Last updated: June 20, 2026
The short version. ER Compass has no accounts, no cookies, and no advertising. The only analytics we use is privacy-friendly and cookieless, it counts visits without identifying you or tracking you across the web. We don't sell or share your data, and we don't build a profile of you at all.
Your saved hospitals and settings live only in your own browser. If you use "find the nearest ER," your location is used once to rank ERs and is not stored. A few map and address features are powered by outside services; the table below says exactly what each one receives. If you switch on a wait-time alert, we store a small anonymous subscription so we can send it, no name, email, or IP, and removing the alert deletes it (see section 11).
This policy explains what happens to information when you use ercompass.ca ("ER Compass," "the site," "we," "us"). It is written in plain language on purpose. If anything here is unclear, please contact us.
You don't sign in to ER Compass, and there's nothing to sign up for. The site sets no cookies and shows no advertising (no Meta/Facebook pixel, no ad networks, no fingerprinting), and we use no third-party analytics at all — explicitly not Google Analytics. To get a basic sense of how many people use the site, we keep our own aggregate, cookieless counts on our own server: daily tallies such as how many searches came from each province or nearby city, which pages drew interest, how visitors arrived, and how quickly pages loaded, to help us decide what to improve. These are coarse counts only: no IP, no precise location, no identifier, and nothing that can be tied back to an individual visit. The nearby "city" is the area of the nearest ER to a search, not your own address or coordinates, which we still never store.
To make the site useful without an account, your browser remembers a few things locally, on your own device, using standard browser storage. This information is never transmitted to our server and we cannot see it:
You can clear all of it at any time by clearing your browser's site data for ercompass.ca. None of it identifies you to us.
This feature is entirely optional and runs only with your express, opt-in consent, your browser prompts you, and nothing happens unless you agree.
We never put your location in a web address we record, never attach it to an identity, and never use it for anything but answering the one request you made.
ER Compass is a small public-interest project and doesn't run its own maps or address databases. To show a map, look up an address, or draw a route, your browser or our server contacts the external services below. Each one only receives what it needs to do its job, and each has its own privacy practices, which we link to. We don't control these services and we don't receive a profile of you back from them.
| Service | Used for | What it can see |
|---|---|---|
| CARTO (map tiles) |
Drawing the map background (map data is OpenStreetMap's; the tile images are served by CARTO) | Your device's IP address and the map area you're viewing, when a map loads. Privacy policy ↗ |
| Geoapify (address lookup & drive times) |
Turning a typed address into a map point, autocomplete suggestions, and estimating road drive times to rank ERs | The address text you type, or your coordinates. Sent from our server, not your browser (so Geoapify sees our server, not your device), and not saved by us. Privacy policy ↗ |
| Google Maps (directions) |
Opening turn-by-turn directions when you tap a "Directions" link | Only if you tap a Directions link: the hospital's location, plus your own starting point if you opened directions from a ranked recommendation. Opens in Google Maps in a new tab. Privacy policy ↗ |
If you'd prefer the site not contact any outside service at all, you can browse the hospital, region and city pages, which work without the interactive map.
Like every website, the computer that delivers ER Compass receives your device's IP address and the address of the page you asked for, that's simply how the internet sends you a page. We and our hosting/security layer use this only to deliver the page and protect the site from abuse (for example, blocking a flood of automated requests). We do not use it to identify you, build a profile, or track you across the web, and we don't keep a running server access log of the pages you view (the only page-view counting we do is the aggregate, cookieless analytics described in section 4, which isn't tied to you). We never sell it and never share it for advertising.
How long we keep things. Your location and address searches are not stored at all, they exist only for the moment it takes to answer your request. We keep no running access log of the pages you view. Our cookieless counts keep only aggregate, non-identifying totals (no IP address is stored, as described in section 4). The settings and saved hospitals in your browser stay until you clear them. The things we keep are the ER wait-time archive itself, which contains no information about visitors, and, only if you switch one on, the anonymous wait-time alert subscriptions described in section 11.
The data ER Compass collects and stores is hospital emergency-room wait-time information published by hospitals and health authorities, numbers like "current estimated wait" at a given ER at a given time. It contains no information about visitors to this website. We gather these public feeds using our own collection infrastructure (which includes a proxy that lets us reach certain provincial feeds); that pipeline only ever carries hospital data and never touches information about you. Our open data is about emergency rooms, not about you.
We don't sell, rent, trade or share personal information, because we don't gather it. We would only ever disclose information if we were legally compelled to (for example, a valid court order), and we would limit any such disclosure to exactly what the law requires.
ER Compass is run from Canada and intended mainly for people in Canada. Canadian privacy law, the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and Quebec's Law 25 among others, gives you rights to access, correct, and ask about personal information an organization holds about you, and to complain to a regulator. Because we keep essentially no personal information about visitors (the one exception is a wait-time alert subscription you opt into, see section 11, which carries no name, email, or IP), in most cases there is simply nothing for us to retrieve, change, or delete. If you believe we hold information about you, contact us and we'll help. You can also contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or, in Quebec, the Commission d'accès à l'information.
ER Compass is a general-audience information tool and is not directed at children. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone, including children. In an emergency involving a child, call 911.
The site is served over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection. Because we don't hold accounts or personal data, there is no store of personal information to be breached. No method of transmission over the internet is ever completely secure, but the absence of collected data is itself the strongest protection we can offer.
You can optionally ask ER Compass to send your device a notification when a particular ER's posted wait drops below a number you choose. This is entirely opt-in, nothing happens until you turn on an alert for a hospital and your browser asks your permission to show notifications. It's the one feature that stores anything about your choices on our server, so here is exactly what and why.
To deliver that notification we store a small, anonymous subscription:
There is no name, no email, and no IP address stored with it, we don't know whose browser it is. We use it only to send the alert you asked for. The notification itself travels through your browser maker's push service (the same channel your other site notifications use), which sees the push address in order to route the message to you.
Turning the alert off deletes it. Remove the alert in ER Compass, or switch off notifications for the site in your browser, and we delete the subscription from our server. If your browser later tells us a subscription has expired or been revoked, we delete it automatically. We keep these only while an alert is active.
If we change how the site works in a way that affects this policy, we'll update this page and change the "last updated" date above. Material changes will be noted here. Because we keep no contact list, we can't notify you individually, please check back if this matters to you.
Questions about privacy, or want to reach the person responsible for the protection of personal information at ER Compass? Email privacy@ercompass.ca.
ER Compass is an independent public-interest project, not a hospital, government body, or medical provider. This page describes our privacy practices; it is not legal advice. See also our Terms of Use.