Bottle Rally

Privacy policy

Last updated: Fri, Oct 30, 2026

Bottle Rally (www.bottlerally.com) helps youth groups run bottle drives: organizers plan collection zones, participants pick a zone, and neighbours donate their empties. This policy explains what personal information we collect to do that, who can see it, and the choices you have. Bottle Rally is based in Alberta, and this policy follows Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, for people in Quebec, Quebec’s Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector.

The short version

  • We collect only what Bottle Rally needs to work: your name, email address, and what you choose to share about bottle drives and donations.
  • We never sell your information, show ads, or use tracking or analytics tools.
  • Maps and place search run on our own servers, so the places you look at aren’t shared with a map company.
  • You can see and change most of your information yourself, and ask us to delete your account at any time.

Who is responsible

Bottle Rally is responsible for the personal information described here. Our person in charge of the protection of personal information (privacy officer) answers questions and requests about it. Write to privacy@bottlerally.com.

What we collect

Your account

  • Name and email address. We send a link to confirm the email address before the account is created.
  • Password. Stored only in scrambled (hashed) form, which no one, including us, can turn back into your password.
  • Postal or ZIP code, if you give one. We store the code and use only its first 3 characters to match you with Bottle Rallies in your general area.
  • Language (English or French), so pages and emails reach you in the right one.
  • Area alerts: postal code prefixes or towns you want to hear about.

If you sign in with Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft

That company tells us your account identifier with them, your email address and, usually, your name. We don’t receive your password with them, and we never post anything to those accounts. Apple may give us a private relay address instead of your real email address, if you choose that option. The company will know that you signed in to Bottle Rally; their own privacy policies apply to what they do.

When you organize a Bottle Rally

  • The rally’s details: name, group, cause, date and time, city, home base, fundraising goal and amount raised, and the collection zones drawn on the map.
  • Participants’ email addresses that you enter so we can invite them. Only add people who expect to hear from your group. People without an account get one invitation email; they can ignore it, and their address is only used for that rally.

When you donate bottles

  • About how many bottles, whether you’ll have them picked up or drop them off, and, for a pickup, the address and when you’re available.
  • Messages you exchange with the organizer about the donation, and the meeting place and time you agree on.

Collected automatically

  • Cookies, all needed for the site to work (no advertising or tracking cookies):
    • bottlerally.sid keeps you logged in and protects forms from forgery. It lasts 30 days.
    • lang remembers the language you picked. It lasts 1 year.
    • oauth_user briefly holds the name Apple sends while you sign in with Apple. It lasts 10 minutes at most.
  • Server logs: like most websites, our web server records IP addresses, the pages requested and errors, for security and to fix problems.

How we use it

  • To run your account and let you log in.
  • To organize bottle drives: inviting participants, assigning zones, arranging pickups and drop-offs.
  • To send the emails and notifications you’d expect: confirming your address, invitations, sign-ups to your zones, messages about donations, changes to a rally, and alerts about Bottle Rallies in areas you chose.
  • To keep the site safe: for example, refusing offensive words in names and messages, and investigating abuse.

We don’t use your information for anything else, such as advertising or profiling, and we don’t make decisions about you by automated means alone.

Who can see what

  • Everyone can see published Bottle Rallies: the group, the cause and description, the date and time, and the city and postal code. The organizer’s name and the home base are not public.
  • The rally’s group (organizer and participants) also sees the organizer’s name, the home base, the collection zones and the first names of the collectors in each zone.
  • People who offer bottles see the home base, so they can drop their bottles off, and the meeting details they agree on. They don’t see the organizer’s name: the organizer appears as the group’s organizer (for example, “Tigers U12 organizer”).
  • The organizer sees participants’ full names and email addresses, the invitation list, and for each donation: the donor’s name, the bottle amount, the pickup address and availability.
  • Only the donor and the organizer see the messages about a donation.
  • Printed zone sheets show the zone map, the collectors’ names and the rally’s join link. Please handle printouts with care.

Companies that help us

We share personal information only with service providers that need it to run Bottle Rally, under agreements that limit them to that purpose:

  • our hosting provider, whose servers store the site and its database;
  • Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, only if you choose to sign in with them.

We send our emails from our own mail server, so no outside email company handles them.

Some of these providers may store information outside Quebec. Before that happens, we assess whether the information will be adequately protected, as Quebec law requires. Otherwise we disclose personal information only if the law requires it, for example in response to a court order.

How long we keep it

  • Your account and what you’ve added stay until you ask us to delete the account.
  • Sign-ups that are never confirmed are replaced if someone signs up again with the same address, and confirmation links stop working after 24 hours.
  • Records of sent emails are removed from our sending queue after 7 days (30 days for emails that couldn’t be delivered).
  • Login sessions end after 30 days.

How we protect it

The site is served only over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Passwords and email confirmation links are stored only in hashed form. Access to the servers and database is limited to the people who run Bottle Rally. If a confidentiality incident puts people at risk of serious harm, we will tell those affected and the privacy commissioners the law requires us to notify: the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and, for people in Quebec, the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec.

Your choices and rights

Children

Bottle Rally accounts are for adults: coaches, parents and donors. Young people who collect bottles with their group take part through their organizer, or a parent’s or guardian’s account. People under 14 shouldn’t create an account. If you believe a child has given us personal information, let us know and we’ll delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change affects how we use information you’ve already given us, we’ll tell you by email or on the site before it takes effect.

Contact us

Questions or requests about your personal information: privacy@bottlerally.com.