Improvements for both GDPR compliance and privacy today 🔐 🕵️‍♀️

We've been deleting a heap of unwanted cookies from Timetastic and producing better documentation of what you will find on our website and app.

It's all on our updated Cookie Policy

We launched booking attachments a week or so ago on the web app, so you can include attachments when you book some leave - for example if you're booking time off as a sick day, you can include a photo of a doctor's note. 🤢

Well... We now have that same functionality in the mobile app! 🎉

When you book some time off - and tap to add a reason - you'll notice some new options here - that allow you to either attach an existing image, or take a photo:

You can also view attachments from the mobile app by bringing up a holiday.

Make sure you update your mobile app to version 5.5 to see this

Enjoy!

We've just published an update to our Privacy Policy to keep in line with GDPR requirements.

The main changes are:

1. Outlining our legal basis for collecting and processing data.

2. More detail on what data we collect, why, and how we collect it.

3. Clarify on how long we retain personal data for.

4. Clarification of your rights under GDPR.

5. Inclusion of our EU data representative - a requirement since Brexit.

Hopefully it all makes sense and you find the information nice and clear.

Thanks, and have a nice weekend :)

Today we launch something that we've been working on for a little while...booking attachments! 🎉 For example, if you're booking time off as a sick day, you can now attach a photo of your doctor's note.

This isn't limited to sick days - if you want to gloat about the weather forecast for your upcoming beach holiday, you could attach a screenshot of the local weather report  😎 

For this first release it's just a desktop function, but fear not, the mobile app will have the feature in the coming days.

Some more updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Part of the ongoing process to make them clearer and easier to understand.

Main points to note:

Terms of service

We are switching to more conversational language, removing the stuffiness.

A full rewrite of the Cancellation and Termination section. To get rid of large swathes of unnecessary legalese and clarify that you can cancel anytime, instantly. And that all your data will be deleted from all backups within 14 days.

Privacy policy - 3rd party apps.

We're stepping up privacy and Google Analytics is the first casualty👏. We removed all Google Analytics tracking from the website and app. We won't be feeding their big data machine any longer. 

And with that we've removed Google Inc as a 3rd party data processor.

Thanks, and have a nice weekend :)

Gary

Fix 

First up we fixed an issue where Slack posts would fail if the public holiday country had multiple public holidays on the same day. 

Improvement 

Second up, big privacy improvement to Timetastic: Following our removal of email trackers a while ago, we've removed Google Analytics from the website, app, blog, help centre and this changelog.

We've moved to a privacy focused analytics app called Plausible.

You can read more about Plausible here: https://plausible.io/ 

We've updated the terms and conditions today.

Nothing that will affect our contractual relationship. Most changes are to use clearer language.

This is the first step in moving towards terms written in plain English, so expect more updates like this.

We've also removed some of the clauses that made no sense at all:

For example:

• Clauses that said you can't use Timetastic for sending out spam emails. Believe it or not this happened once or twice. Some spammers used scripts that created Timetastic accounts and sent strange emails to Russian and Chinese people 🤷‍♂️. The point is, spammers didn't care about terms of service, it's no good waving a contract at them. We upgraded our security measures and it's never happened since.
• Clauses that said you can't try and interrupt the provision of Timetastic. Like the example above, no paying customer is likely involved in hacks or attacks on us. And if they did the remedy is for us to improve security 🔐. We can't imagine holding a hacker to breach of contract will have much impact.

We've also removed some of the preamble and definitions. We had definitions that didn't exist in the main body of the terms.

Thanks, and happy Friday!