Buddy’s Quest Privacy Notice

Last updated: August 2026

The Main Points

Buddy’s Quest is a game for Indigenous youth. Most of the app is about playing fun games and puzzles. Some levels also include questions and information that help young people pause, reflect, and learn about feelings, culture, friendships, social connections, and mental wellness.

What we promise

The Buddy’s Quest experience is anonymous.

• Youth are not asked for their name, email, or phone number.
• Youth do not need to create an account or log in.

Your answers are anonymous

There are no right or wrong answers. Your individual answers are anonymous and cannot be seen by other people using Buddy’s Quest, including parents, teachers, or friends. Your answers help the school, Nation, community, or other organization offering Buddy’s Quest understand what young people are experiencing as a group.

Who sees the data?

Organizations offering Buddy’s Quest can see anonymous, group-level information. They cannot see individual answers or connect an answer to a specific youth.

What about Chat?

Some schools, Nations, and communities will include a “Chat” button in the Buddy’s Quest app. Chat allows youth to seek support and connect privately with a trusted, trained resource who can listen and offer support. Chat is not a chat room, and Chat is not available in every program.

Want to know more? The full Privacy Notice below explains what information Buddy’s Quest collects, how it is used, and how it is protected.

1. Purpose of this Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice pertains to the collection, use and disclosure of your Personal Information, as defined below, in the custody and control of Buddy’s Quest (“Buddy’s Quest”/“we”/“us”/“our”) in connection with your use of the Buddy’s Quest website located at https://buddysquest.com and application Buddy’s Quest (together the “App”).

The App is a game environment delivered by TryCycle Data Systems, that helps users explore wellness topics and reflect on questions about feelings, friendships, culture, social connections, and mental wellness. Some programs also offer a chat environment where users can engage in anonymous, one-to-one text chats with a trusted, trained adult. Chat is not available in every program. Chat is not a place to go for emergency services or professional health support.

Buddy’s Quest is designed to protect youth privacy. The App does not ask youth for their name, email address, or phone number, and youth do not need to create an account or log in.

We have designed the App to minimize the collection of information that can identify users. While we make efforts to avoid identifying a specific user, this Privacy Notice applies in the rare cases in which we may collect information that qualifies as Personal Information, such as certain information about a device, as discussed below.

We recommend that you read this Privacy Notice carefully. This notice may change from time to time (see Section 6, “Changes to this Privacy Notice”). The most current version will be posted on the Buddy’s Quest website, along with the date it was last updated.

Children’s Privacy and Intended Use:

Buddy’s Quest is a youth wellness app designed for children and youth, including children under the age of 13. Buddy’s Quest is designed with youth safety and privacy in mind. The App does not require children to create accounts or provide any information that directly identifies them. The Buddy’s Quest app does not identify, monitor, or track individual youth. The App does not collect location information, use tracking cookies, or use children’s information for advertising, marketing, or tracking across other services.

TryCycle is committed to protecting children’s privacy and considers applicable children’s privacy requirements, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), where applicable in the United States. Buddy’s Quest follows privacy-by-design principles, including data minimization and responsible data practices.

2. Information We Collect About You, How We Collect It and How We Use It

For the purposes of this notice, “Personal Information” includes any information about an identifiable individual, or an individual whose identity may be inferred or determined from such information, that can be used on its own or with other information to identify a single person, but does not include names, titles or other information that is publicly available, such as business contact information or information found in a telephone directory.

We will only collect information that may qualify as Personal Information in the following circumstances:

Technical information about your device. We collect technical information about your device, including information about your device type, device identifier, operating system, language, duration of use, number of notification messages sent or received, and times and dates at which the App was accessed and utilized. While we make efforts not to associate device information with any identifiable user, such information may in certain cases qualify as Personal Information under applicable privacy laws.

We use technical information about your device for the following purposes:

• To provide our App and deliver our services to our users;
• To understand how users access and utilize features and services on our App;
• To troubleshoot, enhance, improve and optimize our products and services;
• To send essential push notifications required to provide the features and services relevant to App’s system;
• Recognize when you return to our App;
• In case of violation of our rules relating to harassment and abuse, we may also use this information to block a device from accessing the App;
• To comply with our legal obligations.

Chat history. As disclosed in the App, we reserve the right to save chat history in cases of harassment, abuse, or if personal safety is considered at risk. We may therefore collect any Personal Information you have inputted in the chat. We may use this information to protect the safety or security of individuals and to enforce our Terms and Conditions.

Non-confidential information. Unless otherwise explicitly stated herein or in our Terms & Conditions, any non-personal information or material, including but not limited to any submissions or posts in public areas of a Website or App (“User Submissions”) or suggestions, reviews, comments or feedback sent to TryCycle related to any aspect of a Website or App (“Feedback”), will be deemed not to be confidential.

Cookies. As you navigate through and interact with our App, we may use automated technologies, such as “cookies”, small files placed on your devices, to collect certain information about you, your device, and how you interact with our Websites and App. We do not allow any third parties to use cookies to track your activity across other apps and websites. You can learn more about how we use cookies by consulting our Cookies Notice.

3. When and to Whom We Disclose Your Personal Information

Buddy’s Quest will never sell your Personal Information.

To the extent we collect Personal Information, we will only disclose it in exceptional cases, namely:

• As required or as authorized by law or by order or requirement of a court, administrative agency or other governmental tribunal;
• As required to enforce or apply our Terms and Conditions and other agreements;
• Where we believe, upon reasonable grounds, that it is necessary because of an emergency that threatens the life, health or security of an individual; or
• Where it is necessary to permit us to pursue available remedies or limit any damages that we may sustain.

Buddy’s Quest uses third-party service providers, such as Microsoft, PostHog, Raygun and bitHeads to assist in providing you the App, host servers in Canada and the United States and to track and prevent errors in our software. These third-party service providers may have access to Personal Information as an incidental result of the services provided by such third parties to Buddy’s Quest, but the access of such third parties to such information is strictly controlled by our agreements with these service providers.

4. How We Protect Your Personal Information

To the extent we collect Personal Information, keeping it safe and secure is very important to us. While we cannot guarantee complete protection of your Personal Information, we follow commercially reasonable practices to protect Personal Information collected from you against accidental loss and unauthorized access, use, alteration, disclosure and destruction.

We store all Personal Information with Microsoft Azure at a data centre in North America. Microsoft Azure is responsible for the hosting and security of all servers, databases and applications in a secure cloud and are certified as compliant with ISO Standard 27018 Code of Practice for personal identifiable information (PII) protection in public clouds acting as PII processors. In addition to the independent certification process under ISO27018, the ISO Standard also includes the right to audit Microsoft for compliance.

Because the transmission of information via the Internet is not completely secure, any transmission of Personal Information is at your own risk. Although we maintain security measures to maintain the integrity of the data in our care, including the encryption of all Personal Information, while in transit or at rest, we are not responsible for circumvention of any of our privacy settings or security measures. Your Personal Information may be transmitted over various networks and may be subject to changes to confirm and adapt to technical requirements of connected networks or devices.

Access to private, sensitive and confidential information, including your Personal Information, is restricted to authorized TryCycle employees, or contracted representatives, who are required to abide by our privacy standards. These individuals are bound by a confidentiality agreement, which strictly prohibits access to or disclosure of your information without authorization. These employees are subject to appropriate disciplinary measures, including dismissal, if they fail to abide by our confidentiality agreement or privacy standards.

The App may contain links or references to other websites and services owned or operated by third parties. These third-party platforms and websites are not governed by this notice. This notice does not extend to the collection of information by third parties, and we are not responsible for the privacy practices, policies or actions of third parties. When visiting third party websites or platforms, you do so at your own risk, and you assume all responsibility associated with the same. We encourage you to review the privacy policies and terms and conditions of each website and platform visited prior to using them or disclosing information to third parties.

5. Retention of Your Personal Information

To the extent we collect Personal Information, we will only retain it for as long as is necessary to fulfill the purposes for which we collected it, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting or reporting requirements or to protect us from liability in the event of a dispute.

All text messages sent through the App will be automatically deleted, except where we need to retain the chat in cases of harassment, abuse, or where personal safety is considered at risk.

6. Changes to this Privacy Notice

We reserve the right to modify this notice at any time. The notice posted on the App shall be deemed to be the notice in effect. A current notice can also be obtained by contacting us. If we make any material changes to this notice regarding how we treat your Personal Information, we will notify you through a notice on the App and will obtain your express consent as required under applicable privacy laws. We also include the date this notice was last revised at the top of the notice.

7. Governing Law

This notice shall, in all respects, be governed by and interpreted, construed and enforced in accordance with applicable provincial and federal laws of Canada.

8. Accessing or Correcting Personal Information

You may contact TryCycle to ask whether we hold Personal Information about you and, where applicable, to request access to or correction of that information. Because Buddy’s Quest is designed to keep youth responses anonymous and does not ask youth for their name, email address, or phone number, we may not be able to identify or retrieve information connected to a specific youth. If we cannot provide access to or correct information, we will explain the reason, subject to any legal or regulatory restrictions. To make a request, please see Section 9, “Contacting Us.”

9. Contacting Us

Buddy’s Quest has appointed a designated privacy contact who acts as Chief Privacy Officer (“CPO”) responsible for information system monitoring and information security notice and procedure management by:

• Undertaking privacy impact assessment and threat and risk assessments on a regular basis; and
• Adopting policies and procedures based on privacy impact assessment and threat and risk assessments to mitigate all identified risks, updated as necessary.

If you have questions about this notice or would like to submit a request or complaint, you may contact our CPO, Geoff Schaadt, by e-mail at privacy@trycycle.ca or by regular mail using the details provided below:

TryCycle Data Systems
7 Bayview Station Road
Ottawa, ON K1Y 2C5 Canada