Privacy Policy

Trace is a tool for contractors to record their own work by speaking. That means we handle two sensitive things: your voice, and information about your clients. This page says plainly what happens to both.

Your voice stays on your phone

On iPhone, Trace converts your speech to text on the device, using Apple's built-in speech recognition. The audio recording is not uploaded to us and we never store it. What reaches our servers is the resulting text.

Apple's on-device speech recognition is governed by Apple's own privacy terms. Depending on your device and settings, Apple may process some speech data — see Apple's privacy policy for what they do.

If a future version of Trace offers server-side transcription (for platforms without good on-device speech), that will be clearly labelled and optional, and this page will be updated before it ships.

What we store

• Your transcripts. The text of what you said. We keep these permanently and never edit them — they are the record behind every hour and every invoice line, and being able to check them is the point of the product.
• What we extract from them. Time entries, expenses, change orders, and the clients and projects they belong to.
• Your account. Name, email address, hourly rate, tax rate, currency and province.
• Your invoices. Including the client name you gave them.

Information about your clients

When you say "six hours at the Johnson place", Trace stores "Johnson" as a client. If you add an email address so you can send an invoice, we store that too. We do not contact your clients, and we do not use their information for anything other than producing the documents you ask for.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis to record information about your clients — in practice, the ordinary business relationship you already have with them.

Who else sees your data

We use a small number of processors, and only these:

• OpenAI — your transcript text is sent to extract structured entries from it. It is not used to train their models.
• Railway — hosting and the database (United States).
• Resend — sends your sign-in codes. Receives your email address and nothing else.
• Sentry — crash and error reports. Configured not to send personal information; transcripts are explicitly excluded.
• PostHog — anonymous product analytics: which features get used, how often. Counts and durations only. Transcript text is never sent.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use your transcripts to train anything.

Deleting everything

In the app: Settings → Delete account. That permanently removes your account, transcripts, time entries, expenses and invoices from our database. It is immediate and it cannot be undone. You do not need to email us or ask permission.

Backups are retained for a short period for disaster recovery and are overwritten on a rolling basis.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to your data requires your account's token; every request is scoped to your account. Sign-in codes are stored only as a hash, expire in ten minutes, and are single-use.

Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law (PIPEDA) and, if you are in the UK or EU, the UK/EU GDPR, you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Deletion is available directly in the app. For the others, email us and we will respond within 30 days.

Children

Trace is a business tool and is not intended for anyone under 16.

Changes

If we change how we handle your data in a way that matters, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect — not just quietly update this page.

Contact

Questions, or a request about your data: [email protected].