Privacy

Privacy Policy

Last updated November 3, 2026

BuyAndSellABusiness.com (the "Service") is a free business-for-sale listing service. Your trust matters to us. This policy explains, in plain language, what we collect, why, and the choices you have.

The short version

Listing and searching are free. We share your information only as this policy describes, including sharing your contact details with partners who want to offer you their services. You can opt out of that at any time (section 6).
Ads help keep listing and searching free. You will always see ads, but you can opt out of personalized ads and of our sharing your information with advertising partners (sections 6 and 9).
Listings never show a seller's phone number or email address, and a seller sees a buyer's name and contact details only once the buyer's inquiry is unlocked.
Messages pass through our system, and automated tools, including AI, help us keep listings and messages safe.
Our promotional emails give you a way to unsubscribe.
We use what people tell us to produce combined market statistics. They never name you or your business.
Your information is stored with service providers mainly in the United States.
You can ask to see or correct your information, or ask us to close your account.

Who we are
Our privacy officer
What we collect
Why we use it
Market statistics
Who we share it with
Where your information is stored
Email
Cookies
How long we keep it
Your rights and choices
How we protect it
Automated tools
Children
Changes
Questions and complaints

1. Who we are

1.1 The Service is operated by ScalePoint M&A Inc. ("we", "us" or "our"), based in Calgary, Alberta. We are responsible for the personal information described in this policy.

1.2 This policy explains how we collect, use, share and protect personal information when you use the Service, including our website, emails and the tools we connect to it. Please read it with our Terms of Use.

1.3 We follow Canada's private-sector privacy laws, including the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act, and Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

2. Our privacy officer

Jodi Scarlett, Privacy Officer

Email: privacy@buyandsellabusiness.com

3. What we collect

Information you give us

Creating an account: Name, email address, password (stored in scrambled form), phone number, and whether you want to buy, sell or represent sellers. Brokers also give their brokerage name, location and website. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your name, email address and an account identifier from them.
Your buyer profile: The business you want: industries, locations, price and cash-flow ranges, timeline, financing, buyer type and experience, plus any searches you save.
Listing a business: Details of the business, including its name, location, figures, assets, premises, staff numbers, reason for sale and photos, plus a contact phone number. When a listing ends, you can tell us whether it sold and, if you choose, the price and closing date.
A broker profile: Your name, photo, firm, title, biography, areas served, specialties, credentials, languages and website.
Messages: Messages you send to sellers, buyers or brokers through the Service, and your answers to our follow-up questions.
The Wanted board: A description of the business you want.
Valuation tool: The figures and answers you enter.
Payments: Billing details. Stripe handles card payments; we receive only the card brand, last four digits and expiry date.
Newsletter and community sign-ups: Your email address and, for our community and workshop lists, your name and interests.
Contacting us: What you tell us by email or phone, including notes of our calls with you, and any listing reports you send.

Information we collect automatically

How you use the Service, such as pages viewed, searches, saved listings, browser type, approximate location from your IP address and the site that referred you.
Records of your consent choices and of any confidential listing agreement you accept, with the date, time, IP address and browser details.
Cookies and similar technologies, including those used by our advertising partners (section 9).

Information from others

Accounts, listings, inquiries and broker profiles from the previous version of the Site, which came to us when the business changed hands in 2026. We use them for the purposes for which they were collected. Broker profiles contain the business contact details brokers publish, and brokers can claim, update or ask us to remove them.
Information other users give us about you, for example in a listing report.

Please don't send us identity documents or other sensitive information.

4. Why we use it

We use personal information to:

run the marketplace: manage accounts, publish and promote listings (always within your confidentiality settings), pass messages between users, and run the Wanted board and confidential listings;
connect buyers and sellers: match listings to buyers' criteria, send listing alerts, and share a buyer's details with a seller who unlocks their inquiry;
process payments and keep records of what you bought;
keep the Service safe: confirm email addresses, review listings before they go live, check messages for contact details and anything suspicious, review messages that are held or reported, and prevent fraud and misuse;
contact you about your account, your listing or your inquiry, by email or phone, and invite brokers in our directory to claim their profile;
send our newsletter if you have signed up for it;
offer you related services, from us or our affiliated businesses, such as help buying, selling or valuing a business;
share your contact details with partners who want to offer you their services, unless you opt out (section 6);
show and measure advertising, including ads on the Service and ads for our Service on other sites (section 6);
improve the Service and fix problems;
produce market statistics about buying and selling businesses, mainly in Canada, and in other countries where we have listings (section 5); and
meet legal obligations, such as tax records.

By creating an account, you consent to these uses. Optional features, such as the newsletter and the Wanted board, are your choice, and you can withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal limits, by changing your settings, unsubscribing or contacting our privacy officer.

5. Market statistics

5.1 We combine information from many listings, searches, inquiries, buyer profiles, valuations and sale outcomes into anonymized, aggregated statistics, reports and benchmarks about the market for buying and selling businesses, mainly in Canada, and in other countries where we have listings. This includes listing details such as industry, region, asking price, revenue and cash flow. Statistics may be broken down by industry, region or business size (for example, restaurants in Alberta), but never name an individual business.

5.2 We may publish these statistics, share them with users, and share or license them to others, including partners. They never name you or your business. We only publish sale prices as combined figures, such as category averages, and we never show the sale price of an identifiable business.

5.3 We will not try to identify anyone from these statistics, and anyone who receives our reports must agree not to try either. We may keep using statistics after your account is closed, because they don't name anyone.

6. Who we share it with

We share your personal information only as described here.

With other users

Listings are shown within the confidentiality settings you choose. They never show the seller's phone number or email address.
Inquiries. The seller sees your message and a short summary of the business you want. They see your name, email, phone number and buyer profile only once your inquiry is unlocked, which a seller can pay for and our broker plans include. If a listing has no seller account, your inquiry comes to our team and we pass on your message.
Brokers. If you contact a broker from their profile, the broker receives your name, email and message. If you accept a broker's introduction on the Wanted board, that broker receives your details.
Wanted board. Anyone can see a preview of your post (industry, province, budget and timeline); brokers on a paid plan see the full post. Your name and contact details stay hidden until you accept an introduction.
Confidential (Vault) listings. If you accept a listing's confidentiality agreement, its seller or broker receives your name and buyer profile summary.
Broker profiles are public, including the broker's listings and any sold history shown on their plan. Sale prices are never shown.

Once a seller or broker has your details, they are responsible for how they use them, and our Terms allow them to use your details only to deal with you about the business.

With service providers who help us run the Service and may use the information only for that:

hosting, database and file storage (Vercel, Neon);
payments (Stripe);
email delivery (Resend), newsletter (Mailchimp), business email and phone (Google Workspace, Microsoft) and customer records (HubSpot);
sign-in (Google, Apple);
website analytics (Google Analytics), error monitoring (Sentry) and spam protection (Cloudflare);
our online community (Slack), for people we invite to join;
AI models that review listings and messages, interpret searches, suggest text and run our listing assistant, accessed through OpenRouter; and
AI assistants we use to help run the Service.

We choose AI providers and settings that limit how long they keep information, and that stop them training on it where they offer that option.

Advertising partners. We work with advertising partners such as Google and Meta to show ads on the Service, to advertise our Service on other sites, and to measure how ads perform. To do this, we may share limited information, such as a scrambled (hashed) version of your email address or an account identifier that doesn't show your name, and our partners may collect information through cookies (section 9). We don't share your listings, messages, financial details or buyer profile for advertising. Ads help keep the Service free, so you will always see ads, but you can opt out of our sharing your information with advertising partners at any time by emailing privacy@buyandsellabusiness.com, and we will stop including you. You will still see ads; they just won't be based on information we share. If you live in Quebec, advertising cookies and sharing with advertising partners stay off until you give your consent.

AI assistants you connect. If your plan lets you connect an AI assistant (such as Claude or ChatGPT), the information it reads goes to that assistant's provider under its own terms. You can disconnect it at any time.

Our affiliated businesses. We may share your information with businesses affiliated with us, which may use it to offer you related services, such as help buying, selling or valuing a business, under this policy.

Partners. We may share your contact details (your name, email address and phone number) and whether you're buying or selling with partners, such as brokers, lenders or other service providers, who want to offer you their services. Partners may pay us for these introductions or leads. We don't share your business's details or figures for this. You can opt out at any time by emailing privacy@buyandsellabusiness.com. If you live in Quebec, we'll ask you first.

For legal and business reasons. We may disclose information where the law requires or permits, for example to respond to a court order or to prevent fraud. If our business is reorganized or sold, personal information may pass to the new owner, who must use it as this policy describes.

7. Where your information is stored

7.1 Our hosting, database and file storage are in the United States (Ohio). Our other service providers operate mainly in the United States and Canada, and some, such as Google and Microsoft, also process information in other countries.

7.2 Our contracts require these providers to protect the information and use it only to serve us. Information held outside Canada is subject to the laws of that country, and may be accessed by its courts, law enforcement and national security authorities. You can ask our privacy officer about how our providers outside Canada handle your information.

8. Email

8.1 Service emails. We send the emails needed to run your account and the features you use, such as inquiries, listing approvals, check-ins, receipts and trial reminders.

8.2 Newsletter. We send our newsletter to people who have signed up for it, on this Site or on its previous version.

8.3 Listing alerts. Buyers can get email alerts about new listings that match their buyer profile or saved searches, and you can turn these off at any time.

8.4 Related services. We and our affiliated businesses may email you about related services, such as help buying, selling or valuing a business. Every such email lets you unsubscribe.

8.5 Unsubscribing. Our promotional emails give you a way to unsubscribe, identify us and link to our contact details. You can also manage many of your email choices in your account, or contact us. We act on an unsubscribe request within 10 business days, usually straight away.

9. Cookies

We use cookies and similar browser storage to keep you signed in and keep the Service secure (including spam protection on our forms), to remember unfinished work such as a listing or Wanted post, and to measure how the Service is used with Google Analytics. Our advertising partners may also use cookies and similar technologies to show ads that may interest you and to measure them. If you live in Quebec, advertising cookies stay off until you give your consent. You can manage cookies through your browser, opt out of personalized ads from Google at adssettings.google.com and from many other advertisers at youradchoices.ca, and opt out of Google Analytics with Google's browser add-on. Parts of the Service may not work without essential cookies.

10. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes in this policy, or as the law requires, and then delete it or remove what identifies you. For example:

account and profile information, while your account is open (if you haven't signed in for 3 years, we may email you and then close it);
payment and tax records, at least 6 years, as tax law requires;
the original text of messages, before contact details are replaced, 30 days;
consent and confidentiality-agreement records, as long as we may need to show what was agreed; and
listing view counts, up to 2 days in a form linked to your browser.

11. Your rights and choices

11.1 You can ask us for access to the personal information we hold about you and how we've used and shared it, to correct it, or to close your account. You can update much of it yourself in your account and unsubscribe from emails at any time. For anything else, contact our privacy officer. We may need to confirm your identity, and we will respond within 30 days.

11.2 Closing your account. When we close your account, we remove your name, email address, phone number, password, profile and buyer criteria, delete your saved searches and alerts, withdraw your listings, end your Wanted board posts and remove you from our newsletter and customer records. Some information stays:

messages you already sent remain in the other person's conversation, under the name "Deleted member";
listings marked sold stay on the Site as sold listings, without your contact details;
records we must keep for legal, tax and accounting reasons, such as payments and consent records;
valuation answers and sale outcomes, which we use only in combined statistics; and
photos you uploaded, which we stop showing but which may remain reachable at their web address for a time.

12. How we protect it

We use safeguards suited to the sensitivity of the information. Your information is stored in secure, professionally managed data centres run by leading cloud providers, which are independently audited against international security standards such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2. Information is encrypted when it travels to and from the Site and when it is stored. Card payments are handled by Stripe, which is certified to PCI DSS Level 1, the highest security standard in the payments industry. Access to personal information is restricted to the team members who need it, passwords are stored in scrambled form, and we use automated checks for fraud and misuse and keep logs of important actions. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong password. If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the privacy regulators as the law requires.

13. Automated tools

We use automated tools, including AI, to review listings, check messages, interpret searches and match listings with buyers, and they can approve a listing on their own. If a tool holds your listing or message, a member of our team reviews it, and you can always ask us how a tool reached a result about you and have a person review it. Paid promotion affects where listings appear, as section 9.2 of our Terms of Use explains.

14. Children

The Service is for adults. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; if we learn we have, we will delete it.

15. Changes

We may update this policy. We will post the new version with its date and tell you by email or on the Site before a significant change takes effect.

16. Questions and complaints

Please contact our privacy officer first; we would like the chance to put things right. If you're not satisfied, you can contact the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (oipc.ab.ca) or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca).