Privacy policy
Short version: we collect what you type into a form or send us by email, we use it to do the work you asked about, we share a creator's details with a brand only with the creator's permission, and we do not sell any of it. This page describes what the site and our tools actually do, not what a template says.
Who this covers
Four Cents Media is a division of Four Cents. This policy covers media.fourcents.ca, the forms on it, the sign-in portal, and the email we exchange with brands and creators. We handle personal information under Canada's federal private-sector privacy law, PIPEDA.
What we collect, and why
A brand brief, contact message or estimate request. The fields you fill in: name, email, company, website, what you sell, budget band, goal, platforms, formats, timeline, whether you can ship product, and your message. For an estimate request from a calculator, the inputs and the result you sent. We also record the page you sent it from, the page that referred you, your IP address and your browser type. Those last three exist for abuse prevention: the same address is limited to a small number of submissions in a short window. Each submission is emailed to info@fourcents.ca and appended to a record on our server.
A creator application. Name, email, city and country, the handles and follower counts you give for each platform, views if you state them, your niches and formats, the rates you give for each format, an audience note, whether you will work on a written contract, and two separate permissions: to be put forward for briefs, and to have a public profile page. Plus the same page, referrer, IP and browser details as above. You get an automatic acknowledgement, and if something is missing, an email naming exactly what.
What review adds to a creator record. A person reviews your application against nine published checks. To do that we look at your public profiles. Where a platform serves a profile page publicly, our tooling can fetch that page and read the public numbers on it; where it does not, nobody pretends otherwise and a person looks by hand. We ask you for screenshots of your audience geography from your own analytics and store them as evidence files against your record. We record your follower counts over time so growth can be compared later. Notes written during review are stored with your record, and the ones that concern a brand travel into the plan that brand reads. We may also send a one-time confirmation to the account itself to confirm you control it.
Email. We keep copies of the email we exchange with you, matched to your record, so that our tooling can see whether you have already replied before it sends a reminder. That mirror is read-only: it never sends, deletes or marks anything on your side.
Companies we research. For brands we might approach, we may record business contact details taken from public sources such as a company website, an advertising library or a referral, together with the lawful basis for contacting that person under Canada's anti-spam law and the date that basis lapses. We do not email a company with no basis on file.
The portal. If you sign in at /portal we email you a one-time link that expires in fifteen minutes. Using it sets one cookie, a signed session that lasts thirty days on that device and is refreshed while you keep using it. That is the only cookie this site sets. Sign-ins, sign-in attempts and every change you make in the portal are logged with the time and your IP address.
The website itself. No advertising trackers, no third-party analytics, no fingerprinting, and no cookies outside the portal. Our web server keeps ordinary access logs (address requested, time, IP address, browser) for security and error diagnosis. The portal sign-in link is excluded from those logs so a one-time token never lands in a log file.
Automated email we send
Acknowledgements when a brief or application arrives. Reminders to a creator whose application is missing something, at roughly day three and day ten, then a closing note at day twenty-one that says the application can be reopened by replying. A note asking whether your rates still hold if your record has not been touched in six months. One check-in to a brand that went quiet after we replied. Emails go out during daytime hours only. There are no newsletters and no marketing sequences, and nothing adds you to a list.
Who sees what
Brands see creators only with permission. If you gave permission to be put forward, a brand whose brief matches can receive: your handle and recent work, the follower count and engagement rate we measured and when, the audience geography split you supplied, what you would make for them, and any review note that concerns them. A public profile page on this site is a separate permission and most creators do not take it. Without the matching permission, nobody outside Four Cents sees your record.
Creators see brands before committing. Before a creator is asked to make anything for a brand, they are told the company, the product, what is being asked for, where the content will run and for how long, and the payment terms.
Service providers. Email is delivered through our mail provider. Records live on a server we control. We do not sell or rent personal information and we do not share it with anyone else except where the law requires.
Decisions a person makes
Our tooling prepares worksheets, computes engagement from the numbers on file, and drafts reminders. It does not verify anyone, does not decline anyone, and does not send a plan to a brand. Each of those is a person's decision, because the site publishes that a person makes it.
How long we keep it
For as long as needed to handle the enquiry and any work that follows, and for as long as records of contracts, invoices and payments have to be kept under tax and accounting law. Our data files are backed up nightly and each backup is kept for thirty days, so anything erased from the live records is gone from backups within thirty days.
Your choices, and what actually happens
- See what we hold. A creator who signs in at the portal sees everything on their record, including the status of each check and the date we owe them an answer by. A brand sees the brief as we received it and what stage it is at. Anyone can ask by email instead.
- Correct it. Creators can change their rates, niches, formats, audience note and both permissions in the portal, and can pause or resume being matched without asking anyone. Brands can correct a brief in the portal or by replying to the acknowledgement. Or email us.
- Withdraw permission. Turning off the matching permission stops you being put forward; turning off the public permission takes your profile page down at the next site build. Leaving the roster altogether takes one email, with no notice period.
- Erase it. Email us from the address you used with us. We run a single erasure that removes your records from every data file we keep, including the email mirror, portal events and evidence files, and then rebuilds the site so any public profile comes down at the same time. The only trace is a receipt recording the date and how many rows were removed from where, with nothing personal in it, because a deletion log that kept your name would defeat the deletion. Erasure cannot be undone. Backups clear within thirty days. Records we are legally required to keep, such as invoices, are kept for the required period and no longer.
- Cut off access. If a portal link was forwarded, a device was lost or a shared inbox has the wrong people in it, tell us and we will invalidate every session and unused link at once. You can sign in again afterwards.
Complaints
Write to us first at info@fourcents.ca and we will answer in writing. If you are not satisfied you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Contact
Four Cents, 49 Thorncliffe Park Dr, East York, ON M4H 1J6, Canada. info@fourcents.ca. Please write from the address you used with us so we can match the request to a record.
Last updated 19 September 2026. Earlier version 7 September 2026.