Privacy Policy
1. Who we are and what this covers
Better Bridge Media Incorporated ("we", "us") operates TheTradeNet, a service that answers the calls a trades business doesn't pick up, using an AI assistant, and follows up by text.
Contact for privacy matters: Privacy Officer, team@thetradenet.ca, Better Bridge Media Incorporated, BN 701913543RC0001.
We have designated an individual within our business as accountable for privacy compliance. Their name is available on request at the email above.
1.1 Three different roles, this matters
We handle personal information in three distinct capacities, and your rights differ depending on which applies.
As a service provider to our clients: when we answer a call for a plumbing company, the caller's information belongs to that plumbing company's relationship with its customer. The business is accountable to its customer for that information; we process it on their instructions. If you called a trades business and reached our assistant, your first point of contact is that business, though we will help, and you can contact us directly.
As the business ourselves, with our clients: when you subscribe as a client, we handle your information for our own purposes and we are directly accountable to you for it.
As the business ourselves, with people considering us: when you visit our website, book a discovery call with us, or email us, we handle your information for our own purposes and we are directly accountable to you for it. This applies whether or not you ever become a client. See section 4.
2. Information about our clients' callers
This section covers information we handle on behalf of a trades business when you call them, they don't pick up, and you reach our assistant.
2.1 What we collect
- Your telephone number, and the number you called
- Your name, as you give it
- The service address you provide
- What you describe needing, and how urgent it is
- The appointment booked, if any
- An audio recording of the call and a written transcript
- The text message conversation, where one follows
- Technical call details: time, duration, and how the call ended
2.2 How we obtain your consent
You are told at the start of the call. Before collecting anything, our assistant identifies itself as a virtual assistant of the business you called and states that the call may be recorded. If you continue, you have been informed. If you would rather not be recorded, you can hang up and contact the business another way.
For text messages, we rely on the fact that you called the business first. Every message identifies the business and tells you how to stop. Replying STOP takes effect immediately and permanently.
Where you gave us your number on a form on our own website rather than by calling a business, the basis is different and is described in section 4.
2.3 Why we collect it
Only to provide the service the business has engaged us for: answering the call, understanding what you need, booking an appointment in that business's own calendar, confirming it to you, and giving the business a record of what was said.
2.4 What we do not do
- We do not sell your information.
- We do not share it with anyone except the service providers in section 5.
- We do not use it for marketing, ours or anyone else's.
- We do not use your conversations to train artificial intelligence models, and our agreements with the providers in section 5 prohibit them from doing so on our data.
On AI more generally, because the distinction matters: the assistant that speaks with you is AI, that is the service. And when a business asks a question about their own results in their dashboard, we may pass the relevant conversations to an AI model so it can answer them. In both cases the model processes the information to produce an answer and retains nothing for training. Processing information to answer a question is not the same as training a model on it, and we do only the former.
3. Information about our clients
This section covers information about the businesses that subscribe, in our own capacity.
What we collect: business name and details, contact name, email and phone, billing information (held by our payment processor, not by us), the settings you configure, the calendar account you connect, the documents you accept and when, your sign-in activity, and a log of the call records you view in your dashboard.
Your calendar connection. When you connect a Google or Microsoft calendar, we hold an access token that lets us read your availability and create, change and cancel the appointments we book. We do not read the contents of unrelated calendar entries beyond whether a time is free or busy, and we do not modify entries we did not create. You can revoke that access at any time from your Google or Microsoft account, and we revoke it ourselves when your account closes.
Why we log dashboard views: those records contain your customers' personal information. Knowing who looked at what is part of protecting it.
Why we collect the rest: to provide and bill for the service, to support you, to meet our legal and tax obligations, and to tell you about changes to the service.
Marketing: we may email you about the service you're using. We will not add you to unrelated marketing without your consent, and every message has an unsubscribe link.
4. Our website, and booking a discovery call
4.1 Visiting the site
When you visit thetradenet.ca we collect anonymous, aggregated statistics: which pages are viewed, roughly where visitors come from, and what type of device they use. We do not use tracking cookies, we do not build a profile of you, and we do not share this with advertisers. There is nothing here that identifies you.
We use Cloudflare Turnstile on our booking form to tell people from automated traffic. It does not track you across sites and does not build a profile of you.
4.2 Booking a discovery call
If you book a discovery call with us, we collect your name, email address, telephone number, and the time you selected.
What we do with it. We create the appointment in our own scheduling system, send you a confirmation email and a confirmation text message, and keep a record so we can prepare for and follow up on the call. We use it to talk to you about TheTradeNet and for nothing else. We do not sell it, we do not add you to unrelated marketing, and we do not share it beyond the service providers in section 5.
Your consent to the text message. The consent language sits directly above the button you press, not buried in this policy. By submitting the form you are asking us to contact you about the call you booked. Replying STOP to that message stops any further messages immediately and permanently.
We check your email address before we accept it. To reduce the chance of confirming a booking to an address that cannot receive it, we perform a technical check on the domain part of your email address, for example the "gmail.com" in "someone@gmail.com". Only the domain is checked. Your full address is not sent anywhere for this purpose.
4.3 If your submission is rejected
If the form turns your submission away, because the email address appears misspelled or undeliverable, the phone number is not valid, or the time you chose was taken while you were typing, we keep a record of the attempt. That record contains the name, email address and phone number you typed, the reason we turned it away, and the message we showed you.
We are telling you this plainly because it is unusual, and because we think you should know it happens. We keep it for one reason: someone who mistyped their email and gave up is a person we failed to reach, and without this record we would never know they existed. It is not used for marketing, it is never sold or shared beyond the providers in section 5, and it is deleted on the schedule in section 6.
If you would rather we did not keep a record of a submission that never completed, email team@thetradenet.ca and we will remove it.
5. Service providers and where information is processed
We use the following providers. Each receives only what it needs.
5.1 Providers that handle our clients' callers
| Provider | What it does | Processing location |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | Hosts our application and database | United Kingdom (Manchester) |
| Twilio | Telephone and text messaging | United States |
| Retell AI | Voice assistant, call recording and transcription | United States |
| Anthropic | Text conversation assistant and dashboard question answering | United States |
| Google / Microsoft | The client's own connected calendar, where we read availability and create appointments | United States and other locations, per that provider |
5.2 Providers that handle our own business information
| Provider | What it does | Processing location |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Subscription billing and card handling | United States |
| Resend (using Amazon Web Services) | Transactional email: confirmations, invitations, verification codes, password resets | United States (Northern Virginia) |
| Airtable | Records of discovery call bookings and enquiries made through our website | United States |
| Cal.com | Scheduling for our own sales and discovery calls, booked on our website | United States |
| Cloudflare | Bot protection on our website forms | Global |
Cal.com is not part of the service we provide to clients. We use it only to schedule our own calls with people considering TheTradeNet. Our clients' appointments are created directly in their own Google or Microsoft calendar and never pass through it.
5.3 Information is processed outside Canada
Our application and database are hosted in Manchester, in the United Kingdom. Most of the other providers listed above process information in the United States.
This means your information may be subject to the laws of those countries, including lawful access by their courts and authorities, regardless of where you live. Canadian privacy law permits this, and requires that we tell you about it and that we use contractual means to ensure comparable protection. We have data processing agreements in place with our providers for that purpose.
Canadian privacy law does not require personal information to stay in Canada.
Providers occasionally change where they process information. We review this table when we change providers and at least annually, and the version number and effective date at the top of this policy tell you when it was last revised.
6. How long we keep things
We keep personal information only as long as we need it, then delete it or strip out everything that identifies a person.
Two things worth being clear about first, because they are commonly glossed over and we would rather be accurate than reassuring.
We do not store call audio ourselves. The recording of a call is held by our voice provider. What we hold is a link to it. We remove that link from our records after 90 days, and the file itself is retained by that provider under its own schedule, listed in section 5. If you want a specific recording deleted at source, ask us and we will instruct it.
We keep encrypted backups, so we can recover if something fails. Information that reaches the end of a period below is removed from our live systems on that schedule, and disappears from backups as those backups age out, within 30 days.
What we hold, and for how long
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| The raw technical payload our voice provider sends us for each call, which contains the caller's details and full transcript | 30 days, then permanently stripped |
| Link to the call recording | 90 days |
| Call and text transcripts | 24 months |
| Callers' names, phone numbers and service addresses | 24 months, then permanently removed |
| Answered-call counts and appointment totals, containing no personal information | Kept indefinitely |
| Client calendar access tokens | Until you disconnect or your account closes |
| Discovery call bookings made through our website | 24 months from the call, or for as long as you remain a client |
| Records of website submissions we turned away (section 4.3) | 12 months |
| Client business and billing records | 7 years (tax and accounting requirements) |
| Accepted agreements and the record of acceptance | Kept indefinitely |
| Dashboard access logs | 24 months |
Minimum retention: where we have used information to handle a call or book an appointment, we keep the record of it for at least 12 months so that you can ask us what happened and obtain a copy. We will not delete it sooner even at request, though we will stop using it for anything other than responding to you. This minimum does not apply to the records in section 4.3, which we will delete at your request at any time.
After 24 months, a past job still counts toward a business's totals, but the customer's name, number and address are gone from our records and cannot be recovered.
What our service providers hold
The providers in section 5 each hold a copy of the part of the conversation they handled: the voice provider holds the recording and transcript, the messaging provider holds the text messages, and our email provider holds a record of messages sent and whether they were delivered. Each retains it under its own schedule, which we do not control. We have data processing agreements in place with each of them, and where you ask us to have a specific record deleted at source, we will make that request on your behalf and tell you the outcome.
Your own calendar is yours. Appointments we book are created directly in the business's own calendar, with the customer's name and address. That is the business's record of its own job. Deleting or keeping it is theirs to decide, and we do not remove entries when an account closes.
If a client's account ends: we revoke the calendar connection, remove recording links within 30 days, and remove callers' names, numbers and addresses within 90 days. Anonymised totals, accepted agreements and our own business records are retained.
One exception: where there is an open dispute, refund claim or legal matter, we pause deletion of records relating to it until the matter is resolved.
7. How we protect information
- Access is limited to the people who need it to operate the service.
- Information is transmitted over encrypted connections.
- Our database is not reachable from the public internet, and our dashboard connects using a restricted account that cannot read our internal cost, configuration or diagnostic data.
- Calendar access tokens are stored encrypted and used only to read availability and manage the appointments we created.
- Every view of a call record through a client dashboard is logged.
- Support access: to help a client with a problem we may need to view their dashboard as they see it. That access is read-only, we cannot change their settings, accept anything on their behalf, or send messages as them, and every such session is recorded. If we need to change something, we ask first.
No system is perfectly secure, and we don't claim otherwise.
8. If something goes wrong
If we become aware of a breach of security safeguards creating a real risk of significant harm, we will:
- tell affected clients as soon as we know, without waiting to complete our investigation, and follow up with detail as we establish it;
- give them the information they need to meet their own notification obligations;
- notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and affected individuals where the law requires;
- keep a record of the breach as required by law.
We would rather tell you early and imperfectly than late and completely.
9. Your rights
You may ask us to tell you what personal information we hold about you, to correct it if it's wrong, to explain how we've used it, or to withdraw consent.
If you are a caller of one of our clients, contact that business first, they are the organisation accountable to you. We will help them respond, and you may also contact us directly at team@thetradenet.ca.
If you are a client, contact us directly.
If you booked a discovery call with us, or submitted a form on our website, contact us directly. We are the organisation accountable to you for that information.
We will respond within 30 days, which is the limit PIPEDA itself sets. We may need to verify your identity first. Where we can't provide something, for example where doing so would reveal information about another person, we will explain why.
Withdrawing consent may mean we can no longer provide the service.
9.1 Complaints
Contact our Privacy Officer first; we would rather fix it. If you're not satisfied, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada: priv.gc.ca, 1-800-282-1376.
10. Children
TheTradeNet is a service for businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If a minor happens to call a business and reach our assistant, that information is handled the same way as any other caller's and deleted on the same schedule.
11. Automated decisions
Our assistant decides, during a conversation, what to ask, which appointment times to offer, and whether a call appears to be spam or an emergency. These decisions affect how your call is handled; they do not determine whether you receive service. The business always retains the final decision about the work.
Our website form applies automated checks to the details you enter, described in sections 4.2 and 4.3, and may decline a booking on that basis. If that happens the form tells you why and lets you correct it, and you can always reach us at team@thetradenet.ca instead.
If you believe our assistant mishandled your call, tell the business you called, or contact us.
12. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. Where a change materially affects how we handle personal information we will notify our clients and ask them to accept the new version, and we will post the updated policy with a new version number and effective date.
Every version a client has accepted stays available in their dashboard with the date they accepted it.
Better Bridge Media Incorporated · BN 701913543RC0001 · team@thetradenet.ca · thetradenet.ca
Privacy Officer contact: team@thetradenet.ca