct, export, or delete your personal information, or to object to a use. Email hello@pawcap.org. We answer within 30 days and may ask you to confirm it is you.

• If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or a US state with a privacy law, you have these rights by law. You may also complain to your local data protection authority.

• We do not use your content to train artificial intelligence models, and we do not allow outside companies to.

International transfers

PAWCAP runs in the United States. If you use it from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States under standard contractual protections with the services above.

Children

PAWCAP is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you think a child has given us information, email us and we remove it.

Security

Passwords are hashed. Traffic is encrypted. Uploaded files are private to the people who should see them, and course video streams only to enrolled learners. Staff access is logged. No system is perfect; if we learn of a breach that affects you, we tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

Changes

We update this policy when what we do changes. The date at the top tells you when. For a change that matters we tell you by email or in the app first.

Contact

PAWCAP, [legal entity name and mailing address]. Email hello@pawcap.org.