Privacy policy

Prototype is a coordination tool for hardware engineering teams. It holds the configuration of the projects a team is building — specifications, components, tasks, approvals, and the files that go with them.

The service is operated by [operator legal name]. In this policy, “we”, “us”, and “our” mean that operator. “You” means anyone who uses Prototype or this website.

We are bound by the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). This policy explains what personal information we handle, why, who else sees it, and the choices and rights you have. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the additional rights described in section 13 apply to you.

This policy covers the Prototype application, this marketing website, and the emails we send you. It does not cover the separate services we link out to, each of which has its own policy.

It also does not change who owns the content in your workspace. The specifications, components, documents, and files your team creates belong to your team. We hold them to run the service for you, and where that content contains personal information about your colleagues, your organization decides how it is used and we act on your organization’s instructions.

Your use of Prototype is also subject to our terms of service, which set out the contract between us. This policy deals only with personal information.

We collect the following kinds of personal information.

• Account information. Your name, email address, profile image if you set one, and which organization and role you belong to. If you sign in with a Google account, we receive your name, email address, and profile image from Google — we never receive your Google password.
• Content you create. Everything you enter into the product: specifications and their parameters, components, interfaces, tasks, milestones, meeting records, comments and chat messages, and any files you upload (up to 50 MB each). This content can contain personal information about you and about other people, such as who authored a change or who approved a specification.
• Activity records. An audit history of significant actions — who changed a specification, who approved or rejected something, and when. This is a core function of the product rather than an optional extra: the point of Prototype is to make the provenance of an engineering decision traceable.
• Usage and analytics information. Pages you visit, features you use, clicks and other interactions, and — as described in section 5 — a session replay that reconstructs your visit visually.
• Technical information. Your IP address, browser and operating system, device type, approximate location derived from your IP address, referring page, and the timestamps of your requests.
• Error diagnostics. When something breaks, an error report containing the fault, the page you were on, your account identifier, and your IP address.
• Messages you send us. If you use our contact form or apply as a founding team, we collect your name, email address, organization, and whatever you write to us.
• Billing information. If and when paid plans become active, our payment processor collects your billing details and we receive your billing email and subscription status. We never receive or store your card number.

We collect most personal information directly from you — when you create an account, enter content, upload a file, or contact us.

Some we collect automatically as you use the service, through cookies and similar technologies (section 6) and through our analytics and error monitoring (section 5).

Some we may collect from other people. If a colleague invites you to an organization, we receive your email address from them before you have any dealings with us. If you sign in through Google, we receive basic profile information from Google. And your colleagues’ content may mention you.

Where we collect your information from someone other than you, we take reasonable steps to make sure you are told about it — normally by the invitation email that brings you here.

We use personal information for the purposes below, and we do not use it for unrelated purposes unless you would reasonably expect us to or you have agreed.

• To provide the service. Creating your account, authenticating you, storing and displaying your team’s content, enforcing permissions, and running the features you use.
• To keep the service secure. Detecting and investigating unauthorised access, abuse, and fraud, and keeping audit records.
• To support you. Answering your questions and diagnosing faults you report.
• To notify you. Sending the emails the product needs to send — a specification you follow changed, a review was requested of you, a digest of activity, a billing receipt.
• To improve the product. Understanding how the product is actually used so we build the right things, and finding and fixing errors.
• To tell you about Prototype. Occasional product announcements, subject to the opt-out in section 9.
• To meet our legal obligations and to establish or defend legal claims.

We use cookies and browser storage for three things: keeping you signed in, remembering your preferences, and analytics. The full list is below.

The strictly necessary cookies cannot be turned off without breaking the product — they are what keeps you signed in. You can clear or block cookies in your browser settings, but if you block the necessary ones you will not be able to use Prototype.

Loading a project cover image fetches it from Unsplash’s content network, which reveals your IP address to Unsplash in the same way as any image loaded from another website.

The analytics cookies are only set if you agree to them. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland we ask before setting any of them, and declining leaves only the strictly necessary and preference cookies above. Wherever you are, you can change your mind at any time using Cookie choices in the footer of any page — declining there stops analytics and removes the analytics cookies from future visits. We also keep one small cookie recording your choice, so we don’t have to ask again.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not disclose it for anyone else’s advertising.

We do share it in these situations.

• With your organization. Prototype is a team tool. Other members of your organization can see your name, your profile image, the content you create, and your actions in the audit history, subject to the permissions your administrators set. Your administrators can see and manage your membership.
• With our service providers. The providers listed below process personal information on our behalf, under contract, and only to provide their service to us.
• Where the law requires it, or where disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect someone’s safety, prevent fraud, or enforce our terms.
• In a business transfer. If the service is sold or reorganised, information may transfer to the acquirer, who would remain bound by this policy until you are told otherwise.

Our service providers, what each one does, and where it is located:

Each provider’s own privacy policy governs how it handles the information it holds — the provider names above link to them. We keep this list current; if we add a provider that handles personal information, it is added here.

Your content is stored in Australia. The database and file storage that hold your specifications, components, documents, and uploads run in our provider’s Sydney region. That is where the substance of what your team creates lives.

Some of the ancillary services listed in section 7 are located overseas, so your personal information is disclosed to overseas recipients. Based on those providers, the countries in which your information is likely to be handled are the United States — for authentication, analytics, error monitoring, email delivery, and payments — together with other countries where our hosting provider operates edge infrastructure to serve the site quickly.

Before engaging an overseas provider we take reasonable steps to satisfy ourselves that it will handle personal information in a way consistent with the Australian Privacy Principles, including through the contractual terms we accept with it. Even so, we cannot guarantee that an overseas recipient will always comply, and the privacy laws of those countries differ from Australia’s.

Prototype is available to teams worldwide. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, your personal information is transferred outside that area — to Australia, where we and our database are based, and to the United States for the providers above. Where a transfer is not covered by an adequacy decision, we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses in our agreements with those providers. You can ask us for details of the safeguards that apply to a particular transfer.

We send two kinds of email. Service emails are part of the product — a review requested of you, a specification you follow changing, a billing receipt, a security notice. You cannot opt out of the ones necessary to operate your account, though you can usually tune which notifications you receive in your settings.

Product announcements are optional. Every one contains an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops them without affecting your account. You can also ask us to stop using the contact form in section 17. We do not provide your details to anyone else for their marketing.

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification, or disclosure. In practice that includes:

• Row-level security on every database table. Access is enforced in the database itself rather than only in application code, so a record is unreadable unless your permissions allow it. A table with no policy returns no rows — that is our deliberate default.
• Permission-scoped file storage. Uploaded files are held in scoped buckets tied to the same permission model as the records they belong to.
• Encryption in transit for all traffic to and from the service, and encryption at rest by our database and storage provider.
• Australian data residency for your content. The database and file storage holding what your team creates run in our provider’s Sydney region. Section 8 explains which ancillary services are overseas.
• Delegated authentication. Sign-in is handled by a specialist provider, so we never see or store your password.
• Least-privilege internal access. Administrative access to production data is limited to those who need it to run the service, and significant actions are logged.

No system is completely secure. If you believe your account has been compromised, or you have found a security problem, please tell us straight away using the contact form in section 17.

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes in section 5, or as long as the law requires.

• Account information is kept while your account is active.
• Content and files are kept while your organization’s workspace exists. Deleting an item moves it to a recoverable trash first; emptying the trash removes it.
• Audit history is retained for the life of the workspace, because a traceable record of engineering decisions is the point of the product. Where we can, we de-identify entries rather than delete them when someone leaves.
• Analytics and session replays are kept for a limited period under our analytics provider’s retention settings and then deleted.
• Error reports are kept for a short diagnostic window.
• Billing records are kept for as long as tax and corporate record-keeping law requires, generally seven years.

When we no longer need personal information and are not required to keep it, we delete it or de-identify it. Backups are cycled out on their own schedule, so a deleted record may persist in a backup for a short period after deletion.

If a data breach occurs that is likely to result in serious harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme in Part IIIC of the Privacy Act. We will tell you what happened, what information was involved, and what you can do about it.

Access. You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you. Much of it is visible in the product already. We will respond within a reasonable period — normally 30 days — and will tell you if we need to refuse any part of the request and why.

Correction. You can correct most of your details yourself in your account settings. If something we hold is inaccurate, out of date, or incomplete and you cannot fix it yourself, ask us and we will correct it.

Deletion. You can ask us to delete your personal information. We will do so unless we need to keep it to provide the service to your organization, or the law requires us to keep it. Content you contributed to a shared workspace may remain with your organization after your account is closed — where that happens we will de-identify your authorship if you ask and it is practicable.

Analytics. You can ask us to exclude your account from analytics and session replay.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you also have the rights to object to and restrict processing, to data portability, and to withdraw any consent you have given. You may lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

Our lawful bases are performance of our contract with you, for providing the service and the notifications it sends; our legitimate interests in securing the service, preventing abuse, and understanding how it is used; your consent, for optional product announcements and — where you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland — for analytics and session replay; and compliance with legal obligations.

On analytics specifically: in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland we rely on your consent, we ask before anything is set, and you can withdraw it at any time using Cookie choices in the footer — with no effect on your account. Elsewhere we rely on legitimate interests and the notice in this policy, and the same control turns analytics off. You can also object to processing based on legitimate interests at any time.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the contact form in section 17. We may need to verify who you are first.

Prototype is built for engineering teams and is not directed at children. You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. We do not ask for your date of birth, so we rely on that confirmation rather than verifying it. If you believe someone under 16 has given us personal information, contact us using the contact form in section 17 and we will close the account and delete it.

We do not ask for sensitive information — health, biometrics, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or criminal record — and we ask that you do not put it into Prototype. If you do, you are consenting to us handling it as described in this policy.

Because Prototype attributes work to named people, and because traceable authorship is the function it performs, we cannot offer a way to use an account anonymously or under a pseudonym. You can, of course, read this website without an account.

We may update this policy as the product changes. When we do we will revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects how we handle your personal information, we will give you advance notice in the product or by email before it takes effect.

If you have a question about this policy, want to exercise a right in section 13, or want to complain about how we have handled your personal information, get in touch:

We will acknowledge your complaint promptly and respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can refer your complaint to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner: oaic.gov.au or 1300 363 992.

This policy is governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia.