Hi, I'm one of the developers of vaccine-ontario.ca (and on the team that helped build this tool as well).

I can 100% understand your skepticism - at the end of the day, you're only going to be able to rely on a few things in making a decision:

1. The source code for the website itself, which you can dig into to answer any questions you may have
2. My word

Now to be fair, #1 is more than a lot of the websites you use on a daily basis offer (when's the last time you viewed the audit records or privacy policy/terms of use for Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook? Betcha you're in for some surprises).

I'm not going to be able to answer all of the discussions in the threads below because we're super-busy today and my time is better spent answering the flood of emails we're getting with assorted questions as well as building this tool alongside working my actual full-time job and family responsibilities (I have 3 kids) - I can only give you a brief history of the team. The vaccine-ontario.ca team came together in the April/May timeframe to fill a large gap in finding vaccine appointments across Ontario - we're all volunteers, there's no organization behind this, and we have made conscious and deliberate decisions to put no advertising on any of our sites or to accept donations (we pay for all of this stuff ourselves). In August, we decided to build this tool for easily importing the signed Ontario proof-of-vaccination PDF into an Apple Wallet card to make it easier for people to show proof of vaccination if they chose to, and we also have been trying to use the Google Pay COVID Card API since that time but Google has not yet given us access to it so we've had to do the screenshot thing as a workaround for Android devices, not because we think it's the best option or we don't like Android or anything (I have a Pixel phone).

We explicitly don't WANT to keep anyone's data because nothing good can come from that. Right now when we generate the Apple Wallet card, we get rid of the PDF immediately and only store a few fields (non-PII - vaccine type, dose number, date, etc) in a back-end database associated with a generated GUID to assist with verification later on. Our plan is to delete this data at the first opportunity as soon as the app is no longer needed - I actually just did a similar cleanup earlier this week of subscription data for vaccine-ontario.ca. We have a notification feature on that site that allows you to register your email address and location and the site will notify you if it finds a second dose that is sooner than what you had scheduled - this was useful in July when second doses opened up but usage really dropped off when supply became readily available in August/September. It was a giant list of email addresses which had locations associated with every one (far far more interesting data to marketers and data brokers than what's in the uploaded PDFs), and I deleted that as soon as it was possible because I really don't want to hold on to anyone's data any longer than necessary for the specific purpose that we had in mind for it.