Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Goud Work is run by Goud Games Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under number 17463983, registered with the Information Commissioner's Office. We decide what happens to the data in your account, which makes us its controller under UK data protection law. The one exception is your customers' details, which are yours: see section 9.

This policy covers goud.work, the services on it (Easy Invoice and business pages), and the business pages at their own names under goud.work. To ask us anything about your data, write to privacy@goud.work.

2. What we keep and why

Your account

Your email address. If you sign in with Google or Apple, the number they give us for you, so the same account opens next time. When you ask for a sign-in code, we keep a scrambled copy of it for 10 minutes. Why: to let you in, and only you. Legal basis: our contract with you.

Your work

Your companies (name, address, phone, email, VAT number, the bank details you print on invoices, logo, look and number series), your customers, your quotes and invoices, the reminders sent for them, and the lines of work you have used before, so we can suggest them again. Why: this is the service. Legal basis: contract.

Your business page

What you write on it, its pictures, the reviews you approve, and the price requests and bookings people send through it. Why: to show the page and pass you what comes in. Legal basis: contract.

People you let in

The email address and role of each person you add, like your accountant. We email them once to say you added them. Legal basis: contract with you, and our legitimate interest in telling them why they can get in.

A service's waiting list

If you leave your email to hear when a service opens, we keep the address and which services you picked, and write to you about those only. Legal basis: your consent, which you can take back at any time.

Invite links

If you join with somebody's invite link, we keep a note that their account brought yours, the name or code the link carried, and the half price coupon for your first month. The one who brought you earns a coupon when you pay your first month. Neither of you is shown the other's email or anything in the other's account; you only see counts and coupons. If one of you deletes your account, the note goes with it. Why: to give both of you the discount, and to stop made-up accounts. Legal basis: contract, and our legitimate interest in rewarding people who bring others.

When you write to us

What you write and the address you write from, to answer you. Legal basis: legitimate interest in helping you.

Paying for a plan

Paying is not open yet. When it opens, card payments will be taken by Revolut and we will never see your full card number. We will keep a record of what you paid and when, because tax law asks us to. This section will name exactly what we get before paying opens.

We never sell any of it, we show no ads, and none of it is used to train AI.

3. People who are not our users

If a business sent you an invoice or quote through Goud Work, your details are in it because that business put them there. The business is in charge of them; ask it first. We hold them for the business, use them only to make, send and remind about its invoices, and note when the link it sent you was opened, so it knows the invoice arrived.

If you use a business page, what you send (your name, phone, email, postcode, a message, photos, a review) goes to that business, which decides what to do with it. We keep it in that business's account and email the business to say it came. To stop a page being flooded we hold your internet address in memory for an hour; it is never written down.

4. Cookies and logs

We use only cookies that the site needs to work, so you are not asked to accept them:

• ei keeps you signed in, until you sign out or for 60 days after you last came.
• ei-ws and ei-co remember which account and which company you were working in.
• ei-form and ei-nonce stop other sites sending forms in your name, and check a Google or Apple sign-in really came from you.
• gw-from is set only when you open an invite link. It holds the name or code in that link, so your new account can be counted, and goes once you sign in, or after 30 days.

When you press Google or Apple on the sign-in page, their button loads from their site and they may set their own cookies, under their own policies. If you use the email code, nothing of theirs loads.

We count visits ourselves, without cookies and without any outside service. As each page is served we add one to that day's count of the page, the site you came from (its name only, like google.com), your country, and whether you are on a phone, tablet or computer. Your country is read from a list on our own server, so your internet address is never sent anywhere. To count people rather than pages, we make a fingerprint of your address and browser that changes every day and is never written down; only the day's total is kept. On a business page, its owner sees the same counts for their page. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in knowing how the site is used, which tells nobody anything about you.

We keep no log of visits and no record of your internet address. The site's own log notes things like "a sign-in worked" or "a reminder could not be sent", without your address or email, and is cleared each time a new version of the site goes out.

5. Who helps us

These companies handle data for us, only to do the job named and under contract with us. None of them may use it for anything of their own.

IONOS (United Kingdom)

Our server and its database, in London. Everything in your account lives here, locked.

Cloudflare

Answers for the name goud.work, keeps our pictures (locked, except those on a published business page) and passes on email sent to privacy@goud.work.

Resend

Sends our emails: sign-in codes, invoices and quotes you send, reminders, booking notices. Sent from its servers in Ireland.

Google and Apple

Only if you choose to sign in with them. They tell us your email and the number they keep for you.

Ideal Postcodes

When you look up an address, only the postcode you typed goes to them, to give back the houses on it.

Anthropic

Makes Claude, which helps only when you press one of its buttons: to draw logo ideas from your business's name, kind of work and colour; to write your page's words from the answers you type; to look over the photos you give it; or to turn a sentence about a job into invoice lines. Only what that one job needs is sent, nothing else from your account. Anthropic may not train its AI on it, and keeps it for no more than 30 days for its own safety checks before deleting it.

Before we add anyone to this list, we put them here and email every account owner at least 30 days ahead.

Your account itself stays in the United Kingdom. Resend, Cloudflare and Anthropic are American companies; where data reaches them outside the UK, it goes under the UK's own approval of that country or under the UK's International Data Transfer Addendum, which binds them to UK standards.

6. How long we keep it

• Your account and everything in it: for as long as you keep the account.
• After you ask to delete it: it is shut at once and deleted for good 30 days later, with the key that unlocks it. Signing in before then keeps it.
• Backups: one a day, each kept 14 days, then written over. So 14 days after your account is deleted no copy of it is left.
• Sign-in codes: 10 minutes, or until used.
• The note that one account brought another, and its coupons: for as long as both accounts are kept. A coupon you already earned stays yours if the other account goes.
• A waiting list address: until the service opens and we have told you, or until you ask us to remove it.
• Records of payments to us: six years, as UK tax law asks, once paying opens.

Your own invoices are a different matter. HMRC may expect you to keep them for five or six years. That is for you to do, by downloading them, because when you delete your account we delete them too.

7. How we keep it safe

Every account has a database of its own. Every record in it is encrypted with AES-256 under a key of that account's own, and those keys are locked by a master key that is never stored with the database or its backups. Your email address is kept locked too, found by a one-way fingerprint. Pictures are locked before they leave our server. Everything travels over HTTPS.

The server holds the master key while it runs, because it has to open your data to do its work. So this guards against a stolen database or backup, not against someone who takes over the server itself; we guard the server for that. Our staff do not open what is inside an account unless you ask us to. Your data is yours explains this more fully.

If something ever goes wrong that puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the Information Commissioner's Office as the law asks, and say what we are doing about it.

8. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask us:

• for a copy of what we keep about you. You can also take it yourself: Account, Your data, Download everything;
• to put right anything that is wrong. Most of it you can change yourself;
• to delete it. Account, Your data, Delete my account does this;
• to stop or limit using it, or to object to how we use it;
• to have it in a form you can take to another service. The download is that form.

Write to privacy@goud.work from the address on your account. We answer within a month and it costs nothing.

If you are not happy with our answer you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. If you live in the European Union you can also complain to the data protection authority where you live.

9. For businesses: your customers' data

When you put a customer's details into Goud Work, or someone sends you a request through your business page, you are the controller of that data and we are your processor. UK data protection law (Article 28 of the UK GDPR) asks for terms between us. These are they, and they are part of our agreement when you use Goud Work:

1. Only on your say. We use your customers' data only to do what you ask through Goud Work: make, send and remind about quotes and invoices, show your page and pass you what comes through it. Nothing else, unless the law makes us, and then we tell you first if the law allows.
2. Kept quiet. Everyone at Goud Work who could reach it is bound to keep it confidential.
3. Kept safe. It is kept as section 7 says: in your own database, encrypted under your own key.
4. Helpers. You agree to the companies in section 5. We hold each to the same duties we have here, and tell you 30 days before we add one, so you can object or leave.
5. Your customers' rights. If one of your customers asks you for their data or to delete it, you can do it yourself in Goud Work. Where you can't, we help.
6. If something goes wrong. We tell you without delay, and within 48 hours of knowing, if your customers' data has been lost, seen or changed by someone who should not have, with what we know and what we are doing.
7. At the end. When you delete your account we delete your customers' data with it, as section 6 says. Download it first if you need to keep it.
8. Showing we keep to this. We give you whatever you reasonably need to see that we keep to these terms, and answer questions about it at privacy@goud.work.

On your side: you need a lawful reason to keep your customers' details (sending them an invoice for work they asked for is one), and you tell them, in your own way, that you use Goud Work.

10. Children, and changes to this policy

Goud Work is for adults: you need to be 18 or over to have an account.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we email every account owner at least 30 days before it starts, and the date at the top changes. Small fixes to wording just change the date.