Your information

Guru Nanak Free Kitchen, Calgary

Why we ask at all

Three reasons, and nothing else.

So the line moves. This is the main one. We serve thousands of people in a couple of hours, and if we remember your address you do not have to spell it out again every time. A few letters and you are through.

So one home gets one hamper. If two people from the same address come separately, the volunteer can see it and ask, which keeps there being enough for everyone behind them.

So we can say how many families we feed to the people who fund and supply this kitchen. That reporting uses counts only.

Why there is no name

We thought about it and decided a name adds nothing. To hand out one hamper per home we need to know which home, and how many people live there. A name would only make the records more revealing if they were ever lost or stolen. So the app does not have a field for one, and a check runs every time the software is built to make sure nobody quietly adds one back.

What happens to the ID photo

Showing ID is optional and it is only ever a shortcut. If you let a volunteer photograph your licence or ID card, the picture is sent to a text-reading service that returns your street address and nothing else, and is then discarded. We ask that service for the address only, and we do not save the picture on the tablet, on our server, or in our records. If you would rather not have it photographed, the volunteer types your address instead, or you can give no address at all.

If an address comes up twice in one day

The volunteer sees that it has already collected and chooses what to do: not serve a second hamper, serve one anyway because it is genuinely a separate home such as a basement suite, or make a note for next time. The note records only what happened and who decided it. It is never an accusation, it is never counted up, and it never stops anyone being served. Any volunteer can clear it. If you think a note about your address is wrong, ask us and we will remove it.

Being straight about "deleted"

After 18 months without a visit, your address is cleared and the record of which visits were yours is broken, so the app cannot tell anyone that those visits were yours. The same thing happens immediately if you ask us to delete it. We would rather explain the small print than overstate it: for a short period after any deletion, ordinary database housekeeping can still hold fragments, and a backup taken beforehand keeps what it captured until it ages out. Over a window as long as 18 months those backups have been replaced many times over, which is the honest reason the 18-month deletion is a real one.

Who can see it

The volunteers working the line. Your address appears when one of them is typing it in or confirming it, and when you come back and they look you up. It never appears in the list of people waiting, because that screen is visible to whoever is standing next to it. There is no way to look up an address over the internet, and we do not share any of this with anyone outside the kitchen.

Your rights

This kitchen handles personal information in line with Canada's PIPEDA and Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act. You can ask us to:

• Show you everything we hold about your address, including every date you collected.
• Correct it if the address or the number of people is wrong.
• Delete it, at any time and without giving a reason. Deleting it does not affect your being served, now or ever.

Ask a volunteer at the trailer or use the contact page below. We do these by hand rather than through a website login, because a page that let anyone type an address and see whether that home collects food would be worse for everybody.

Questions

Speak to a volunteer at the trailer, or see our contact page.

Software built and operated by Kwata Team, Calgary, Alberta. Last updated September 20, 2026.