Why we published our terms and privacy notice from the start

Part 7 of 39 of Building TradeYoke, the story of how the platform was built, from January 2024 to today. Previous: Designing a job that repeats: every four weeks, for years. Next: One codebase and offline-first: the early engineering decisions. See every part on the build timeline.

Quick answer: TradeYoke first published its terms of service and privacy notice in June 2024. A business that keeps customer records for other businesses should say, in writing and in plain English, who is responsible for the data and what is collected. Both documents are public and show when they were first published, when they last changed and a version history.

• TradeYoke's terms and privacy notice were first published in June 2024.
• Each document shows its first-published date, the date of its latest change and a version history.
• A software business that holds other businesses' customer data should write its rules down before it needs them.

By June 2024 TradeYoke was starting to hold the thing that matters most to the people who use it: their customers' details. That changes what we owe. Software that holds a window cleaner's customer list is holding names, addresses and phone numbers that belong to someone else's business and, behind that, to the customers themselves. So in June 2024 we published our terms of service and our privacy notice.

• It forces clear thinking. Writing down who is responsible for what, and what happens to the data when someone leaves, is easier before there is a lot of data.
• It tells a business what it is agreeing to. A trade business owner is not a lawyer, and should not have to be to know where they stand.
• It is the right order. Collecting data first and deciding the rules afterwards is how many businesses end up with rules that describe something else.

There is a distinction that shapes a privacy notice. For information about you as a user (your account, sign-in and billing), we decide how it is used. For information you keep about your own customers and staff, you decide and we process it on your behalf. Each role has different responsibilities, and a good privacy notice says which is which.

A published document that is never updated is worse than none. Both documents are updated when the service changes. Each shows when it was first published and when it last changed, and carries a short version history at the foot of the page, so you can see what changed and when. You can read them at Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

This is not legal advice, and we are not saying your own paperwork can copy ours. A trade business that keeps its own customers' details has its own responsibilities too. What we can say is that writing it down early made us more careful about what the product collects.

Related: Terms of Service · Privacy Policy · Roles, permissions, audit and 2FA · Invoice fraud and account protection · Pricing · The build timeline