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Legal documents

A tenant's consent, terms of use and privacy notice are legal documents. Each has a code, a type (consent, terms or notice) and published versions; a published version never changes. A tenant that hasn't written a document with some code inherits the DEFAULT tenant's, so every tenant has the platform's consent, terms and privacy notice until it writes its own. Only a platform admin writes and publishes them; admins read them.

What people owe​

Every person is bound by the terms; consent is a participant's. A person owes a document they have never agreed to, or one whose newer version asks again. A notice is never agreed to, only shown, and is owed again when a newer version tells of a change. What each version asks is chosen when it is published:

  • ask: everyone who agreed to an earlier version is asked to agree to this one.
  • notify: a notice is shown to everyone once more.
  • none: a correction; nobody is asked anything.

Consent stands only while every consent document that applies is given. A person asked to agree to a newer consent version still stands on the one they gave until they answer; refusing the newer version withdraws consent, so the apps offer Withdraw consent there rather than Decline. A membership owing the current terms holds no permissions until it accepts them, so the apps and the portal ask before anything else.

Decisions are records​

Each decision is an event on the person, never changed afterwards: consent given, declined or withdrawn; terms accepted or declined; a notice shown. It names the version and keeps a fingerprint of its text. Every decision is the person's own, made in an app or the portal and dated by the server; nobody records one for someone else. Staff can read the record, and each read is logged.

The user's consentGivenAt and consentWithdrawnAt are kept from these events and can't be written directly. See Consent, access logging and erasure.