Privacy policy

This policy explains how Fair Market Exchange handles personal information. It applies to everyone who uses the platform: buyers, sellers, brokers, investors, and people who contact us without an account.

We handle personal information in line with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and, as an Alberta organisation, Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act.

The person accountable for privacy at Fair Market Exchange can be reached at info@fair-market.ca.

When you create an account: your name, email address, and phone number if you give us one. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and we never see it.

If you are buying: the criteria you save — industries, provinces, price and cash flow ranges — and whatever you choose to tell us about yourself. That optional part includes how you would finance a purchase, capital you have available, your timeline, whether you have bought a business before, your relevant experience, and what you would do in the first year.

If you are selling: details of the business you are listing, including financial figures, employee counts, your reason for selling and the description you write. If you are a broker, the name and email address of the client you are representing.

As you use the platform: inquiries you make or receive, messages you exchange with other members, NDAs you send or accept, deal stage changes, and when you were last active.

Automatically: our hosting provider records standard request information including IP address, browser type and the pages requested. We use it to keep the service running and secure, not to profile you.

If you contact us: your name, email address and whatever you write.

Some of what we ask buyers is deliberately optional — financing, available capital, timeline. You can skip every one of them and still inquire on any listing. Nothing is blocked.

You should know what answering, or not answering, does. A buyer's profile completeness produces a tier badge that sellers see alongside an inquiry, and sellers can see which of their requested questions you have not answered. Not answering is visible. It will not stop you inquiring, and it may affect how quickly a seller engages with you.

We tell you this plainly because consent only means something when you know what you are consenting to.

We do not use your personal information to make automated decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Tier badges are shown to sellers; they do not decide anything on their own.

Sellers are anonymous by default. A seller's identity is disclosed only by a deliberate act on their part, never as a side effect of a permission.

Buyers are not anonymous. When you inquire on a listing, that seller sees your name, your email, and the profile information they asked for. This is the asymmetry the platform is built on: a seller is risking their staff and customers finding out, and a buyer is not.

Other members see nothing about you unless you have engaged with them. A seller cannot browse buyers; a buyer cannot see who else has inquired.

Messages between two members stay between them. Fair Market Exchange staff do not read them, and the administrative tools staff use are built without the ability to display message contents.

Staff can see account details, listings, profile completeness and deal stages — the information needed to run the marketplace and support people using it.

A broker listing a business on behalf of a client gives us that client's name and email address so we can send them a status report about their own listing.

If you are that client: the broker is responsible for having your permission to provide those details. We use them only to send you reports about your business, at your broker's instruction. Ask us at info@fair-market.ca and we will tell you what we hold about you and stop sending.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not rent it, and we do not share it with advertisers.

We use a small number of service providers to run the platform, and your information passes through them:

These providers process data on our instructions and are bound by contract. Their infrastructure is located outside Canada, principally in the United States, which means your information is stored and processed there and is subject to the laws of that country, including lawful access by foreign authorities. If that matters to you, please consider it before using the platform.

We may disclose information where the law requires it, to enforce our terms, or to protect the rights and safety of members — and if our business is ever sold or merged, to the acquirer, who would be bound by this policy.

Service messages — a confirmation link, a notification that someone has inquired on your listing, a change in deal stage — are part of the service you asked for and continue for as long as you have an account.

New-listing alerts are commercial messages under Canada's anti-spam legislation. We send them only to people who have asked for them, every one carries a one-click unsubscribe that needs no sign-in, and unsubscribing from alerts does not affect anything else about your account.

Every commercial message identifies us and carries our mailing address.

Account and profile information: for as long as your account exists.

Listings: for as long as the account exists. A withdrawn listing comes off the public index but is retained, because it remains part of the record of inquiries made against it.

Inquiries, messages, NDAs and deal history: retained after an account closes, because they form part of the other party's record of a transaction and may be needed to resolve a dispute. We keep them for seven years, consistent with ordinary commercial record-keeping, then delete them.

Contact form messages: as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and a reasonable period afterwards.

Access to data is enforced in the database itself, row by row, rather than only in the interface. A query that should not return your information does not return it, whatever the page asks for.

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and are never visible to us or to staff.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Privacy Commissioner as the law requires.

You can see most of what we hold about you by signing in and looking at your profile and your listings.

You can ask us for a copy of your personal information, ask us to correct anything inaccurate, ask us to delete your account, or withdraw your consent to a particular use. Write to info@fair-market.ca.

We will respond within 30 days. If we cannot do what you ask, we will tell you why.

Withdrawing consent may mean we can no longer provide parts of the service — we cannot run an account without an email address, for example.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, or to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta.

We use cookies only to keep you signed in and to keep your session secure. They are necessary for the platform to work and cannot be switched off without breaking sign-in.

We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not run third-party trackers on this site.

This platform is for adults conducting business. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.

We may update this policy. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell account holders by email. The version you agreed to is recorded against your account.