Privacy

Each business decides who works there, what they are told to do, and what is recorded about them. The business is therefore the responsible party for its own people’s information, under the Protection of Personal Information Act. That includes every recording a worker sends.

YardNote is the business’s operator. It holds that information on the business’s behalf, on its instructions, and for the business’s purposes only. It uses none of it for purposes of its own.

• Their name, and the shorter name the business actually calls them by.
• Their mobile number, where they are on WhatsApp.
• What they do, and the language they prefer to be spoken to in.
• Whether they can read a written instruction, and which recording they prefer to hear — their manager’s own voice, a spoken translation, or both. These exist so that somebody who cannot read is never sent only writing.
• Whether they have agreed to be recorded, when they agreed, and which manager was there when they did.

The service is built on spoken messages because many of the people using it cannot read. It holds the manager’s original recording of an instruction, a spoken translation of it, and any voice note a worker sends back.

The recording is the record. Transcripts and translations are a convenience and are often partly wrong, so the original audio is never deleted or overwritten to make room for a corrected version.

Alongside each recording the service holds its transcript and translation, and whether a person has corrected either.

A voice is never used to identify anybody. A worker’s message is known by the phone number it came from, never by the sound of a voice. Nothing in the service measures a voice to tell one person from another.

• The work orders themselves: what the job is, which place or piece of equipment it concerns, who it was given to, and what happened to it.
• Every message sent or received, when it was sent, whether it arrived, and what it cost the business.
• A location, only when a worker chooses to attach one to a message — for example to show where a broken fence is. The service does not track anyone and does not ask a phone where it is. Nothing is collected between messages.

No work is sent to a person, and nothing is recorded for that person, until the person agrees. The business asks on WhatsApp. The message is in the person’s own language. It says what the person is agreeing to, and it has two buttons: “I agree” and “Not now”. The answer is a tap on the person’s own phone. That answer is the record: the number it came from, the words it answered, and the date and time it arrived.

When a business adds somebody new, a shorter message may come first. It says which business has added this number, and the person answers yes or no. On yes, the person picks a language, and the question above follows in that language. On no, nothing more is sent.

WhatsApp does not carry every language in a message of that kind. Where it cannot, the person agrees with a code instead. The manager shows the code on the screen, and the person scans it with the phone the work will go to. The words open there in the person’s own language, and the person presses send. Or the words and the code arrive as an ordinary WhatsApp message, and the person sends the code back. Either way the agreement is a message from the person’s own phone, and it is kept as the record in the same way.

Nobody can agree on somebody else’s behalf. A message carrying one person’s code but sent from another person’s phone is refused, and there is no box anywhere in this service for a manager to tick instead. Somebody who works on a computer rather than a phone agrees the same way, signed in with their own login.

The service refuses to send any work to anybody without that record — not as a setting that can be switched off, but in the code that does the sending. The only messages that go before it are the ones that ask for it.

Consent can be withdrawn at any time by telling the business. It takes effect from the next message: the permission ends, and the date the person asked is kept, so that nobody asks the person again without knowing the answer was already stop. What was said before that is not deleted — it belongs to the person who said it, and it stays.

• WhatsApp (Meta) carries the messages and the recordings. It cannot be otherwise — that is how the message reaches the phone. Meta’s own terms govern what it does with them.
• Speech services transcribe and translate recordings, and read numbers and titles aloud.
• Hosting providers store the database and the recordings, and run the service.

Nothing is sold, and nothing is used for advertising. One business cannot see another business’s people, work or recordings.

The database and the recordings are hosted in Frankfurt, Germany. A recording is kept for twelve months, and only the business it belongs to can hear it.

Names, work orders and message records are kept while the business uses the service, as its own record of the work that was done.

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act a person may ask what is held about them, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, and withdraw consent to being recorded.

Ask the business. Every one of these can be done by the manager, and a worker does not need an account, an app or an email address to ask — which matters, because most will not have one.

The service is for people employed to do a job of work. It is not for children.

Where this notice changes in a way that affects what is held or who sees it, every business using the service is told, through the person who signed it up, before the change takes effect.