Become an Ambassador › Charter
Public-benefit and privacy charter
map.ca is a social enterprise. The Gather track invites people to document the infrastructure and civic assets that help their communities, and rewards them for it. This charter is the binding promise about what that does and never does. It is enforced in code on every capture, not just stated here.
The five principles
- No people. Captures that show a person or a face are rejected automatically, on your device and again on our servers. We do not photograph, recognize, or track people.
- Infrastructure and civic assets only. Every capture must map to an active civic target: a curb cut, a hydrant, a broken streetlight. If it does not, it is not stored.
- Minimal metadata. We strip precise GPS and device identifiers from every photo, keep only the coarse location the asset needs, and blur the location of sensitive sites such as shelters.
- Public benefit first. The civic library is curated for the common good. The first beneficiaries are governments and public-serving organizations seeking transparency and ground truth.
- Not for profit-extraction, not surveillance. Gamification exists to channel attention toward what helps everyone, never to harvest people or sell them out.
How it is enforced
A pure rules engine evaluates every capture. Your device runs it first for instant feedback, and our servers re-run it as the authority. A capture that fails the charter is refused before it is ever stored. The person and face detector is pluggable, so the check improves over time without weakening the rule.
Open by default
Verified civic data is a public good. It stays exportable and accessible to the communities, governments, and organizations it serves, with sensitive locations coarsened and no contributor identified without consent.